Listen
Don’t sell books. Give them away to facilitate the SOLD process in your business.
Why you need some “how” and not just a lot of “why” in your book…
When you’re so close to the stuff you’re good at you forget “beginner’s mind”…
I started with the problem…
Find out what’s the biggest problem authors face… and it’s not writing the book
Why you shouldn’t sell books and what you should do instead…
Why you need to Make Your Book Pay
I’ve got techniques for what I’m supposed to do about it, but I still forget and I still end up stuck in my own brain, in my own chaos, unable to see from an external point of view.
Joe Gregory, Make Your Book Pay, www.makeyourbookpay.com
Authors are focusing on the wrong thing if they’re trying to sell their books…
Over the last 20 years working with expert businesses Joe has noticed the patterns…
I’ve been immersed in books and business for the last 20 years…
Authors need to sell a bigger idea, not books
At Rethink Press it’s a point of pride that nearly all of our authors become Amazon bestsellers. But it’s not to sell books, it’s to sell the author.
Joe Gregory, RethinkPress, RethinkPress.com
Mainstream publishers are making a mistake when it comes to serving their authors
Don’t become an accidental employee of the mainstream publishers
Joe Gregory
Don’t get into editing before you’ve done a great job on creating…
Use the constraint of a writing outline to keep you on track
Discover Joe’s SOLD model that all expert business owners need to understand
Use your book transactionally
Don’t assume – people want to know specifically what to do, what to say, and they want permission to know it’s OK to do it.
Why expert business owners should give their books away…
Find out about the Value Stack, which flips the business funnel on its head, and let’s your clients ascend the mountain of value you provide
Bounce your ideas off another brain, but be careful who you choose!
Joe Gregory
When do you know to throw away your creation and start again?
Don’t succumb to false constraints
Does it really solve the problem?
Read
Okay. So today we’re speaking to Joe Gregory, who’s a marketer and a publisher who’s worked with over 400 experts to plan, write and publish their books to build their businesses. And today’s guest talk to us about his newest book, which is called, make your book pay. And he’s got an author method or the marketing method called sold, and then something fell on the floor. Joe, I need to do that again. I’m sorry. I think I do the clap again today. We’re talking to Joe Gregory, who is a market town publisher who is working with over 400 experts to plan, write and publish their books, to build their businesses. And today’s going to talk to us about his newest book, which is called make your book pay. And in that book uncovers the sold author marketing canvas, S O L D for like Joe, over to you. Tell us about what you’re up to and what’s going on.
Speaker 2:
[00:01:30]
Hi Deb. So yeah, I’m, I’m, I’m writing my book at the moment and I’ve written 22,000 words, but I haven’t gone deep. So I started to panic that I’d been quite glib. Um, I was just touching the surface. Why you should write a book, why you should use a book to promote you, why you should be giving your book away. All of those things are covered. Lots of why. And I realized I haven’t given anybody any hand and I had a plan for a model, which is a solid model, which I’ll talk about in a little bit. I had outlined it all. And again, I just talked about why the model, and again, I’d forgotten to fill in the how, and I do this for a living. I help people do this. I just kept answering the question. Why and what? And I forgot to answer the hat.
[00:02:00]
Speaker 1:
Just pause a minute there. So you knew, you know, you do this for a living. So is it one of the most difficult things when you do something for a living to actually do it for yourself? Is that you find that really difficult?
Speaker 2:
[00:02:30]
[00:03:00]
Yeah, I do. And I I’ve got techniques for what I’m supposed to do about it, but I still forget and I still end up stuck in my own brain. Um, so only by my own chaos, unable to see from an external point of view. So what I should do is step into the role as, as I am, when I’m a coach and I’m helping somebody plan a book of the coach and to ask objective, ask the stupid questions that are going to go to unpack that like, well, how, how would you do that? That’s the sort of question that would come out when you get too close to stuff. I’m sure this is the case because I see it with all my clients when you’re so close to the stuff you’re good at. You forget that beginner’s mind, but the idea that you didn’t know this once, and so you assume lots of stuff. So you end up focusing on the why rather than the how, and by the habits, it’s not so much that I didn’t tell people what they should do. I just didn’t tell them some of the specific things. And so when I looked back through the book, I’m like, this isn’t good enough yet. Um, and I’ll be honest. It left me feeling a bit blocked. Um, and again, this is something that I help authors through, which is getting past the block. I thought I’d planned the book really well.
Speaker 1:
Okay. Let’s look pass this truck. They construct this little bit. So what is your process for creation? So where did you start?
Speaker 2:
[00:03:30]
[00:04:00]
Um, I started with the problem and the problem in this case is I’ve worked with hundreds of authors and probably directly with over 400, but I work and see authors all the time. It seems that most authors think when the book’s done, the magic is going to happen for them and the books automatically going to promote them, raise their profile. Everybody’s going to ask for their autograph. Um, they’re just going to have clients beaten a path to their door and it doesn’t happen. And in order to solve that, what the mistake they make is, and this is what I see again and again. And I’m partly responsible as a publisher. I’ve been in publishing since 2003. There’s a mad focus on selling books. Selling books is the aim of the game. If you think about any book that anybody writes, it’s a best seller. And so everybody’s focused on selling books and I noticed this and I’ve seen this and we’ve been working with clients, the clients who do really well, the authors that do really well.
Speaker 2:
[00:04:30]
[00:05:00]
But I work with who written a book. They start giving the book away and I noticed this pattern. They were giving the book away. They weren’t interested in selling the book. Um, the book was just a means to a bigger end for them, which is to promote their business entrepreneurial things to do. So I realized that was a mistake. And so the problem was, so the problem is twofold for the clients where I started from with making book pay. One is they were focusing on the wrong thing, trying to sell books. So all the books out there, all of the solutions out there, or how to sell more books. Um, and I’m not knocking book publicists, but if you look at book publicists or anybody that does all the marketing, that’s trying to sell books, they’re still trying to hit bestsellers and sell books and you’ll know debt because you’ve written books.
