How to Write the Right Book for the Right Client

All right, welcome everybody to our BSPU call appropriately called Don’t Write the Wrong Book.

This is all about how to build and write a book that actually helps you attract high ticket clients, high ticket customers, those that will actually help you to grow your business and get exactly what it is that you’re looking for. Here’s a question that most experts never ask themselves before they sit down to write. And this is unfortunate. They should ask themselves, why do some books add hundreds of thousands of dollars to a business in a short period of time? Sometimes as short as 30, 60, or even 90 days, while others just sit on Amazon collecting dust. And generally, look, it’s not the writing. It’s not even the marketing. It’s not even the cover, which you guys know how much I love covers and how important covers are. It’s what the book was built to do before even a single word was written. Was it built to attract your ideal clients? Too many experts, they’re grinding and are not recognized as the authorities that they deserve to be recognized as. And it’s not a work ethic issue. If they work 60 hours or if you work 70 or 80, visibility is an issue, but primarily it’s not a visibility problem. Today, most experts have a problem because they don’t see results from building the authority that they could if they were a best-selling author. And that’s the idea is helping you be a best-selling author in the right topic and then using your book in a way that it attracts your ideal client. Okay? So, we want to get you building the right asset from the very very beginning. All right. So, I got this broken down in a couple of different parts for to share and then steps with each one. So, especially if you’re new, especially if you’re in the process of writing your book, going to be really, really important. Okay. So, part one, this is a problem that publishers and experts are not asking themselves or the problem that they’re not talking about. You’ve probably been told for years, you should write a book. Why are you putting it off? Like, you have a great story. You should tell your story. All those things are legitimate. Love that. The problem is it’s generally not your story that is attractive to your ideal client. It’s your expertise that’s attractive to your ideal client. Okay? So, we have to take off the table this idea that finishing your book is the goal. Okay? It’s not the goal. Finishing your book is the starting line. Okay? So, it’s not the finishing or I can’t get disciplined enough to write. That is the problem. The problem is, are you writing the right thing? Are you writing something that’s going to position you the way you want to be positioned? Okay. So, think about the last book that that maybe you read or bought to solve a problem, not just for pure entertainment reasons. When you read that, did it want to make you or did did you want to hire the author of that book? Did it compel you? Now, I don’t know if you’re like me, but I buy books all the time. I always buy online. A lot of times I buy on Amazon, but many times I will buy from Facebook or Instagram or from an ad that I see. You probably do the same. Many of you bought my books because of that very reason. There was something about the title, the cover, there was something about the message that spoke directly to you. It was compelling for you. It solved a problem that you had. And so, you purchased that book. When you finished reading it, did you feel like you understood the author and that the author could solve your problem or not? Now, I can tell you I’ve bought books that have done a good job at drawing me in and make me want to purchase from them. And I’ve purchased books that repelled me. And often times it repelled me because I felt like it was a glorified transcript or I felt like the book itself was more about the author than it was about me and my problem and I was looking for a solution to my problem. Okay? I’m not talking about writing fiction. I’m not talking about writing a children’s book. I’m not even talking about writing a memoir. though, if you’re writing a memoir, as I’ve tried to talk to you as my clients for a long time, even if you’re writing something that’s autobiographical, even if you’re writing something that’s a memoir, find the the main problem that you solve for yourself over your lifetime and lead with that rather than your story. Your story will be throughout the book and it’ll be compelling. It’ll be interesting, but lead with the problem that you’re solving. Okay? When you do that and when you do it well, it will compel the reader to purchase from you. See, most experts kind of skip this idea because they’ve been told, maybe you’ve been told, I’ve been told, hey, you got a great story. You should tell your story and all that’s great, but we instead need to think what is the problem that we’re primarily solving. A lot of people write to get famous or hope that they get famous. Look, fame is expensive. It is. It cost a lot to build fame, but positioning, when you have a book that positions you, that’s where profit is. So, finishing the wrong book will not fix your positioning problem. It will make it worse because you’ll be attracting people to you that you can’t help or that you don’t want to help. Okay? So, we need to make sure that we’re answering the right question and we’re solving the right problem first. Second, we need to have like a paradigm shift, an an idea that you came to