265: Holly Worton ~ How to Know if You Should Write a Book For Your Business

Today’s Guest

Table of Contents

I’m back again, with another solo episode! Today I’m talking about writing a book. Everyone seems to be writing a book these days. Should you write one? In this episode, I walk you through some questions I think you need to ask yourself before you embark on a project like this.

Listen to this episode

What You’ll Learn

How to know if you should write a book or not
How to know that it’s the right time for you to write a book
What to do if you want to have a book, but you don’t want to write a book
How to get clear on what’s stopping you from writing your book
How to get the mindset you need to write your book
Next steps you can take to get started

Questions You Need to Ask Yourself

Do you want to? Or is it a should? Or do you just like the idea of being an author?
Are you willing to put in the work?
Why do you want to write a book?
What do you hope to get from writing a book?
What are your expectations for the book? Are they reasonable?
Are you willing to put in the time and effort to market a book?

Things I Discussed

Take Action Today

Listen to the other episodes on books and writing
Answer the questions above
Write down a list of things you could write a book about
Block out time in your calendar to write the book, launch the book, and market the book
START WRITING. KEEP WRITING until you finish

Connect With Holly

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Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly: Hello and welcome to the Business Mindset Podcast, episode 265. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode.

Today, I am going to talk about writing, and books, and I am going to talk about how to know if you should write a book. How to know if it is the right time for you to write a book and how to get the mindset you need to write your book, if you decide that you want to.

Now, this was inspired because as you may know, if you have been listening to this podcast for any length of time, I have written, and self-published, eight books: four books on business mindset, and four books on my walking adventures. And, it has been a wonderful process, and I’m so glad that I have self-published rather than deciding to seek out a traditional publisher, I know absolutely without a doubt that’s the right path for me. And I am very happy with the way things are going, I have just hired a new book launch coach to help me with my next launch of my second edition of my Business Beliefs book, I am writing excited about the ways things are going with my writing and I look forward to writing more and more and more books because I love writing.

So, it is very clear to me, that writing is the right thing to me, in fact as you know if you have listened to some of my episodes from earlier this year, my focus this year, and for the foreseeable future, is to focus on business mindset more through my books and my writing than through one-to-one sessions. So I am focussing my time on writing books and when clients come in for one-to-one work I continue to do that, but my main focus is on my writing because I can help more people that way.

So, writing books is right for me. It is what I love, it is what I am going to continue to do, and I am very happy that I have chosen to focus on that. But, the thing is you may have noticed that everyone seems to be writing a book these days. And there are several reasons for that, all the marketing experts are promoting writing books, as a way of being seen as an expert in a subject, of driving traffic to your one-to-one work, and your online programs, of getting speaking engagements based on your book, of getting media attention based on your book, which of course will also attract attention to the other offerings that you have in your business. It can be a really great lead-in to getting people to work with you, or to buy your other stuff, if you have online courses and that kind of thing. So, it has been promoted as a good thing to do.

Also, we are in the golden age of self-publishing, self-publishing no longer has the bad reputation that it had for many years when people used to refer to it as vanity publishing, there are some really good writers who are self-publishing. And, writers who have traditionally been published by traditional publishers are getting very disgruntled with the treatment by traditional publishers, it is not what it used to be, a lot are returning to self-publishing and self-publishing is seen as a very viable route for writers who used to be traditionally published, no longer want to do that. And it is just we have the technology, it is easier and easier and easier every year to self-publish a book or to be an independent publisher, because of course you shouldn’t be doing everything yourself, you should be hiring people to help you, with stuff like the editing, and the cover, and that kind of thing – that’s a whole different topic.

Should you write a book?

So, I wanted to get started by talking about how you should know if you should write a book, or if it is time for you write a book, or if it is the right time to write a book.

I think there are a number of questions you need to ask yourself:

Do you really want to write a book, or is it a should? Or do you just like the idea of having a book that you have written and seeing your name on Amazon as an author?