Speaker 2:
[00:05:30]
You don’t make very much money from selling books. In fact, I mean, I have background, we co wrote a book, we sold 12,000 of them. I think we made 30 grand. Um, and that was hard slog. And if you had in writing it, that’s not even like part time, like minimum wage money, that’s just silly money. Like you shouldn’t do it if it was to make money from selling books. Um, so that part of the problem is they’re focusing on the wrong thing, which is selling books when they should be using the book to sell them, you have, the problem is, and this is why the title took a while to come in. What was going to be called from book to business, because it’s all about the business. And then it came, it became more crystallized. And I started to dig deep, dig into the hat.
Speaker 2:
[00:06:00]
[00:06:30]
Um, what they want to do is they’ve spent, how was an hours writing this book? They’ve planned the book, let’s put sweat and tears into the book. Um, they shared possibly their best thinking. And then nobody buys it and nobody reads it and I have no impact. So their real problem, this is the real pain point is the book isn’t working. It’s not working for them. It’s not working for their business. They spent an inordinate amount of time building it. And then it’s like, who cares? Nobody notices. And so I wanted to make the book pay. And I didn’t mean it just in the sense of monetary. Like you can get money from using your book in the right way, actually make that fucking thing pay because you spent hours and hours and time putting into it and invested in it and it’s not paying off. So that’s where I started from exact problem. And actually getting that energy right. Helped me to kind of really get much more focused on why I’m doing this. I feel really passionately about it. I don’t like seeing people’s books, not working for them.
Speaker 1:
[00:07:00]
No, I think you’ve got right on. So I’m trying to break your process down there. So you notice the pattern so that that’s the input stuff, all the work that you do with all these different authors through the years and over the last, nearly 20 years, you’ve been working with them. So you’ve been noticing patterns. You noticing patterns. When you notice these patterns, these are the signals in the system. However you want to call them. You’ve been noticing these patterns. Have you been collecting them deliberately or did you just spot them in the,
Speaker 2:
the, um, good question you can tell. It’s a good question. Cause my, my brain stopped. Um,
Speaker 3:
hello.
Speaker 2:
[00:07:30]
[00:08:00]
I haven’t lost myself in it. I’ve been doing books and business, those two things, marketing and entrepreneurs and books for nearly 20 years, 17 years. And before that I was a marketer. So I’ve been immersed in that, the outcome, the idea of the outcome and the actually has to work. It’s really important to me. So I’ve noticed the signals all the time. And at the same time, I’ve been trotting out the same dogma, which is sell books. We even help people like the business I’m working with. Now, my business, we focus on getting best salads. It’s a point of pride that nearly all of our authors become Amazon bestsellers. But the purpose of that really is again, just to elevate the author. It’s nothing really to do with selling books. Um, so I’ve seen it again and again and again. And I seen all the successes, all the people go, wow, everybody seems to have their book.
Speaker 2:
[00:08:30]
[00:09:00]
They’re not really best sellers. They gave that book away a book that really inspired us with Seth Godin idea virus and gave it away. You gave that book away. That set everything else off the Seth Godin. I think he’s one of his first books. Um, he was giving it away back, like when I was starting in business and I didn’t even notice, I didn’t, it didn’t even click. That is actually, that’s like the thing we’ve all been missing, all of publishing. This is it. Um, and publishing this is it for a reason. And it’s because their focus is to sell books. That is like your mainstream publishing their job is to exploit the intellectual property by selling it, whether it’s selling rights or selling books or selling spin-offs, it’s all about how you explore it, the IP by selling it. Um, most authors they’ve got a different agenda. Their agenda is,
Speaker 3:
yeah,
Speaker 2:
it’s got to sell me. I want it to sell a bigger idea. I want to put my ideas out into the world in a big way. And they’re not going to make loads of money from sentencing. So back to your question, as you can see, I am, I am the epiphany. Epiphany is the wrong word. I embody chaos, the epiphany of chaos that might make it for main podcast, but I’m going to click my fingers here. Please get rid of a pit for me.
[00:09:30]
Speaker 1:
No stay.
Speaker 2:
So yeah, I picked demise chaos by going, going round in circles. But so going back to your point,
Speaker 3:
cool.
Speaker 2:
I noticed it all the time and didn’t do anything about it and still acted as if there wasn’t a problem.
Speaker 1:
[00:10:00]
Can I ask you another question? Because you’re actually saying something really quite controversial. Now you’re actually saying don’t sell books like the books are you. And as you said, already, traditional publishers are interested in selling books because they, they made an investment and then looking for the blockbuster hits, that’s where they get return on their investment. So you’re actually saying something controversial. Did that influence you when you were deciding whether to say, make your book pay? Did he influence you that fear of contract controversy?
Speaker 2:
[00:10:30]
[00:11:00]
Yeah. Data. That’s why the, the original title was so weak. The original title was from book to business. Cause it wasn’t going to offend publishing. And I’ll be honest, I’ve been on platforms with heads in penguin as kind of compact competition. And like, you know, I have no business on that stage from their point of view. Um, so I don’t want to annoy or irritate or be against the mainstream publishing. Like I love penguin. I love all the books that I’ve read the, the huge production quality. So it feels really nasty to say they’re making a mistake, but they are making a mistake when it comes to serving their authors. Um, and that feels controversial. Um, and so I don’t want to focus on, but there’s no value in knocking the status quo publishing industry. Um, it’s got what we’ve got. Like, I mean, that’s what got me into books. If I think about all the books I’ve read, but they’re making a mistake in this specific area,
Speaker 1:
specific area, so, okay. So you’ve got two bits to your, um, your accompany, which was, they’re making a mistake for specific authors yet for specific. So tell me who, the specific ones,
Speaker 2:
[00:11:30]
[00:12:00]
the specific authors are business owner authors that wrote a book because they wanted to raise their profile. And that’s a story everybody’s saying that this wasn’t the story a few years ago, but it is now all of the paid for it’s like, yeah, books grow your business. Books can help you raise your profile. That’s what it’s all about. And it always has been, and it’s just much more surface today. Um, so it’s for those authors and what happens when authors like that sign out a traditional publishing contract is they become an employee of the, because they go hand out, please, will you publish my book? Cause I know you’re going to invest. You know, it’s going to be the best book. So please here’s my platform. Like I’m giving you access to all of my marketing. I I’ll I’ll I’ll work for you for free to sell it.