me, you came to Bestseller Publishing or you’re watching this because you’re thinking, you know what, I want to write a book and I want to be a creator. Instead of thinking of yourself for a moment, you’re an author. When you finish your book, you’re going to be an author. You’re going to be a best-selling author. All that’s great. But if you could have a paradigm shift entering your authorship that takes you away from calling yourself or thinking yourself as a book create creator or an author and instead thinking of yourself as somebody that is looking to select the right clients and have your book do the heavy lifting of that. That could be a game changer for you. Instead of thinking I’m going to write a book and I’m going to be an author, think I am going to write a book that actually selects clients for me, that attracts the right people to me. Okay? I know you you think you need a book that sells. And we want to create a book that sells. But really, if your book selects and deselects the right people, that’s even better. It’s even better. Okay. The big lie in the publishing industry is you need as many readers as possible. And look, we would like to have as many readers as possible, certainly. But the reality is you don’t need as many readers as possible. You don’t need millions of readers. If you had the right thousand readers, even if you had the right hundred readers, you could make a million dollars plus from your book. And if you made a h 100red,000 or 300,000 or a million bucks from your book, would you be happy? Would you want to write another one? Of course you would. And you can get that with a hundred of the right readers and certainly a thousand of the right readers. Okay? The experts who make the most money from their books are rarely the ones that just sell a lot of copies because without the right positioning, your book will attract the wrong people. Browsers, not buyers. People that give you compliments but don’t become clients. That’s not what we’re looking for. Okay. Speakers often say, and this is of course not a class about speaking, but speakers often say those that sell from the stage, you can either get applause or you can get credit cards. And I know that’s a little crass and a little rude, but there’s a difference between selling from the stage and people just applauding and and encouraging you. And in the same way, we want a book that attracts people that want to work with us, not just people that want to applaud us, right? We want to try to do both of those of those things at the same time. So, we need to set up the right positioning. A book that pre-qualifies the right person, a book that answers the reader’s objections and concerns even before they ask it. A book that is selecting, a book that is dividing those that want to work with you, those that want your help to solve their problem and those that don’t. And perhaps they enjoy they your book and maybe they even get some great things out of it. But it’s not solely, this is the paradigm shift. It isn’t solely a creative project. Okay? Yes, it is a creative project and it’s something to be proud of, but it’s not solely that. It is a client getting machine and that’s what we want to build and that’s why you came. All right, part three. Here’s your your framework and I’m going to give you some steps of this. The the ideal reader avatar is what we want, right? Before we write a single word, you need to answer some questions. The big question is who is the one reader whose yes changes your business and theirs? Okay. Who is the one reader? I can’t remember who it was, but um on last week’s or the week before the call, we were talking about a memoir and specifically about somebody that had dealt with some significant health challenges in their life. And instead of writing a book about the the the life story or the memoir, the suggestion was, why don’t we we reposition this to people that have similar health challenges that you’ve gone through and that you’ve been able to like live a fantastic life and make a difference in other people’s lives and like get past all of that. Then wouldn’t everybody else that experiences those particular health challenges be interested in reading your story to answer their own questions and issues? A client came to me a couple years ago. We we just launched this book in um in December or January. He was exiting his business. He is in his early 60s and he was finally retiring and he he was an athlete in college. He was a baseball player and uh over the years he had gained like a 100 pounds and was in like the worst physical health of his life and was basically told by the doctors look if you don’t do something then you’re probably not going to live to see and play with your grandchildren because of your health issues. And he took that to heart and he took it very seriously. And he decided through kind of his own routine and the own changes that he decided to make. He lost over 100 pounds in his 60s. And when he went through that, so many people were inspired by that. So many people were encouraged by that that he decided when he exited his his business, when he retired from his business, he wanted to start a new business. And so he wrote a book. And the book that we launched was uh called uh Think and Grow Thin kind of along the Napoleon Hill lines, right? And started an entire coaching business helping particularly men in their maybe late 50s or early 60s to like get their health back, lose weight, etc. Now, this could have been