And this is a really important question because it is a lot of work. I get a lot of work done on my Workcation weekends when I go away and I very intensively work on a book. I use the Workcation weekends to work on getting my first drafts, editing, and producing the second and third drafts. I get a lot done on my Workcation weekends. However, most people don’t have time to go away for a weekend and just write, or, most people don’t make the time to do that. Now, there are some people who like me need large chunks of time in order to get into a book and get a book done and get the words on a page. Other people are capable of writing an hour a day, but I think it is safe to say that very few people are willing to put in an hour a day to work on a book. So, the question is: are you willing to put in the work to create a book? Now, the beauty of self-publishing, one of the beauties of self-publishing, is that you can write a book of any length. So you could write a full-length non-fiction book is usually based between 40,000 and 50,000 words, but you can do whatever you want because you don’t need to fit into some publisher’s box of what’s marketable for them.

There are lots of business owners and Cat Loterzo, who was a guest on this podcast, is a great example of someone who releases very small, short, sweet and actionable and motivational e-books, on Amazon. She is a fantastic example of this, because she has released so many books. And these are kind of like extended blog posts, I want to say, because they are very short books, but they are really focused and really well done. So, check her out as an example of what you could do if you wanted to write very short books. And that’s something that I started with my model of business mindset books but now I am starting to realise that I want to make them more in depth. So, I am doing that with second editions, however, I still have a whole series of ideas for very short e-books that I want to continue doing as well, so I think what my books in the future look like to me, are a mix of really in-depth longer books on Business Mindset but also the short and sweet books. So again, Cat Loterzo, I’m going to link to her in the show notes, check her out to get an idea, of the kinds of eBooks that she has produced, because I think she is a really good example of this.

So, are you willing to put in the work it takes to write a book? Because even if you do write shorter books, like Cat and a lot of other people do, you are going to need to market the books and you are going to need to write them and you are going to need to publish them. And you can get help from a VA, of course, in setting up the books on Amazon. You can get help with, and you should get help with, designing a professional cover, and edit it, and proofread, and all that good stuff but it is still going to take time, you are still going to have to manage the project and do the writing. So, are you willing to put in the work?

Why do you want to write a book?

What do you hope to get from writing a book? What do you think it is going to give you? Do you think it is going to raise your profile? Do you think it is going to make you famous? Do you think it is going to make people see you as a leader in your field? Do you think that it is going to get you new clients? Do you think it is going to get people buying your online programs? What do you want to get from writing this book, because hopefully it will lead on to something.

So, why do you want to write a book? What are you reasons? And, are your reasons for wanting to write a book reasonable? Like, is it reasonable to assume that you are going to become super famous from just writing one book? Maybe, if you put in the work to market it and hire a book launch coach, and you get tons of publicity for it, maybe. But, maybe not. Are your expectations reasonable? This is really, really, important to consider as well, because most writers don’t make a lot of money from their books, whether they are traditionally published, or self-published – or independently published, I should be saying. You need to put in a lot of time and energy, and sometimes money, to market your book to get those readers, and not everyone is ready to do that. So, while Amazon is a great way for people to find you, there is a lot you need to do to be easily searchable on Amazon. So, in the same way that you would do SEO for your website and use key words and that kind of thing, you need to do the same thing with your books.

Finally, and I have hinted at this in the last few minutes, are you willing to put in the time and effort and sometimes money to market a book? Marketing a book is like anything else, it is like marketing your podcast episodes, it is like marketing your blog posts, it is like marketing your webinars and your online program, your one-to-one course you need to invest time and effort and sometimes money if you are going to do advertising and that kind of thing to market your book. You are going to have to build that time into your calendar, and really plan for it, to make sure that it happens.

So, those are some questions that you need to ask yourself and I will post these questions in the show notes, so you can look for those there.

So, hopefully, you should have an idea now of whether you should write a book or not and how you feel about that and what your expectations are, and what you want to get out of it, and, is it right for you? Because, well I think probably just about everyone is capable about writing a book that doesn’t mean that you should. Maybe you don’t want to, maybe you have a bunch of ideas and you just don’t want to do the writing. Now, if you don’t want to do the writing, but you really want to have a book, there is a very obvious way to get that done and that’s by using a ghost writer. There are plenty of ghost writers out there, plenty of people who can write your book for you, all you need to do is give them guidelines, bullet points, what you want to say, and you can pay for someone to have your book written for you, people do that all the time. So that’s another option if you want to have a book, but not necessarily write it.