Speaker 2:
[00:12:30]
So they get a free sales person, they get free intellectual property and they pay you on results. If you sell, you get some money and advance his own book goal now, unless you’ve already proven. So they pay you after the job has been done after you’ve put hours into writing a book, I mean, let’s not forget writing a book card. They don’t even want you to write the book your way. If there are things in the book that could, um, affect sales of the book, they’d rather you didn’t say it. So what happens is books tend to be a bit more diluted, um, for a mainstream audience. Cause that’s how publishers sell more books is to broaden the reach of the audience. And I’ve seen this before where a book that was meant for just coaches, for instance, which is the, the authors perfect target markets, the only people they want to work with all of a sudden it’s a book for everybody.
Speaker 2:
[00:13:00]
[00:13:30]
So that’s a disservice to the business owner, just there, in fact, chasing sales of books and fame, and the idea that you’re gonna have millions in the bank from passively selling books, which doesn’t really happen for most business book or nonfiction authors. So they’re my ideal target for this, that, and that’s where the industry is making a mistake in thinking they’re doing them a favor by, by controlling it. And so basically what, what you do when you sign a traditional publishing contract, they tell you when the deadline is, they tell you how you’re going to write it. Basically you sign up for a writing job without getting paid in advance. Then they tell you, you got to sign it and promote it.
Speaker 1:
So basically what you’re saying is if you’re going to have to, um, uh, write if you’re going to write a book and uh, write it anyway, and the market anyway, you might as well be writing, get a marketing. If you wrote benefit rather than a publisher’s,
Speaker 2:
[00:14:00]
[00:14:30]
[00:15:00]
I’m writing exactly for your ideal client and exactly for your business outcome, you know, cause you can, you can marry those two things up, serving your audience and selling to them on mutually exclusive things. You’re just guiding them to the next logical step in your business. And that’s published on interested like mainstream publishers. Aren’t interested, they’re interested in selling books and that’s their frame of reference for everything. That’s their lens. Um, and it’s not their fault. That’s their business model. So I’m not, I’m not knocking them for it. But from my point of view, looks like a bad deal. It’s why, when we did our first book, we, we looked at the options you had profile. We could have probably got a mainstream publisher and we figured out what we were trying to do with a marketing thing. So even way back, that’s like 17 years ago, we realized the error for a business outcome in going with a mainstream publishing approach, which, and the mainstream publishing pro really is just all about selling books. If that’s all you think about mainstream is sell books. That’s where the error is. So that’s so you’ve got, sorry. I know you’re trying, you’re you’re having to control the chaos. You’ve got the kind of the mistake I noticed and who it’s for.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. Well, let’s go back to, let’s get some more out if your process, cause it’s, I think it’s really fascinating to that. The next step I spotted was that you did some writing. So you did some writing, you did some drafting and then you reflected on what you did achieve and whether it was working or not. So is that, is that roughly what happened?
Speaker 2:
[00:15:30]
[00:16:00]
Yeah, I’d planned it. Like I’ve got a specific planning process that I developed, um, and S and a structure that I developed, which is the author model. We probably won’t get into that now. Um, I’ve helped hundreds of authors plan, brilliant books. And then the writing takes care of itself pretty much. I mean, you still got to show up and do the product we’ve worked, but the plan is there. And I planned my book really well. I, as I thought, um, and then when I got onto it, I thought, well, what am I going to do to get that first big push of content out? And I, I did something that I don’t normally do. And I think this might be where the era came. I read it and I try and I got it transcribed. So I read it, recorded it and transcribed it. And then what it created for me, rather than a creation job, it created an editing job.
Speaker 1:
So you changed immediately from creation mode into edit mode, which is like the Cardinal sin of writing.
Speaker 2:
[00:16:30]
[00:17:00]
Yeah, I did it cause I I’m like, no, I’ve just got content I have to read and figure out what’s good. What’s not, I have had no choice. So for me, my main, probably the best way to communicate, he’s writing at a keyboard. Um, and I thought I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll hack this process. I’m going to cheat. I’m going to do what some of our clients can do really well. You know, professional speakers, people that are good at speaking for living with guidance, from a coach who can hold them back. I mean, as you can see now how much word, how many words come out of my knife, but aren’t related directly to the question I was supposed to be answering. It creates a lot of words that then the data team. So I did that and then I thought I’ve kept it all surface and glib because I couldn’t do what I normally do to devise this, which used to be very, very structured, very logical, very piece by piece. So we’ll unpack the sold method if you’re interested in doing that. Um, I hadn’t, I hadn’t gone into it in that forensic depth of, you know, what specifically, how specifically are you going to do those things? Because I was talking and you don’t tend to do that when you’re talking.
Speaker 1:
[00:17:30]
One of the things that I believe is that there, there are three steps to creating anything, which is the chaos phase, which we’re both very good at and enjoy. And then there’s the constraints, but in the middle in order to get to a creation. So you broke your own normal constraints by accident, by, by hoping for a shortcut, you brought your own normal constraints, which is an outline writing detail. And that caused you a problem. Is that
Speaker 2:
yeah. Yeah. So what
Speaker 1:
[00:18:00]
[00:18:30]
would have, what would have unfolded from the plan, which the plan was meticulous? What would have been folded from the plan if I’d have written, is that the speed of it coming out would have been slowed? The logic would have come out differently and I’d be like, I need to answer that. Now I need to answer that. Now I’m at the hand now what happened? Because I spoke it is I just stayed on why I got through all of the topics on the cards and didn’t drill into any of them and that. So when I got to the edit, it’s like, I almost got to the point where I was like, there’s no point in editing this because it’s surface, it’s still to surface and painful as it stands. Cause you know, regional, that took a while. I’m saying all that, all those words took a little while. I may start again. I think that’s where I’m at. And so I have gone back to start and again, with the way I know best, which is to design and going back to what you said about constraints, I’ve designed all the constraints. I’ve designed all of the fluff out of how I deliver the answer. So did, when you did your planning process, did you have the Sol D model?
