Less is More

"Foreign."

Stuart: Hey everyone, welcome back to the Book More show. You've got the A team back today. It's myself here with Susan. Susan, how's it going?

Guest: Fabulous. Excited to be here.

Stuart: Good stuff. So today, picking up on a couple of questions that we had in the Q and A last week, today I thought we'd go into more depth about the length of someone's book and the target market had a chance yet. Go back and listen to last week's show. We covered four or five questions that had been sent in from people who are either writing books at the moment or thinking about writing books. And a couple of the first ones were around. I know a couple of colleagues who have written books. They're all quite long. It seems like an onerous task to get to. So how long does my book need to be? And then riffing off the back of that, we were talking about say single target market and the job of work of the book. So that led us into how now narrow is too narrow or conversely, how broad is too broad. So I think those two questions should make for a good show today. What makes for a good length of book? How much do I need to write? And when I'm looking at addressing a single target market to really be in tune with the audience, how do I know when I'm being narrow or specific enough? So I think that's going to be a good show today. Talking about talking about that.

Guest: Absolutely. And as a matter of fact, let's start by chatting about typically how long the 90 minute books are. And we it's actually a pretty simple formula for how long you can probably expect your book to be. And I always tell the authors, Stuart, that when you talk for an hour and someone records that conversation, it generally turns out to be between 8 and 10,000 words depending on how fast someone talks. You know, there is some variability. And then when you transcribe that and turn it into a book, it turns out to be about 40 to 45 pages, give or take. So and then generally, interestingly enough, what takes you two hours to talk, I mean, sorry, takes one hour to talk, takes someone two hours to read. So generally speaking, a 50 page book, most people can read between 20, 25 pages in an hour. So it'll take someone two hours to read your book, which really is most of all the attention span you're going to get from your target audience in one go. Right? Someone's not going to sit down and read a six hour book, they're just not going to do it. But oftentimes you can get them to commit to an hour and a half if they're interested in the topic. And so that to me is, you know, I think most people would agree if they could be in front of their potential client for two hours, they have a good chance of converting them. And so think of the book as that you're getting in front of them for a solid two hours where it's your thoughts, your best practices, your knowledge, your expertise coming through via the book into that potential client's mind. And you know, they get to know you, they get to like you, they get to appreciate you, they are thankful for the information because this is a real problem they're having. And so I think to me the 40, 45, 50 page book is perfect because it is gettable in a one time sitting. And then hopefully if we did our job right, they can take that next step with you.

Stuart: Yeah, I think hitting the nail on the head in terms of what it's not so much going into it with a particular target in mind of how big it needs to be, but just having a mindfulness or an awareness of how it's received at the other end. So it needs to be compelling enough to take people from the promise of the title, whatever it was that got people to raise their hand in the first place, through to a call to action, the next step towards the end of the book. I think it's a perfect breakdown of the numbers there into. So for those people who aren't aware, the way that we record the, that we get the content for authors that we work with in the 90 minute book process is to record that content and then we aim to keep the books relatively conversational to make them more accessible. Just as Susan said that imagine you're sat in front of a person for an hour and a half, having that personality come across, that warmth come across the knowledge of the subject, not just a cold dry textbook. That's another reason why recordings work very well for that type of content. So an hour's worth of recording translating into an hour and a half to two hours worth of their attention. It's really unlikely that you're going to get. I know from my own point of view, I've bought so many books where there's the expectation I'm going to read every word of it and may sit down and begin with those intentions. But once it's been put down once or certainly twice, the likelihood of it getting picked up again is pretty slim. I think the other reason that it's another way of thinking about it is that it's a nice introduction to a subject. As we said before, there's always more that can be talked about. So the risk of going too broad or too wide trying to get too much content in there to begin with is you don't really give anywhere anywhere to go. It creates quite an overhead for you as the person writing the book to be able to fill that amount of time. And it doesn't necessarily give you the opportunity to allow people to raise their hands as requesting. Requesting more being further interested in something. So to have this accessible piece of information that's easy for people to consume, it's in a. It's in a nice format that gives people value. It seems accessible because the length is about right. I think that 50, 60, sorry that that 45, 55 kind of page range by the time you've added in a couple of blank pages, this is the physical copy we're talking about obviously. But added in a couple of blank pages at the beginning and end to get the numbers to be an equal number of pages. You've got an introduction there. You maybe would repeat the call to action towards the end. There's usually an imprint page showing some of the printing details that then takes you towards kind of 55, 60 pages. We tend to print all of the. Or certainly our default model is to print on 8 1/2 sorry 8 by 5 or 5 by 8 rather dimensions. So that weight, that kind of. I was going to say hand feel but that sounds. There's got to be a better term for it. That kind of feel of a book, that weight in hand really makes it seem valuable without seeming overwhelming. I know that I can get through this in one or two sittings. It's not something that I need to carve out a large proportion of time to. To get around to reading and that definitely makes it far more likely that I'm going to sit down and read it at least to make the start. And if the content is then compelling and it's guiding towards answering a question for people, they're much more likely to get through it and or take the next step rather than it just be sat on the shelf and not get anywhere.