just a book about his own story, right? His memoir, his autobiography could have and and it has lots of stories of his challenges and successes and whatnot. But he took the one thing that he was the most proud of that around this one area of his life that he was able to change and he was able to create not just a book but a course and a coaching program that he is signing up people for for thousands and thousands of dollars. So before you write a single word, you have to answer the question like like what am I writing that when somebody reads this, it’s going to change their life and it might change mine as well because they’re going to come to me and they’re going to maybe want to become a coaching client. Maybe they’re going to buy a course, etc. Not general. You need to be specific. So it’s not I help entrepreneurs or I help people who want to lose weight or or I can help anybody that needs help. No, no, that’s that’s just that’s way too broad. If you’re right for everyone, as we’ve said many times, you end up attracting no one. So, here are the steps. So, you can think of this ideal avatar. And these are the questions. And look, if you’ve already started writing your book, no worries. But go back and ask yourself these questions. Really start thinking about who your ideal client is. So that maybe the writing that you’ve already done needs to be adjusted. or maybe some themes come out of that writing where you go, “Oh, holy cow, like this is really what my book is about.” So, number one, name the exact person that you’re writing to. You should always write to one reader. Think about their age, their sex, their their demographics, their psychographics, where they’re from, what their socioeconomic status is. Who is that person that if they read your book and hired you, you could change their life? Get specific. What do they do? how much money they make. The more specific you are about your reader, the more universal your book will feel to everyone, literally. But when you’re writing to one person and you’re focused on the needs of that one person, when people read it, they’re going to feel like, “Oh man, this is this is for me.” So name the exact person. Also, name the problem and be specific about that problem. If it’s something like weight loss for men in their 60s, name it, right? Something that causes, you know, a severe health challenge that might affect somebody’s longevity, time with their grandchildren. So, name the problem, not a surface problem, but specific. What’s the real think about what the real problem is underneath all of that. It’s not that experts have a marketing problem. It’s that often they have like a clarity problem. They try to be everything for everybody instead of like, hey, here’s the niche I’m focusing on. We talked about this last week with with Crohn’s. I said, there’s millions of people in the world with Crohn’s. If people with Crohn’s saw your book as something that could be be really helpful for them, my gosh, it would change your life as well as theirs. So, you don’t need to be more general than that. Name the real problem that you’re you’re solving. A book that names the problem and is specific with it is worth 10 times the book that just describes symptoms or issues. Okay. Taki’s book, Million-Dollar Coach. This names the problem as well as the solution that people want. Right? If you’re in the coaching business and you’re making 10,000 bucks a month or 5,000 bucks a month and you’re struggling and you’re trying to figure it out and Taki tells you, “Well, I have the nine steps that can take you from where you’re at right now and help you get to a sevenf figureure coaching business and here are the nine strategies that do that.” And oh, by the way, we’ve done it for 300 400 other people. When Taki launched this book, it’s so clear in the problem it solves. It’s so clear who this is for. He did $300,000 in the first 30 days based on what he told me in a beautiful testimonial when he happened to be in Pasadena when my office was still there. Be specific about it because the right people then will be impacted by it and the wrong people, they’re never going to pick it up. If you’re not a coach, if you’re an eightfigure coach either way, it’s not for you and that’s okay. There can always be book two, book three, book four. Name the transformation. Step three, name the transformation. What does their life or their business look like after they read your book? This is a transformation, right? Pamela Moss Garrett’s book, Legally Ever After, there’s a transformation involved. The transformation is the promise, right? It’s part of your your title. It’s part of your subtitle. And your expertise, whatever that is, could be worth millions of dollars. and your book is how you can prove that expertise to the right person, the person who is interested in solving that problem. Part four, what this looks like in real life. I mentioned Taki, I mentioned Pamela. So when when Pamela came to me and this is her first book, we launched her second book just a few months ago. Pamela is an estate planning attorney. Do you know right now today there are more people in law school than there are attorneys in the United States? Now, if you’re an attorney, that should terrify you, right? Because that means there’s more competition coming for what you do right now than there is in the competition in the workplace for you at this very moment. Holy cow. What do you do to stand out? When Pamela did this book, we did a a webinar