Speaker 2:
[00:19:00]
Yeah, I’d come up with that originally going to be third. I can’t remember what third stands for. Um, and then it just, it, and this emerges often. It emerged. It’s like, what are the things that I want our authors to pay attention to? So these are the things that book can do for you. They can raise your status and your authority and your credibility. And I was using those words interchangeably. Um, you can show off once you’ve got a book and I, you know, at one point I was thinking to call him the ass show off. So it’s about status. It’s like, here I am, I’ve arrived. I’m an authority. You should listen to me. I know I’m on a date and we know full well from, from just being able to say, you’re an author, you can raise your fees, you can open doors that weren’t there before.
[00:19:30]
Speaker 2:
[00:20:00]
And so the second part is actually what doors were opening for authors. So the second thing is what opportunities can you get as an author that you couldn’t as a non author? And if you look at the news or you look at most media, the people that are interviewed and talked to and talked about and asked for advice, are they due to gotten their byline all throughout something? Um, they’re usually two things and one of them the really hard way and one who’s really easy way, really hard ways they use your PhD and they’re experts like genuine, real, like, you know, subject matter experts specialists, or they’ve written a book or both, but you can, you can shortcut that. Like if you were the author of a book and it sounds like a book on the topic you’re in and you get the same billing, whether it’s fair or not, with the people that have spent most of their life, you know, studying this in super detail and like, I real experts on it, you still get the same credibility.
Speaker 2:
[00:20:30]
[00:21:00]
So that was the other thing, what opportunities open, um, for people that have got a book or, or can put author in their byline, then the very kind of like the marketing of remains. Like you could use your book to generate leads directly. Like how can you offer that? We, and we did this for clients, way, way back in the nineties, which is a lead gen. You offer them a free, free lead magnet, a free book, a free piece of information to get email addresses or to it, to get them into your world and not on somebody else. Well, to get them to join your group. So Leeds was an important part. And then actually, how do you use a book to make the sales process better? How do you accelerate knowing, liking, and trusting, understanding your ideas and understanding the problem, allowing your, your ideal customer to make some conclusions themselves about what they need from you rather than you having to constantly kind of feel like you’re forcing the ideas on the books are brilliant for that as well, to educate and to inform your prospective clients.
Speaker 2:
[00:21:30]
[00:22:00]
I thought those are the four things they test or authority. So building your authority and credibility there’s opportunities. So people will, when you’re an author and people know you’re an author and you’ve signaled that people will reach out to you to say, can you speak to my podcast? Can you speak to my Facebook group? Um, I’d like to interview you for this slot on TV, about a specific thing. I know you’re the author journalist and they researchers go looking for authors on things when they need something specific. So being in the game as an author helps. Um, but it can go much further than that. Like why wait for them to try and find you that isn’t part my question and then leads. So how do you use the book? Very, very transactionally. How do you use a book as an author or as a gift in order to get people into your world, that similarly interest in your book and then sales. So how do you use the book to support the sales process? Um, whether you’re selling one-to-one or into corporates, where there may be a group of people that you have to convinced that you’re the right person for the job.
Speaker 2:
[00:22:30]
[00:23:00]
So yeah, so the soul model, I can do that. So the soul model is, and this, this, so these, those are the four things. It wasn’t sold originally because I was thinking I was called opportunities was speaking or something like, it didn’t make any sense, but the sole model is status opportunities, leads and deals, and I wanted it to smell sold. So it could have spelled souls cause it’s really sales, but actually deals makes more sense because it’s usually closing the deal and, and developing that trust through the deal. Um, that makes a difference. Well, I tend to put the opportunities, stuff like that. So the opportunities are being on the board, somebody reaching out to do a JV with you because, Oh, I want to I’m on all three. And the team like this is the expert and they like those kinds of things.
Speaker 2:
[00:23:30]
I try. And I bunch them, we don’t opportunities, deals. He’s very specifically about proactively using the book. And so things you do in the deal stage would be whenever you meet a prospect, you give them a gift of the book. And if anybody’s not ready, I seen everybody’s ready now, but I’m often surprised that nobody’s heard of it. Robert Cialdini’s book influence talks about reciprocity. Um, it’s a gift, it’s a high value gift. We value books massively. Um, and if you sign it, it’s a personalized gift, which makes it even stronger. Um, and I know we feel silly doing that, but there you’ve given somebody a personalized gift of on your first meeting. And even if they don’t like your book, which I found they’ll give it to somebody else.
Speaker 1:
[00:24:00]
So to be clear, your, your premise in this book is that you don’t sell books. You give them a way to facilitate the sold process in your business.
Speaker 2:
[00:24:30]
Absolutely. And given them ways, the key giving them away is the way it works in all of those areas best. Um, but we’ll, we can talk about leads, cause there were kind of some nuances about whether you give it away completely or you give it away and get them to pay a little bit. And it really depends tactically how you’re planning to, um, follow up with that lead and what your kind of plan is for that, that lead and what you’ve got of service for them that you can sell mixed. Okay.
Speaker 1:
Okay. So I just, just in your explaining the assault acronym, you can see there’s a lot of detail and a lot of debts, and that was what you felt was missing before. When you went through your process of writing that you’d missed that debt, but you’ve now gone back and added in the hive.
Speaker 2:
[00:25:00]
Yeah. The hard elements. And I have to, I have to realize this. I hope other people do this. You have a main model. So we’ve got this main model naked sold. And then I talked about it in the terms, I’ve just talked about it to you, which sounds convincing and people that didn’t need the extra help can probably go, I know what to do now. I’ll do something on social media to tell everybody I’m an author and I can do regularly. And I’ll find that in. Or, you know, I know what I can do now for opportunities. I’m going to go and find all the podcast hosts and Simpson, I assume everybody will know to do that. And that was, that was a detail. I left out. People want to know specifically what to do the, they want to know specifically what was to say, they want in a way they want permission to know it’s okay to do that.