Guest: I know a lot of the authors seem to use their book Stuart for they want to become sort of seen as the expert in their area. And so some authors may feel that a 50 page book doesn't set them apart if you will enough and let's speak to that point. I think our books generally are more lead generation in nature meaning not that you can't not that having one of our books done with us. A 50 page book won't set you apart and won't set you up. You know, a lot of times when people ask to see the 90 minute book or if we advertise for the 90 minute book, no one says, well, wait a minute, I only want it if it's 133 pages or more. In other words, people don't care if it's 20 pages or 200. They really just want the information in the book. They don't necessarily care how long it is.

Stuart: Well, and it misses the point of quality versus quantity as well. I think just getting to the stage where it's a way of engaging with someone has to be of a certain size really detracts from the content. There is a. I tried to quote it in last week's show and I forgot to look up what the actual quote was. But there's something a well known writer replied to someone saying something along the lines of apologies for the length of this reply. I didn't have time to make it more concise. And that idea that the words on the page are more important than how many words are on the page is really quite key to this. I think if someone. If you want it to be a textbook, then it has to be a certain size. If you want it to be an introduction to a subject, then it doesn't necessarily need to be the same piece. If you want something that's just designed to entertain people. If you want to write a novel, then there's an expectation that it's a certain size. But again, if the value in what you're doing in writing a book is to start a conversation, then the length of it becomes almost secondary. It needs to be compelling enough to answer the question, but it, it doesn't need to be. You're not trying to break tables with this when you drop it on someone's desk. It's very much about answering one particular question as comprehensively as possible. Now if that takes you 150 pages, then that's great. It's job well done. It's still answering that one particular point would perhaps argue going forward that you might want to narrow down the target market a little bit so you don't have quite so much of a job to do. But if it does take that much to comprehensively answer something, then okay. In some industries that might be worthwhile. But I think for the 90% of people out there who are thinking about creating a book as a lead generation piece, then creating that overhead, creating that Rod for your own back. To create something that's that big with no kind of quantifiable upside is definitely missing the point. And really it's going to, you're going to cause yourself some challenges in getting that out of the door.

Guest: That's true. And a lot of times I've talked to some authors who have told me that they wrote a bigger book, Stuart, in their, you know, previously to coming on board with our program. And what they found was they would often give this, you know, 200 page book to a potential client and then follow up with them, you know, potentially four weeks later or however the timeframes work. And you know, or they would tell the client, you know, when you're done reading the book, give me a call, I'd love to meet with you, that kind of thing. And, and one guy told me that he met someone like, you know, eight months later at an event and he's like, oh, you never called me back. He's like, yeah, I never finished your book. So in other words, he's like, I've done the bigger book. And in a way it was hampering my ability to kind of connect with that client. And, and sometimes the authors come to me and they, and I've had one author say, you know, Susan, I wrote a bigger book and I literally had a client look me in the eye and say, well, why do I need to hire you? Everything I need to know is in the book. And there's something to be said for that. And I think that there is a science and art to putting enough in the book so they get value, so that they feel like they've learned something, that they understand a problem better. But at the end of the day, most of the topics we do books on, they really do need further help. Very rarely do we get someone that gives you everything in one go. And I don't even think in a full book you can give someone everything they need to know about a problem that they're having. At the end of the day, people need help and even like it. On the 90 minute book, we give you the formula for doing a book and you could go off on your own and do your own book. And we know 95% of the people that read that book are going to need help. Even though we've given you this step by step, you know, for the most part, and, and I think that's the same across the board for every book we do that. Even though you've given them sort of the keys to the kingdom, they're going to need your help. Most of the people reading the book, you could tell them how to retire early, they're still going to need help. You can tell them what they need to know to, you know, turn their salespeople, you know, turn, you know, turn their sales team around and turn their leaders. But the end of the day, there's. It's very rare that someone can pick up a book, read a book no matter how long it is, and have kind of a, an aha moment where they turn on a dime and now are living their lives very differently. There's usually a coaching or an add on or some service that you provide beyond the book that the reader really needs. And that's the whole point of these books. It's to start the conversation. It's not to give them everything you've ever learned about a topic. And you don't want to overwhelm them. I think that's actually a real problem with a longer book, or can be, is that you overwhelm the reader and then they don't do anything. At least with a simpler shorter book, Stuart, there's a chance that they're going to feel complete at the end of that book and, and know that, wow, I really do need help. And she seems to know what she's talking about. I'm going to give her a call.