together because she was so happy with the results. She did three key things that we tell all of our clients to do. And many of them do, some of them do not. The first thing is we want to get a copy of of your book. You want to get a copy of your book into every current client’s hands with a little thank you note and maybe even with a mention of, hey, if you know somebody that this could be helpful for, give it to them and I will send you another copy so you can get referrals. Right? That’s number one. Number two, a copy of your book should go out to every prospect that came through your doors in the last six months because for whatever reason they didn’t become a client, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t become a client. It means that they got busy, something else happened, and so they never got started. This will help them to get restarted. And the third thing is look for people that can be strategic partners of yours. For Pamela as an estate planning attorney, that’s real estate professionals, mortgage professionals, you know, people that are closing on homes, buying and selling homes, of course, financial planners. She did all three of those things and in 60 days did $60,000 from her book. I mean, amazing. That’s just in the first 60 days. She booked 12 speaking engagements from her book in the first 60 days. She hadn’t done them all by the time the the 60 days went. And that led to a significant amount of income for her and her practice. So what happened? So she went from estate planning attorney, one of a million estate planning attorneys to one in a million because of her book and the use of her book. You can come with an expertise. And if you take your expertise and you combine it with the solution, the problem that you can solve for somebody and how you can help them, then you’re not going to write the wrong book. You’re going to write the right book. A book that can make a huge difference in people’s lives. Some of you want to be speakers. Great. I want you to be a speaker if that’s what you want. Kevin, who’s a good friend of mine, we did this book for Kevin. You’ve been upgraded. When Kevin first came to me, the book was probably twice this size and it was mainly his life story. And I said, “Hey, man, that’s great. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to tell your life story. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to leave a legacy. Just understand this. If you want to use this book to attract clients and speaking engagements, that’s not going to do it. I could be blunt um and honest with him. He’s my friend. I’ll be blunt and honest with you. If you want to write your memoir, if you want to write your life story, you should do it. Do it for your children. Do it for your legacy. But don’t do it and then expect that amazing things are going to happen in your business from that because people aren’t buying memoirs of people that they don’t already know and aren’t already famous. So I said, “Hey, why don’t we take your stories?” And it took a while. It took months to do this, but why don’t we take your stories and and your the lessons that you’ve taught and let’s adapt them with some other client case studies and things that you could teach to people because he’s a consultant in the medical industry and gets you know high five figure and six figure contracts and does speaking engagements and they pay him to come and speak and do workshops and that kind of thing. I said why don’t we do that? So we did that in you’ve been upgraded. Lead happier, achieve more, stay sane. In the first three months, he’s booked three speaking engagements from this because he used a simple system that we taught and set up. It’s in the BSP membership area on speaking. If you guys are interested in that, each of them are paid between5 and $10,000 and he’s speaking in front of his ideal audience. And in speaking in front of his ideal audience, it means that not only is he being paid to market to people, which is what what is happening, but he’s going to get five figures up to six figures of additional clients out of those speaking engagements. Now, Kevin is in his is in his 60s and he told me, “Look, I only want to speak twice a month and then, you know, get a few contracts from each each speaking engagement.” I said, “That’s a great plan. All you have to do and you will have more opportunities than you could ever want is you have to write the right book and then you have to get that right book in front of your ideal client. And he wanted to do that via speaking engagements. You can do it a lot of different ways but that is one of the ways that is most powerful to use. The book that tries to say everything is the book that nobody is really interested in. But the book that says one thing really well is the book that will attract the right people to you and it will change everything for them and probably everything for you as well. So here are some questions that you should ask yourself as you’re listening to all this especially questions about you know in in my writing am I writing something that’s going to leave money on the table. So here are the questions. Number one who is the one reader that I want to attract the most with my book. Who’s the one reader number two of that person what is the real problem they have not the surface problem okay to give you an example of that for my books for publish promote profit for bookfunnel secrets for write with AI the big problem that I’m helping people to solve is