[00:25:30]
Speaker 2:
[00:26:00]
And because I’ve worked with so many authors doing it and I’ve advised it for so long, I know it works. So they know they need that kind of trust in it. Cause it feels a bit, it’s a weird, it’s a weird switch to make, which is I’m supposed to be selling my book. So right. I’m going to buy loads of books. I’m gonna invest some money in getting hold of stock and I’m going to send it to people. Um, and so that’s, that’s where the detail needs to be there. You need a plan. You need, you need a process to follow in all of those areas. That’s convincing that you can see yourself doing that. You can understand the, the, the, the exact steps to do. And that was what was missing. So it felt glib. It felt just like I’ve told you those four things now to me, and I’m not, I’m not blow my own trumpet. Cause my background’s marketing that’s enough for me. And that’s where I’d got to, I don’t know what to do. Um, that’s not enough for everybody. Who’s there. They’re what they made you in is something other than marketing and sales and outreach in that way, they actually need the steps.
[00:26:30]
Speaker 1:
Okay. So now you’ve gone back to your, uh, big picture model and within each of the letters in your big pitch, you want to just understanding your creation process. You’ve not created in those, um, pieces of the model, extra detail. So the reader can go ahead and, and work it through themselves. So why should they work it? So I’m going to ask you like an all three question. So if you’re going to give all this information away, so you’re basically telling people how to go away and do it themselves.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
[00:27:00]
Speaker 1:
Why should they ever get in touch with the author of a book? For example, if they give away so much information.
Speaker 2:
[00:27:30]
So this, I think it was, I may have heard it from Frank Kern first, but it was always instinct in me that you, you serve massively. You give huge value in order to demonstrate value in order for people to want to invest in you. So always serving first, providing huge value first but something. And I’m paraphrasing because I can’t remember the quote, but I remember hearing him say it, if you give away your absolute best stuff, and then you’ve got something to sell for them, that’s 10 grand. And they like you gave all that away. The 10 grand thing must be worth a million times that the value is like hugely stacked in your favor that the 10 grand thing is going to be stretching the reality. And this, it feels like a trick, but it’s not a trick. The reality is it will be the same content.
Speaker 2:
[00:28:00]
It will be the exact same content that you got in the book for 10 grand. The difference will be, you’ll be having it done with you or for you by somebody that knows the what ifs and knows how to massage it and make it work and just do those specific things. A book can’t cover. And that’s the same with coaching, but you can’t, you can’t read your way to a coaching intervention, but you need a coach to hold that space. You can’t read your way to a consulting intervention because you need a consultant to dig in and ask the right questions and get the detail. So unless you’ve got those skills and some people can do it, that’s a great, that’s why I love books. Sometimes you read a book, it changes your life. It changes everything for you and you didn’t need the help.
Speaker 2:
[00:28:30]
[00:29:00]
That person was never your client. Anyway, if you’ve got an expensive implementation for them, they weren’t your client because they were, they just needed some advice. What, what happens to those people is they turn into the biggest evangelist you’ve ever heard. They’ll say this book changed my life. You can’t lose by giving away your best value. And I still see all the time, people protecting their best stuff. And I possibly shouldn’t say this on a podcast, but I did have a discussion with my business partner saying, should we keep this stuff that you do in Joe is our secret sauce. I’m like, no, I’m giving it away to everyone. It’s a book. Um, but it was a question because you know, this stuff is the game changer for authors, entrepreneurial authors. If they do this and get this right, they will get more clients. They will get more business. They will be featured in more places. Their status will increase. Um, so it feels secret. It feels like we should keep that in house and we shouldn’t share it. I mean, I know I get that resistance. I feel it back, Oh, I can’t possibly share this, but I know every time the case has been the opposite. That’s how you sell more. If I given away the value,
[00:29:30]
Speaker 1:
it’s a problem. I find a lot with clients as well with my mentoring or coaching clients, which is that the fear that if they produce assets that, um, that are free, they give away content or they give away, um, diagnostics that help the person move on to that next level that they might never come back. And like you said, I think perhaps that those people who don’t come back, what your client, and there are plenty of clients, if you’ve done a good niche and you, uh, you, you are the expert in your business. There are plenty of business.
[00:30:00]
Speaker 2:
[00:30:30]
Well, and honestly, like going into a restaurant, like if you’re an amazing cook and you go to a restaurant and they cook it and you thought I could have done it better myself, it doesn’t matter that they served you and they did all the work. You still don’t really feel well served. And it’s the same with people that are resourceful enough to take your advice and go with it themselves. If you take the money off them and done it, they’ve said, be constantly think I could have done that myself and they’re not your clients. Um, and, and, and, and so that, that person that I speak about, it’s not a particular type of person. It’s just, if they’ve got specific expertise in that area, the value to them is less. Um, so give it away. And this, this goes like you were talking about the different kind of ways of helping people along.
Speaker 2:
[00:31:00]
So one of the models that sits before the sold model is what I call the value stack, which is it’s flipping the funnel on its head. So we all know kind of about the funnel. So you go as broad as possible, your free content. Um, and then you, you kind of attract people into your world through the free content. And then you’ve got something to sell to them, kind of a lower cost thing, just to get them in your world. And you can hear that you might be called a trip wire or, uh, you know, the first kind of minimum viable thing that you sell to them. And these will valid things, but we’ve always been either told to go. We did it sideways. If you remember in our gorillas book, because we saw it as a, as a journey in a relationship, we never saw it as a funnel.
Speaker 2:
[00:31:30]
Most marketers say we’re putting people in the funnel, which is like the most dehumanizing words. And don’t let, let me not knock. Actually, I’m using click funnels as my funnel provider. So the word funnel is, is a word that’s just normal. Now, I don’t like to think about the value you’re giving to people in terms of a funnel. Um, so I flipped it on its head. So the funnel is usually, um, it’s a funnel upside down. So it goes wide at the top and it goes into a tiny little thing. And then you all the high value, one to one clients that can pay you loads of money, drip out of the bottom, and then you help people along the way, but they kind of get stuck. That’s the kind of assumption. Whereas if you flip it round, actually it’s a maintain that they can ascend.