Stuart: I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of overwhelm because as you say, a book that with the best intentions, if you wanted to make it the most comprehensive piece out there on too broad a subject, it turns into a very weighty piece of information. Not only is the overhead then on the person expected to read all of that, which as you said, there is very unlikely to happen in all but the most engaged edge cases. But you also create the problem of then as you're writing it, you need to write it with a coherent theme or story running all the way through this long book. And once you accept, as you said, that it's unlikely that even if you did write a very large book, it's still not going to give people all of the answers. There's still always going to be a next step. And almost specifically so when we're talking about kind of engagement or lead generation or business books, you absolutely want there to be a next step. So understanding that and then drawing in the scope of the book to answer that one specific question, relatively narrow but valuable. So go deep rather than wide, then you can draw a line under it in a more sensible way that isn't going to create A huge overhead to create. It's going to be easy for the people to consume. They're not going to feel like they've been bait and switched into. The only option is to give you a call because the way you position the book, you'll position it in such a way that it's answering just one question and obviously there's other things that people would want to know rather than positioning it as this is the answer to this whole industry and then what's actually inside it isn't as comprehensive as you hope. So starting that relationship off on the best foot, giving someone a valuable answer, if it's only 50 pages, then 50 pages is the right amount. That's the amount that answers the question as fully as possible. The person is left feeling great that they've had all of their questions answered. Some of the other information that you might have, perhaps you've written three quarters of a bigger book already, but take some of that additional information and then offer it to people as a follow up. So once they've opted into the to receive a copy of the book or they've bought a physical copy of the book, have a way for them to request then that follow on info and the people who are then interested in it will raise their hands as being further interested. You can then work more closely with those people who have raised their hands. Better use of your time, better use of their time. And you've got the book out there collecting leads in the same amount of time that it would take someone else to think about the outline, let alone having created something and got it out there. I think it's quality versus quantity. Understanding what it's there for and then making it the appropriate size is definitely the way to think about it rather than trying to hit a minimum page count because you're thinking about it in terms of a book deal for a novel or something like that.

Guest: Well, and it's funny, we have a saying here, the 90 minute books. A bigger book doesn't necessarily make the book go faster. And what we mean by that is, hey, if you can get someone to download your book, read it and contact you with a 40 page book, why would you want to write 120 page book if you're going to. If the whole point is them to get to raise their hand to say I'd like more help and maybe, and just maybe that 120 page book gets in the way of that because they never get to the end or they feel complete or something else is, you know, it gets in the way between the time they start it and finish it, there's just too much time has gone by. Now they have a different problem. They're trying to solve that kind of thing. And I also think that most of the authors that come to us that want a bigger book, Stuart, I always suggest to them, and this seems to have gone over well, like, let's just take a part of that bigger book and at least get that down on paper and turn it into one of these sort of thinner quote books and see how it lands with your clientele, hand it to a few clients, get some feedback. And the reason is rather than go spend all that time and energy writing a bigger book that maybe or maybe not that your market even wants, why not do a textbook and get feedback on it? And if you really do feel like, hey, I need to put all these other sort of elements in the book, you can add to the book once you have a completed book, even if it is on the 40 to 50 page side, adding a chapter on a topic that maybe you just do a presentation on. And now you want to turn that, put that as a new chapter in the book, no problem. If you want to do a whole second book and make it a series of books so it's a series of quote, smaller books, fine. And then maybe after do three or four of these, Stuart, turn it into, compile it into one big book. Now it's interesting. Stuart. I've told this idea and talked a whole bunch of guys into starting with a smaller, simpler book, saying that if they wanted to later come back and make it bigger, we'd work with them on it and, or we would, you know, do a second book and then combine the two into one bigger book. No one's doing ever come back. They've never come back and said, hey, you know, in my, what I take away from that is either they just got so busy from the success of the book or they do realize, hey, this works.