not how to write a book it’s not it’s not how to publish a book or market a book or launch a book that’s not the big problem that I’m solving the big problem is what I’m talking about today that people are writing the wrong book and because of that either a they’re never going to finish it or b they’re going to finish it and they’re going to be disappointed because it doesn’t do what they want it to do. So there’s a there’s a deeper problem that your ideal client and your ideal reader has. There’s a surface problem. My clients, I need help finishing my book, right? I need help marketing my book. That’s the surface problem. The deeper problem is really the important one. So you have to think a couple layers below the surface. Number three, what is their again your ideal reader, what does their life or business look like after reading my book? What does their health look like? What does their marriage look like or relationships if you’re writing about that? What does their checkbook? What do their finances look like? What does their business look like after reading your book? Is it better? Is it changed? Is it radically different? Is it a whole different idea? I hope it is. And number four, for those of you who have already started writing, is my current book idea built around the previous three questions? Is what I’m currently writing built around those first three? And if it’s not, doesn’t mean you have to throw it all out. It just means that you need some repositioning. It’s what we did with Kevin. Okay? So, be encouraged. It’s what we did with Kevin and it’s worked like gold with him. Okay? It’s working fantastic with him. And he had already started writing and in fact had been writing for years and years and years. And that’s the problem, right? When somebody isn’t sure of what their destination is, they’re never sure when they get there. So, he had been writing for years and couldn’t finish it until we got clear on what the destination was. That’s what I want you guys to do today. I want you to be clear on the destination. And you’ll be clear on the destination based on who is the one reader, what is the real problem, and then what solution, what does your solution do to their life. Okay? So, let me go through these these parts one last time and then I’ll open it up to any questions that you guys have. Number one was the problem that people aren’t thinking about and they’re not talking about. And that’s the whole idea of yes, I’ve I’ve wanted to write a book for years. I’ve been told I should write a book for years, but why are we putting it off? We’re putting it off because we’re not sure of the destination. Or we’re in the midst of writing what clearly is the wrong book, and we need to fix that. Number two, we need to have this paradigm shift. We want to go from just like the creative, which is cool. Nothing wrong with that, but we want to go from from the creative to, hey, this book is going to attract the right things to me. And so, it’s not just a creative exploration for me. It’s not just about getting it out into the universe. It’s about having something that gives the right message. It’s not about the millions. It’s about the right 1,000 readers or 10,000 readers. That would be gamechanging for you. I’m telling you, the right hundred readers easily can make you $100,000. The right 1,000 readers can make you a million dollars. Yes. Yes. I don’t have the other book with me as an example, but I’ve shared with you many examples like this where 500 books mailed out, excuse me, 200 books mailed out over a two-year period led to a half a million dollars for one of my clients. 200 readers led to a half a million bucks. You don’t need millions. You need the right positioning. Okay. Number three, you need to really dial in who your ideal reader is. Super important. Okay. Before you write a single word, you have to answer those questions of who it is and what the the details are, what their problems are, what your transformation is, what their life looks like after working with you. Those are the key questions. And of course, I I gave you those in a summation well as well. If your current book doesn’t look like that, it’s okay. But you have to start like answering those questions. And as you answer those questions, it’ll it’ll start appearing to you what your book should look like, how you take your story and make it impacting for people. And by the way, when you do a great job on your first book and you make it as narrow as possible, let me tell you what’s going to happen. You’re going to be successful with it. You’re going to be happy with the transformations and the reviews that you get. You’re going to be happy with the money that you make. And then guess what you’re going to do? You’re going to write another book. And your second book can be broader. It can serve a bigger community because now you have a platform that you’re building. John Maxwell did not become John Maxwell because he wrote one book. Became John Maxwell because he wrote his first 20 and then his first 50 and then his first 70 and now he’s approaching a hundred books. And of course he has a system for doing it and it’s amazing. But it wasn’t his first book that changed everything for him. It was that his first book gave him a little taste, not near as much as his third or fifth or 10th. And that’s what I want your first book to do. I want it to be successful for you. And if it is successful, then you’ll you’ll build a great platform and you’ll do more and more.