Speaker 2:
[00:32:00]
[00:32:30]
You put yourself at the top as the expert, the thing that you, that the flagship product, if it’s you, if you’re a coach or consultant, you put your time as the most highly pricing at the top of that mountain. And then you give them the ladders and steps and help all the way up the main thing. So they can ascend from wherever they happen to be on that maintenance start. So the free stuff is at the base it’s wide. So you want to be talking to the most possible people. Then a book usually sits one tier up from that. It’s actually, you want a bit of an investment from them to sound, I’m willing to pay for this, or I’m willing to pay at least we, my attention for this so that you can help them. And if you can help them massively, there they go up.
Speaker 2:
[00:33:00]
They build their way up the mountain, which I call a value stack. They build up their way up the stack. They get higher and higher up the stack so they can afford what you’ve got for them. And some people can afford you straight away. And they see you at the top of this value stack. Like, I want to work with you one to one. I know you can do all the other stuff. I just want you, if you haven’t got that, Amy, didn’t say, if you haven’t got things like a book and you’re not signaling, you’ve got a book and you, haven’t got some of the things that can help them in between the book and the 10 grand intervention. You’re not serving them in order to get there. You’re only working with the people that already at that high level, and you miss out on helping people.
Speaker 2:
[00:33:30]
[00:34:00]
Um, and, and the leverage is you’re supposed to be working at one to many in those places. The one-to-one should be really reserved. It should be really carefully controlled. Um, so that’s where I start from. And so in the book, I talked to people about what is is there, and you’ll, you’ll hear it called, um, your pipeline, your product pipeline, your product ecosystem. All of those words are valid words for what’s there, but you’ve got to have it really clearly mapped out what are you, where do you want them to go next? And I think the idea of ladders came from Dan Kennedy. He was away. Don’t sell, don’t sell answers, sell ladders, and it’s a ladder to help them up to the next thing. So it’s helping, helping them ascend. So if you flip it on its, on its head, you get fewer people at the top. That’s why it’s a triangle. There were a few people that are going to pay this thing, but the value is high, which is why it’s higher. So these are the high value. This is where you can really make massive, massive difference and where you put massive, massive effort into making that difference. If you decide to work. One-to-one, um,
Speaker 1:
I really like this model Jack, because I think one of the other things about it is if you imagine yourself as the authority standing on the top of the Maktoum Wiki flag, um, and you can attract people from wherever they are rather than forcing people down into a funnel and pushing them through your system. So you’re attracting people, it’s a much more comfortable way of thinking about it
Speaker 2:
[00:34:30]
[00:35:00]
and you’ve visible at the top. And so we worked with a lot of coaches and they hate the idea of selling more than anything, you know, actually honoring the other person in that process and seeing them as another human and understanding where they’re at, all of those things can kind of be lost when you start thinking funnels and, and like the numbers and you just need to fill it with loaded numbers, pack it in. And then, you know, we’ll squeeze out the cream, kind of we’ll get the best clients. We’ll squeeze out of it. And it’s a dehumanizing, but if you make yourself visible and open and you stand on your stand proudly for everybody to see, like, you’d like, join me, come up. You’re not saying like, I’m going to drag you into this. And even the word backend, I don’t like frontend backend. He’s like, I’ve got something I’m hiding from you. Um, so all of those things, that’s why being a visible author and authority can be so powerful, but I’ve gone off. I can’t remember your question. I just want to clarify.
Speaker 1:
[00:35:30]
It’s good. So in your book then, so this process, let’s go back to the process of writing a book of creating something. Cause I think lots of people parts get stuck at the bit that you got stuck at, which was, you’ve kind of created something. And then there’s this big, you said earlier, I’m like even throw it away and start again. How, how, how are you going to make that decision? And how are you going to make that decision from the point of view of throwing something that you’ve created a way, how are you going to do that? What’s your, what’s your plan?
Speaker 2:
[00:36:00]
So this has taken months to come to this decision. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t an instant thing. You see all the words you like prod the job looks done. It looks partly done. It looks like a lot of words.
Speaker 3:
Cool.
Speaker 2:
[00:36:30]
But for me to disentangle myself from that knowing full well, how the, how the creative process works, you’ve got to let it go, you’re it? This is inside me. I I’m not the, the fear is I’ve got it out now. I’m going to forget what I said. There’s going to be some brilliant, like insights there. They’re still inside. That’s why their insights. So I just didn’t express. I Clyde one way of expressing them and it didn’t create the product or the asset that I wanted. So I noticed the arrow was trying to do it in a mode that didn’t work for me. Some people could read their book and it would be perfect and there’ll be very, very analytical thinkers and able to control that and put the constraints around their discipline as a speaker. I can’t do that. And so it was the wrong mode for me.
Speaker 2:
[00:37:00]
I should have written, I should have written cause it slows that process down a little bit. For me, that thinking just takes longer. Literally just takes longer to get the words out. Um, so noticing that was part of the thing, knowing then if I kind of do a, a, you know, an upside downside upside of trying to fix what I’ve got means, I’ve got to now do an editing job and two options I had for that as well. I’ll get an editor to do it, but I know fundamentally there’s stuff missing and to get somebody else to edit it and make it better would be. And I hate these vulgar, but it’s like polishing a turd. This there’s still something missing. And so you can only make,
Speaker 1:
[00:37:30]
so it’s football fundamentally. You’re actually delegating the responsibility for thinking. And I think that’s dangerous, slippery slope when you delegate that responsibility of thinking, because that’s the special magic that each, uh, expert brings it, that, that ability to think, and then Polish the diamond draft
Speaker 2:
[00:38:00]
[00:38:30]
third. Yeah, exactly. You know, there, there probably is a diamond in the toe, but you don’t know. And if you can give it to somebody else, they may accidentally throw the diamond out, thinking it was a bit of grit. That’s getting really disgusting now let’s change the metaphor. So yeah, that was so understanding that. And again, going back to what you draw on and what, you know, in life we do complex. And I know we’re not hiding the fact we used to work together. So I may, as I say, we used to create really complex software solutions in a world before you could just take it off open source, or you could outsource it. Like we were solving complex it projects and user experience projects. And I can’t remember what the term for it is sometimes, you know, that Cody is so bad, you’re better off starting from scratch. And it’s kind of like the sunk cost fallacy to a degree, but sometimes you go, should I be fixing this code? Or do we just say back to let’s build it as though we didn’t have that crappy code. Cause you know, there are too many bugs.