Timing

So, one of the next things that I want to talk about is: how to know that it’s the right time for you to write your book, is the timing good? Do you have the time to write a book? Do you have the time to write an hour a day, or eight hours on the weekends, or whatever, can you fit the time in your schedule? That’s one very important thing.

Can you fit the marketing into your schedule? And do you have an audience of people to market this book to? Now, even if you don’t have an audience, even if you don’t have blog readers, or website visitors, or podcast listeners, or people watching your YouTube channel, I don’t think that means that you shouldn’t write a book, it just means that you need to be clear on your expectations, because, again, you are going to have to do a lot of work to market this book, you are going to need to do extra work if you don’t have a community of people to buy the book, because you are going to have to be expanding yourself out into new communities to get new people who don’t know currently to, to buy the book. If you have a small community that’s not a no, no you shouldn’t write a book, but it is kind of a call for you to manage your expectations.

So, how do you know it’s the right time to write a book?

Intuition, gut-feeling, there is something in the back of your head that has been telling you to write a book. Have you been getting those intuitive nudges to write a book? Have people been telling you over and over and over again to write a book, that you need to write a book, that you need to tell your story. If so, what’s stopping you from doing it? And I think that’s a very important question to ask, because I know a lot of people who have wanted to write a book for their entire lives, or for a certain length of time, but they haven’t done it. So, what is stopping you from writing that book? That’s a really important question to ask. It is not a rhetorical question, if you want to write a book, and you haven’t done it, why not? And if you need to pause this podcast now, and get clear on the answer, do it. If you want to journal on it, do it, but do whatever you need to do to get clear on that answer. And that leads me into the next part of this podcast episode which is how to get the mindset you need to write your book.

Mindset

Now, a lot of people want to write a book but haven’t because of mindset stuff. Self-sabotage, fear of visibility, fear of taking action, fears that: what are people going to think, what are they going to say about me? Fears of bad reviews on Amazon. Maybe they believe that they don’t have anything interesting, or useful, or important, to say, or maybe they think: who am I to write a book? Who am I tell my story? Who am I to tell any story? There is so much mindcrap that can come up when we actually sit down to think about why we haven’t written that book.

If you have read either of my first two books on business mindset: Business Beliefs, and Business Blocks, you know that several of the categories of business beliefs are relevant here, when it comes to looking at your business mindset as it relates to your ability, or your beliefs about your ability, to write a book.

So, actions and goals, is the first category. So, what do you believe about your ability to take on a big project like a book and make it happen? Do you believe to put in the work and take the action to make this possible and get this book finished?

Next category is change and growth: and things will change when you become an author, when you have written a book. You will have grown as a person, you will have grown as a writer, you will have grown as an entrepreneur. Are you okay with that? Are you okay with having an author profile on Goodreads? Or, does that freak you out? Are you okay with having an author profile on Amazon? Or does that feel like: who am I to have an author profile on Amazon? What does that bring up for you?

Confidence and self-trust is the fourth category: and, do you trust in your abilities to write a book? Do you have the confidence to say what you want to say in a book? Do you have the confidence to speak your truth, to tell your story? That’s a big thing!

Fifth category is creativity: where are your beliefs around your creative abilities? Do you believe that you are a good writer? Do you believe that you are a bad writer? Do you believe that you can write something as long as a book? And, again, remember it doesn’t have to be long, it can be any length you want, if you are going to go the independent publishing route.

Leadership and outsourcing is the sixth category. Now outsourcing, as I have said before, you are going to want to outsource and get an editor, a proofreader, you are going to want to outsource the book-cover; please do not attempt to design the book over yourself on Canva, it is going to look like shit unless you are a graphic designer. Sorry to be as blunt as that, but seriously, you want to hire a graphic designer who has experience in doing book covers and preferably who specialises in doing book covers, so that they can design a book that looks like a book cover. I have said this many times before, and I am going to keep on saying it, because I think it is really, really, important. I often see people sharing their book covers online, and it is something they clearly designed themselves, and it looks unprofessional. If people have never heard of you, and they see a very homemade looking cover on Amazon, they are not going to buy the book because they are going to think: if the cover looks like shit, what’s the inside going to be like? And, we have all heard the saying: don’t judge a book by it’s over, but in many cases, absolutely you should, because if the author hasn’t put the time and energy to finding and getting a professional to do the book cover, then maybe they haven’t spent much time making sure that the inside of the book is as polished as it could be or should be. So, outsourcing.