Stuart: Why do I need to go any faster?

Guest: It really isn't. And, and I know I have had guys insist that their book needed to be, you know, a certain size. And I tell them, great, but we're never going to get that big book done in one go. So let's just chunk it down so it's in bite sized pieces so that you can get it done. We'll help you. And then you can always come back and add those missing chapters later. But getting the whole formula for the book, getting the title, getting the COVID getting the subtitle all dialed in, getting the introduction that's actually the bigger part of the book, the actual content from the author's point of view, it's just more content from their brain. It's not that difficult. It's all the other pieces that they fall apart on that we can help them with that.

Stuart: Absolutely. And I think that's a great point, isn't it? The fact that this isn't a one shot deal. We're talking about self publishing at the end of the day helping as many people as possible get their books out there, whether they do it themselves or whether they use us or one of the other services out there. But to have something that isn't going through one of the big publishing houses, this isn't a one shot deal. We're not talking about a minimum print run over 100,000 books. And therefore what is there on day one is there on day 501 because it's too difficult to change. This is, can be, if it makes the boat go faster, this can be a living document that's updated. And I really love that idea of here's the start, let's get it out there in its first version and let's adapt based on feedback is the kind of minimum viable product type approach of here's version one, let's get it out there as quick as possible and then pivot or change or add to based on the real world feedback rather than a cycle of endless analysis of what it should be and never actually getting something out there in the first place. There was again, I think I mentioned, did I comment? Anyway, I might have mentioned it last week, but Dean and I were talking about bestsellers and there was a article going around in sort of February, March this year of what it takes to be a best selling author and someone had written a book. Self published was actually just a cover and the content was. There was nothing in the content, it was blank. But because they'd kind of tricked the algorithms into making it a bestseller of a particular category, then they could, just as with the same amount of credibility as everyone else, say I'm a best selling author. But actually there were zero words in there at all. It was, I think it was done or certainly turned into afterwards a demonstration of the kind of. Well, a lot of people called it the scam of the bestseller, but I don't know that I'd go that far. But it certainly highlights that the content is separate from whether it engages people on the outside. Now a lot of that example may well be it just turned into a bit of a meme and then Got its own traction. But the whole point of the content just needs to be compelling enough to do the job work of helping people get to the next stage. Not a particular size or weight or content. There's no minimums, there's no maximums. It just needs to do its job in the most efficient and effective way possible. It kind of bridges into a slightly different topic and just talk about, we talk about single target market a lot and how ideally the book should aim and talk to that single target market. And then if there's another single target market, then it's another book. And your comment about having the series of books really made me think about that. And in the back in the UK at the moment, and on the bookshelf here, there's a couple of books I had from years ago which are the Short Guide to something. So I think over here I've got the Short Guide to Classics and the Short Guide to the European Union. These are books that were published by big publishing house, but they're really quite short introductions to huge topics. But they're just almost primer type books. And there's a series of about 20 of them and they look nicely lined up on the shelf next to each other, but each one of those books. Exactly. This is exactly what other authorities, other publishing houses do. They understand that the job of work of this particular book is to do something. And if people can poly that into their own business, they can understand that the job of work of addressing this one particular audience is to get them to the next step in that particular funnel. And then just to the next bit. Just the next bit, sorry, just to the side of it there might be the next funnel and then next to that there might be the next funnel. And whether that five funnels that address all of your business or 55, it doesn't really matter. Starting with one and having one dialed into that group is much more likely that you're at least going to get one out of the door. And you're not going to sort of sit back and worry about trying to create the big book that addresses all five of them all at once.