Speaker 1:
[00:39:00]
Yeah. Refactoring. It basically can, uh, you, you use it as the prototype. You use it as your thinking, you use it as your ability to test things out, but then you have to do the right version and the correct thing. So I think that’s where you’ve got to NASA you’ve used, and this is part of this, the chaos constraints, creation process, which is you created something, but it wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t to your standards. So now you brought it back through the constraints and you’ve made decisions about what you’re going to do next. Yeah. So
Speaker 2:
like one thing just to tell him myself, I’m really lazy. So me coming to that conclusion, I have to start again, is pain like massively painful, just on a laziness level. It’s like, I’ve thought it was done. Now I’ve got to do it again.
Speaker 1:
But that laziness is, um, it’s beaten by your a bit, your desire to do the right thing and to do a good job.
[00:39:30]
Speaker 2:
[00:40:00]
[00:40:30]
Yeah. And, and you know, and I know I’ve got people around me, like, why isn’t your book done yet? I know I’ve got that kind of time pressure. And it’s like, and it’s not about perfectionism. It’s about doing the right thing to me. It’s just doing the right thing. I don’t want to mislead people or give them half of the answer. I don’t want people feeling incomplete when they read my book. I want them to know exactly what to do. And I know what will happen as a result of that. So there is a selfish element to that. They’ll go, that sounds complicated, Joe, I want help. And then I’ve got something to sell to them or it will give me the opportunity to have a conversation with them and then work out how to help them or they’ll go and do it. And then they’ll tell everybody you need to get this. It’s great. And then people that can’t do it will find me. So you can’t lose by doing the right thing. Um, and that’s, um, I remember you, you pass this on to me from our head master in junior school that he used to say only my best is good enough for me. And it’s not about perfectionism. It’s just knowing I could do better and I want to help better.
Speaker 1:
[00:41:00]
Yeah. Okay. Let’s talk about perfectionism and only your best is good in a few, because I want to ask you about the constraints that you are, uh, um, that was forced upon you and the constraints that you put upon yourself. So for example, constraints that might be put upon you would be timescale or, um, uh, how much, how much money you could spend on the job or how many resources you’ve got to put through it and the task scales that and the constraints that you’re putting upon yourself, uh, uh, slightly more, um, amorphous they’re sort of like, is it good enough? So talk to me about the constraints that you’re fixed with it and the constraints that you put upon yourself.
Speaker 2:
[00:41:30]
Okay. Well, the, some constraints are false constraints. So the pressure I’ve got to get this done quickly is our authors are asking for this, we need it like, and I know they are like, we’ve got hundreds of authors. What I’m doing short term is I’m having a one-to-one conversation with all of them. And that, that gives me a bit of pain cause it’s an hour, but actually I’m serving them in exactly the same way as it’s giving them a book at the moment in the best possible way, having a book will just make it more leveraged, but we’d been being this, they needed this answer for the last, I think the current, the current publishing business, I’m running a I’ll name, it rethink press. Um, that’s been going since 2011, they’ve needed this answer since 2011. So to say, right now I’ve got to get it done in two months because we’ve agreed two months is the time is a false constraint because if it’s not the right thing, we still haven’t fixed the problem.
[00:42:00]
Speaker 2:
[00:42:30]
Um, and I may be just trying to get myself off the hook by saying that, but it feels like a full constraint. The real constraint is, does it solve the problem? Does he actually answer the question? Does it solve the problem? And does it solve the problem better than me? I’m going to want to consult with them because at the moment I’ve got enough capacity to do that. And I know I’m able to serve really well by doing those one to ones. Um, can, will it serve them at a higher level and a bigger scale? And the answer is if I write it properly and I actually fully dig into what needs to be shared, then it will, there’ll be follow up better. And it may still require a conversation, but it will be a much better informed conversation. They’ll be asking specific questions in that conversation rather than what the hell do I do? Um, so yeah, to me, the constraint was it has to solve the problem.
Speaker 1:
Yep.
Speaker 2:
Sergeant didn’t and it could have solved my problem. I could have said it’s done done two months. Yeah.
[00:43:00]
Speaker 1:
Yeah. And so I love, I love that as a constraint and it reminds me of another software question, which is better, faster. All right. Pick two. Do you, do you believe in better, faster or right. Pick two?
Speaker 2:
[00:43:30]
I think he can have all three. I just haven’t found a way of doing it. I think that’s, it’s an old, it’s an old kind of idea, but there’s a lot of talk in books like blue ocean thinking that says actually the blue ocean has been able to solve all three of those, um, personally for me that, and I think that’s why, what you’re doing is so good. You could, if I’d have worked with you, I could have got the faster as well. Um, because I wouldn’t have made some of the mistakes that have slowed it down, but if I have to pick them faster, isn’t my top. It’s not my top of the three ever. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[00:44:00]
So, okay, fantastic. So Joe, let’s start wrapping it up a little bit. Um, if you were starting this project again, now, if you’re just starting from scratch, what have you learned through this process of, uh, the chaos and the constraints that you set upon yourself and the creation process? What have you learned from that, that you would tell your previous self a year ago? So
Speaker 2:
[00:44:30]
follow my own advice. So I would have got somebody else to be the external, um, bounce off. Cause I did it all in my own head because I’m like what? I do this for a living like that, making that kind of fundamental, it’s kind of an ego mistake. I do this for a living. I don’t need help. Um, it’s exactly when you need the help and because I’ve got structures, I could have got help from pretty much anyone who’d be willing to spend the time and listen, but I didn’t, I did it all myself. Um, so my fault completely my own fault. Um, so that would be, it we’d get an external person to bounce this stuff off. It works better when you’re bouncing the ideas off another brain. Um, and I would, I would say to a degree though, again, going back to constraints, be careful who you put in your team for that kind of exercise, not in terms of their expertise, but in terms of what they pay attention to.