The other half of this category is leadership: so when you step up as a writer and you write your business book or other book you are stepping up as a thought leader and saying: this is what I believe I have put it down into words, and I am selling it to you as a book. That’s a big thing! And I think that freaks out a lot of people, so what are your beliefs about your ability to stand up and speak as a thought leader in your field, in your area of expertise? Does that freak you out? If it does write that down. You should be writing all this stuff down, if anything I have said triggers anything for you, write it down, because that’s going to help you drudge up to the service the mindcrap that is not serving you and is keeping you blocked for writing your book.

Next, learning, whether you go the independent publishing route, or you go the traditional publishing route, there is going to be a lot that you are going to need to learn. So you are going to need to learn how to write a book, how to edit your book, how to work with an editor, how to work with a graphic designer, how to work with [etc.]. There is a lot of stuff that you need to learn, and all the information is out there, there is so much information out there, but you are going to need to learn stuff. So, what are your beliefs about your abilities to learn what you need to learn, to be a good writer and to write a book and to get your book out there? Do you believe that you can lean what needs to be learned?

Next marketing and sales: do you believe in your ability to market your book effectively? To get a good amount of sales of your book? So, that you can either make money from your book and/or get clients from the back of readers reading your book.

Personal power is another category in my books, it takes guts to stand in your personal power and stand up and speak and write your book, tell your story, share your thoughts, share your experiences, and share your ideas, theories, and concepts. Are you ready for that? Are you willing to do that? What are your beliefs about your ability to stand in your personal power and put a book out?

Next category is clarity, strategy and vision: so, writing a book, and releasing a book is a project, it is a business project. What do you believe about your ability to create a strategy to market a book, and to manage the project of the book? And do you have the clarity of what you want to say in the book? And do you have a vision for this book? And what are your beliefs about your ability to have a clear strategy and vision for your book? Because this isn’t something that you write and then you get it out there and there it is, you need to put some effort into it.

Next is success and opportunities: what if your book is wildly successful and you get tons of media coverage and tons of people wanting to interview you, and tons of people wishing to feature you in articles, and you get really well known based on this book that you have written, and you get all these new opportunities coming to you. How is that going to feel? Does that scare you, or does that feel exciting? Sometimes that can freak us out: fear of success. Do you have a fear of success and what are your beliefs about your ability to see opportunities when they come your way?

The 14th category is value and self-worth, do you believe that your stories have value? Do you believe that your beliefs have value? Do you believe that your theories and your concepts have value? Do you believe that you are enough? That you are enough to write a book, that you are enough to tell your stories? You are enough to get your thoughts out there in book form?

And, finally, 15th category is visibility, and you may have noticed that I skipped some categories, because I felt that they weren’t really relevant to book writing, but almost all of them were. There are so many aspects of our mindset which come into play when we look at writing a book.

So, visibility, how do you feel about getting out there and being visible with your book? I’m going to be honest, it freaked me out. My first book, yeah, I mentioned it, I mentioned it online, I mentioned it on Facebook. I was excited about putting it out there, but also a little freaked out, so I probably didn’t market it anywhere near as much as I could have, which is why I am really excited to be updating the book and relaunching it, because I know it is a helpful book, I know it is a useful book and I know that I was really freaked out about marketing it and being visible with it, which is also why I have hired someone to help me with the book launch, to do the stuff that I need to do to get the thing out there. The visibility freaked me out, and also the vulnerability, I was really scared of getting bad reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and I do have bad reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, and I also have good reviews. But we have to be willing to accept the bad with the good, because not everyone is going to love what we do, not everyone is going to love our book. I mean, have you loved 100% of books that you have read in your life? Probably not. I haven’t, there are some books I have read that I couldn’t stand, I thought they were awful. So, some people aren’t going to like it, and that’s totally fine, but we need to be ready, willing and able to receive those negative reviews, because if we don’t put ourselves out there and open ourselves up to receive the negative reviews, as well as the positive ones, then we are going to be hiding in the dark corner of our office, trying to do our thing, but, silently, so that no one knows what we are doing. So, visibility is a big part of writing a book.