Guest: Yeah. If the authors or potential authors listening to this want to go to 90minutebooks.com gallery we actually have dozens and dozens of pictures of the books that we've done and I just want to kind of highlight a couple of them just to kind of give the scope of what we're talking about. There's an author that did a book with us called Gene McManus and he did a book called the Lifetime financial solution sounds actually pretty big. Lifetime financial solution. But when you actually break it down, it's 10 questions you must answer before retirement. And I'll tell you what, if I'm someone approaching retirement, I'm going to want to read this book. And I don't necessarily want a big book that talks about how the government creates inflation rates or, you know what I mean. This guy talked in very, very, you know, easy to understand street language. Here's what you need to know before you approach retirement. And I think that is a gift to his clients or potential clients, because in very quick amount of time, he gets them to see areas maybe that they're doing great in, but, oh, geez, not so great over here. Maybe I ought to go and talk to him. Another one. What's next after dental school? So a dentist came to us and he wanted to write a book. Because a lot of dentists, they go into the work because, Stuart, they like the practice of dental care, but they're just not business owners. They're not good business owners. They don't want to. In fact, they don't want the hassle of running a business. So they get out and they have all this student loan debt and it's a big problem and they need to start making money. But there's a whole bunch of, well, do you go into solo practice? Do you join a group? Do you. What kind of group do you join? And so he basically just calls it the eight must haves. Every new dentist should know before they make a costly mistake. I don't know if I'm a dentist, not a dental school. I want to read this book. And if I have questions or problems, of course his team is available to, you know, sit down with the potential dentist and chat with them about what their goals and ambitions are and how their team can maybe work with them. And so you can see that they're sometimes big topics, but they're chunked down. It's not everything about running your own dental practice. That's a different kind of book, but now we're kind of going to the pain of it. Like, what is that new dentist that gets out of dental school? What do they need to know versus, you know, here's how you set up a practice. That's a different kind of book than what he's doing here. And I think it's super sexy and valuable and targeted.

Stuart: You can imagine that for both of those books, the guys could have written books that were five times as long as, and not made the boat go any faster at all in sticking with that analogy, it wouldn't have made any difference to how it's received. People would have been less likely to read it all. Both of those books. I've seen the content on both of those books and it's compelling. Like you said, it's easy to understand. It's very obviously positioned as this is the start of the conversation. There's particularly the financial one. There's 50 more things that we would need to discuss to actually go into the depths of the plan. But there's no way that can be done in a book. And even if the book was 50 times as long, it still wouldn't have covered all the questions we'd still need to meet. So this is an easy, accessible way to answer a couple of those top level conversations, top level questions rather, and start the conversation rather than trying to be convincing and convince someone that you're the best person to work with because you're using all of this technical language and you're trying to show how clever you are. It's just an easy way to start the conversation and draw people in. It doesn't have to be five times the size to really get across the same amount of message and compel someone to raise their hand to take the next step rather than just keep beating them over the head with more and more information.

Guest: Absolutely. And think about, Sorry, if you think about real quick, Stuart, the target audience for some of these people, if you're trying to get in front of a busy CEO, someone that's running their own company, I can promise you they're very rarely going to sit down and read a 200 page book on what you have to offer. On some level, these are calling cards. They're really trust building exercises. And I think a potential client that is busy, that doesn't have a lot of time, would appreciate the time of you taking this content and simplifying it for them in an easy to read book so they can get it in an instant feel like they could have a conversation about it and at the end of the day they realize they're going to need help. Well, who are they going to call? Some random stranger or the person that just gave them a lot of great information.

Stuart: And I think that's a great place to kind of draw a line under this rather than run the risk of us beating people over us making it a 50 minute podcast rather than a 30 minute podcast. So sticking to message, I think that's a great place to end and it does really honours their time. It gives someone the condense the concise information, the right information at the right time before then leading into a further conversation. It's. Yeah, it really is a great way of looking at it and whether or not people choose to work with others or want to do this by themselves. I think just keeping that mindset front of mind when thinking about the breadth of the content, it's really going to help them get something out there. And just as you said, if people want to add to it later, if they want to do a second book later, if they want to do five books and then consolidate them all because they want to use that bigger piece in a different context, we should definitely do a podcast in the not too distant future talking about the context of books as well, actually, if I'll put it in the show notes of this episode. So if people want to go to 90minutebooks.com podcast, then we've got all of the episodes here. And I'll include a book that I did recently with Nadine Hoft as part of her webinar series that she was doing and that talks again about how to dial in a single target market, how to make sure that your content isn't going too far off track, how to make it more likely that you'll get it finished and get it out there. So whether or not people work with us or choose to themselves, I think remembering that less is more is going to be a way of people being much more likely to get it done and get it out there. So I'll make sure that's in the show notes of this. So as I say, if you go to 90minutebooks.com podcast and this will be 007 because we're on episode seven though. So head over there and check out some of the show notes.

Guest: Awesome. Thank you, Stuart. Always a pleasure.

Stuart: Thanks, Susan. Looking forward to catching next time.