[00:45:00]
Speaker 2:
[00:45:30]
Should I talk about that a little bit? Cause it’s not my, it’s not my thing. Um, so there’s a great book by a chap called Dan Rome, the back of a napkin. He talks about the three different pens. And so I’ll briefly go through this black pen thinkers. They just kept million million miles an hour with an idea as a second, like nonstop is give me the pen. I’ll write down all the stuff I’ve got in my head and they won’t stop with the ideas. That’s brilliant up to a point. And at a certain point, you need to start saying, wait, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. We need to slow that down. Now it’s time to start capturing these brilliant ideas. And that’s where the highlighter pen people come in. So the, the highlighters go, there’s some similarities there. There’s a, there’s a pattern emerging here.
Speaker 2:
[00:46:00]
We can put these things together and I’m saying them as people, these are just tendencies. They’re just preferences. What’s really good. If you, if you’re aware of these and this is one of the tricks I didn’t do for myself, you can jump between these three modes of thinking yourself and cover your bases. But it’s much easier with somebody else there and who can hold you to that, or at least play those roles if you ask them to. So highlight depends all about putting the ideas together, bunch of them together. Um, so the card process we use it’s, it’s about like collecting all that stuff. You’ve just got out of your head and saying, there’s a bunch there that fits as a bunch. There’s a pattern there. Um, did you notice, Oh, look that almost spousal something, those kinds of conversations happen with a yellow pen type of thinking.
Speaker 2:
[00:46:30]
[00:47:00]
And then there’s a red pen people and they’re great at the end of the process, red pen is good at the end of the process, terrible at the beginning. And usually when, if you’ve got a creative brainstorm going on and as red types, red pen types, they can kill it before it even gets off the ground. And if you’re a red light, if you, if you tend to look for the potential problems, threats, dangers of something and, and the intent in all three of these pens is good. The intention is good in all three pens. If you, if you tend to that person, you just need to tell yourself, like, we’ll get a chance for that. That’s a really valid, important thing to do is to check that you have made a mistake or you don’t look stupid, but if you do it too early, it breaks. Um, so in terms of choosing the right person for your team, I think the, the best person is somebody that can go in all three and he’s aware of them. So I’d make them aware. Um, if I had to pick just one and you know that that tendency I’d go for the highlighter pen every time, cause you can get editors later, red pen is potentially the killer. It can kill the whole idea you can end up going. I don’t even think the idea is good if you get the wrong red pen to my constraints,
[00:47:30]
Speaker 1:
which is organization patterns and decide.
Speaker 2:
[00:48:00]
And I would say actually, I, I spoke from my own, my own experience because I’m black, I’m predominantly black pen and I play the role as, as highlighter pen most of the time. And I, I struggled, but I have to do it at the final stage. When I do the book plan, I go into red pen, um, deliberately for my clients. Um, for me as a black pen, highlighter pen is a perfect counterbalance. If you’re naturally red pen, you probably want black pen as your natural counterbalance. If you’re a highlighter pen, you could probably work with either. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. Okay, fantastic. So, Joe, um, is there anything I haven’t asked you that you want to tell us?
Speaker 2:
Um, that’s a good question. Isn’t it? Well, it sounds like that sound like a criminal interview.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. They don’t incriminate yourself.
Speaker 3:
No,
[00:48:30]
Speaker 2:
just trying to think. I cheated. I cheated. And um, when I was seven years old, I cheated in a times table test and got caught. I don’t think I ever told you or my mom.
Speaker 1:
No, you need to don’t do it again.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. Yeah. Just a confession really? Cause this is chaos confessions. So that’s my confession.
Speaker 1:
[00:49:00]
Right. Don’t do that again. Okay. So Randy, not, then you’ve mentioned a couple of different things. I want to know where we can get hold of them. So, um, B the card process that you’ve mentioned a couple of times and the author system, why can we get older? Those?
Speaker 2:
[00:49:30]
So, um, rethink press runs a process called book plan. Um, it’s a one day intensive. Um, often not with me anymore. I started it. Um, one of our coaches will play these roles for you and bring all this stuff out. We use colds to collect all the ideas. Um, it uses a design thinking approach. So it’s rapidly getting all the ideas out then did a highlight to pen to organize them and cutting it into the kind of hierarchical detail by using the red pen. Um, so we press.com is one place. You can have a look, um, in terms of the soul model, make your book, pay.com or search for make your book pay anywhere. Um, I don’t know when this podcast is going out. So you might want to delete this. I don’t know when the podcast is going out. Do you want me to do a different outro? Cause I’d rather actually focus people.
Speaker 1:
Yes. Yeah, no, no, no. Fuck this to you. Cause I want to do it. Cause it’s going to be in a couple of weeks, yours will be the light one. Cause
[00:50:00]
Speaker 2:
[00:50:30]
find me if they want, they want help doing the author method or the author process. Um, reach out to me on social media. So Joe Gregory, um, Facebook is forward slash get published. I was early in on that one. Yeah. And I can talk to you about that and we can, we can help you with that. Um, if you want help with, if you’ve got a book already and you want to help make any pay and make your book pay com you can get a free copy of the book, um, there, or you can find me on social media again, make your book page on any of the social media channels. You should find something
Speaker 1:
[00:51:00]
excellent. Okay. So just to sum that up then, if you are interested in the author process and planning a book, then go to rethink press. But for everything has to do with making your book pay, go to make a book, pay.com or look out for Joe on Facebook, get published. Okay, Joe, thanks so much for being a guest today and the first guest on the season of the, um, the case to creation confessions. And, um, we’ll see you soon. And I’m really looking forward to reading your book.
Joe Gregory: www.RethinkPress.com