So, I hope that those questions and going through those categories has helped you get clear on what your current mindset is in relation to your ability to write a book, and get it out there and market the thing. If you have any questions please get in touch, please let me know.

Next steps

Next, I wanted to help you get started with some of the next steps for writing your book.

So, I recommend that you check out Cat Loterzo on Amazon; I think there are a lot of other really good resources that you can use. Four of the previous podcast episodes on this show are related to book writing. So, episode 155, I did with Jo Casey, and it was about How to Get a Book Out of Your Head and Onto Amazon. It has a downloadable transcript, and it is a great episode on kind of the steps you need to take to self-publish your book and I think that’s a really great place to get started, because it gives you an overview of what the process is like.

Prior to that episode 144, with Halona Black, was about how to create your signature book for your business. This is another great episode, she is an expert on this and I think you will find it really, really, useful. Before that, episode 126, was Sylvie McCracken, was about how to create passive income through eBooks, another really great episode that I encourage you to check out. Finally, way, way back, episode 63, Michelle DeFilippo was on the show and we talked about how to self-publish a book that looks professional, and I think that is really important, as I said, your book needs to look professional, it needs to have good cover, it needs to have good typesetting and it needs to be properly formatted for eBook and that’s all really, really, important. So, those are some good episodes that you can do to kind of get started, listening and you know, looking into the process of writing a book and self-publishing. Also, I always talk about her, but the expert on this is Joanna Penn, who has an excellent podcast called the Creative Penn. I will link to her and I will link to all of this in the show notes. She is the expert on independent publishing, she has a great podcast, a really thorough blog, with tons of information, do check her out

Next, other stuff that you can do in addition to doing your research. You can start out by listening to these episodes, on books and writing; answer the questions above that we talked about at the beginning of this episode: do you really want to write a book? Are you willing to put in the effort, your expectations and all that stuff? And those six questions are in the show notes, so, answer those questions.

Next, write down a list of things, you could write a book about. Once I started writing a list of all the books I wanted to write I kept having more, and more, and more, ideas.

Next, block out time in your calendar to write the book, launch the book and market the book, so you know it is in there.

And, finally, start writing and keep writing until you finish!

Now, another thing that I neglected to mention earlier, when I said if you want to have a book, but not write a book, you can get a ghost writer. You can also take transcripts from your podcast episodes, from other audio stuff that you have done, and turn that into a book. Now you are going to have to edit the transcripts, but that is another way to write a book and Denise Duffield Thomas once said, I forget whether it was for her first book, Lucky Bitch, or for her Get Rich Lucky Bitch, one of those books she created from audio files that she had where she had talked about all that stuff, and she got the transcripts done, got the transcripts edited, went through it herself, and turned audio stuff into one of her books. So, that’s another thing you can do, get transcripts done. If you have a lot of online courses, if you have a lot of audio stuff from a podcast, or from whatever, you can use your audio files to write a book. And, in fact, part of my first book, Business Beliefs, there is one chapter in there that started out as a podcast episode, and I got the transcript done from that and I turned that into one of the chapters from the book. So, that’s another really, really, good way to create a book, if you don’t want to write a book, but you do want to have a book. So, I wanted to mention that again, before I wrap this episode up.

Show Notes

So, as always, I hope you have found this episode interesting and useful, you can please drop me a line and let me know what you thought of this episode, if you have any questions you can email me at: [email protected] or join me in the Facebook group: Business Mindset Alchemists, and ask me there, if you head over to https://www.hollyworton.com/group you will be redirected to the Facebook group.

Also, I would love to see you on Patreon, if you head to: http://HollyWorton.com/Patreon, you can join me there. Membership starts at just $1 a month and you get exclusive access to content that I won’t be sharing anywhere else, including a monthly Q&A and my afterthoughts for this podcast. I often think of extra things to add after I finish an episode, and I will be creating extra mini episodes when I share those bits and pieces.

So thank you so much for listening, if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes, it would mean the world to me.

I will be back next week for another solo episode.

And remember to visit hollyworton.com/265 for the show notes on this episode. Thank you so much.