There are no silver bullets when it comes to Authority Marketing. Generally it requires a steady, consistent effort to share knowledge and serve your ideal clients.

But there is one Authority Marketing asset that is far superior to others. A book.

Consultants typically avoid thinking about writing a book because it sounds like a monstrous task. And while it does take a lot more effort than a blog post, we believe the payoff is worth it.

Even better, we believe it’s possible to create a book sustainably, without compromising quality, and without impacting delivery of work to clients. And in this article we’ll break down exactly how to do it.

The benefits of publishing a book.

There are several reasons why a book is a force multiplier:

It differentiates you.

Anyone can write a blog post. Far fewer people can write a book. At least that’s how the thinking goes. To be sure, writing a book is considerably more work. But that’s why it’s so valuable.

It helps you clarify your Point of View.

In order to write a compelling book, you have to get very clear on your Point of View. Fuzzy or vague thinking won’t work. As a result, if you haven’t already done the work on defining your “unified theory”, it goes a long way toward helping you do so.

It cements you as a Trusted Advisor.

My wife is the Chief Revenue Officer of an investment bank. On at least three occasions in the last couple years, one of their senior leaders read a book. They bought into the premise of the book. They reached out to the author to talk more about the ideas. And they ultimately hired them to help with implementation.

Being an author of a book creates trust in a way that an article or podcast interview cannot. It’s a shortcut to Trusted Advisor status, authority and credibility.

If gives you a fantastic way to build relationships.

Author copies of self-published books are pretty inexpensive. But people are hesitant to throw away books. There’s a… magnitude to them. A weight. A perception of value that far exceeds their actual unit cost. As such, they represent a great way to develop rapport.

A FedEx envelope with a copy of your book, a hand-written note, and a brief note on the inside cover represents a “gift” that very few people will be offended by. And because they’re hesitant to throw it away, there’s a good chance it will sit on their desk or their bookshelf for quite a while. Each time they see it, they’ll subconsciously think of you.

It makes your other marketing activities easier.

Conference speaking spots are harder to come by. There’s increasing competition for being a guest on podcasts. But a book provides an easy intro to both. And in the case of conferences, it gives you an easy way to sweeten the deal for the conference organizer. If they’re trying to decide between Speaker A and Speaker B, and Speaker B is willing to bring a bunch of free copies of their book for the audience, that’s a pretty great incentive. And unlike paying for a speaking slot, this investment has the downstream effect of having hundreds of your ideal clients walking away with a physical memento of your ideas.

Note that “become famous or rich” is not one of the goals here. While it’s theoretically possible, it’s highly unlikely. And I don’t think it’s the point. You’re much more likely to use your book as a marketing asset to build a great business than you are to create a book that generates significant revenue on its own. If that happens, great. But don’t get your hopes up.

How to create a great book

So you want to write a great book. Where do you start?

Start with a compelling promise

What is the outcome a reader can expect once they’ve read your book? If you can make a compelling promise and keep it, you’re on your way to creating a great book. Unfortunately, many books fail to accomplish this goal.

A great example would be The Four Hour Workweek. That’s a compelling promise. Or, closer to home, The Trusted Advisor by David Maister. Implicit in the title is that by reading it you’ll become one.

I like to use a tentative working title that makes the promise clear and abundant. “How <ideal client> can <promise>” is a great start. Doing so makes sure that as you work through the process of creation you keep your eyes on the objective.

Focus on an evergreen topic

If you’re going to go to the effort of creating a book, you want to make sure it has a long “useful life”. Books that capitalize on current events tend to not be relevant for long. Similarly, books that go into detail on specific software or tools tend to become obsolete quickly. And while this can provide you with a good reason to create an updated version every year, that’s probably more work than its worth.

Focus on a book that will resonate now and 5 years from now.

Create an outline

Using that as a working title, what are the necessary elements that lead to the accomplishment of that outcome? These become the chapters of your book

A common approach is to start with an intro, then have a chapter or two to agitate the problem, followed by your solution, with each element of the solution broken into discreet chapters, perhaps wrapping with a highly actionable set of steps people can take to implement your ideas.

This is just one approach - there are many examples of others. But the point is to have a logical, structured approach to writing without losing track of the purpose.

Create a framework

If possible, you want to take the different elements of your solution to the promise and codify them in a framework. Books with frameworks tend to perform better than those that don’t.

Frameworks are memorable. They provide their own sense of credibility and certainty - it’s like “these are the authoritative elements that make up this solution.”

It can be useful to visualize your framework to aid in retention. And you should hire a designer to help - while you can get away with a crude version in your slide decks or blog posts, you want your book version to be high quality. (Of course, once you have a high quality version, you should go back and update your other materials to incorporate it.)

We do a deep dive into how to create proprietary frameworks in this workshop.

Get to the point

B2B books don’t need to be long. They just need to be useful.

Your goal as your writing should be to maximize your “highlighter moments” - the number of times someone takes notes or highlights passages when reading your book.

These tend to not be 50,000 foot, theoretical elements. They also tend not to be stories or anecdotes (although those are actually incredibly powerful in aiding retention of the material.)

Most often the strategies and tactics are what people highlight the most. So we want to be practical and actionable as much as possible.

A 70 page book with dozens of useful takeaways is better than a 200 page book that no one highlights.

Involve readers early

I’m a huge fan of creating a big Google doc for your book and involving “beta readers” as early as possible, ideally once you have your first draft done. Use that to inform the edits you make.

I like to ask for two specific requests:

• Mark any passages you think are “highlight worthy”.
• Mark places where you got confused, or particularly when you got bored. Explain why if you can

You can start with friends and family at first, but eventually you want to fold in current or prospective clients to get their take. The best feedback is from people who are like the people you ultimately hope read the book.

Invite clients to participate

You likely are going to involve examples of client work in your anecdotes to support some of your key points. If they don’t give you permission, you’ll need to anonymize their names and the names of their companies.

But why not ask them if they’d be comfortable being included? If they say yes, you can interview them and get their perspective on the experience. They’ll likely be thrilled to be included in a book (as long as you did good work). And they will likely be more inclined to spread the word.

Plan for several drafts

In addition to your beta readers, you can use services like Kirkus to hire editors to help you refine your book. They can provide a “developmental editor”, which you can use earlier in the process to focus on overarching flow and structure. Later you can hire a “copy editor” who will go through the book with a fine-toothed comb.

Editing is a step that many people feel tempted to skip. Don’t. It makes your final product much higher quality.

Invest in a great book cover.

Book cover design plays a critical role in how your book is ultimately perceived by your market. Even if people aren’t designers, they can usually tell when a book has been designed by someone who knows what they’re doing and someone who doesn’t.

This is not the place to be cheap. Find a great book cover design and be willing to pay for their work. You can go to the bookstore and find covers you like, and see who designed them in the front matter of the book.

Get your book typeset.

Similarly, you want your book to look like it was made by someone who knows what they’re doing. However, unlike the book cover, if you are handy and trying to conserve budget, you can use off-the-shelf software like Vellum to create a pretty high quality version.

Do pre-marketing

Just because you aren’t trying to become famous with your book doesn’t mean you don’t want to maximize the effort you put into it. A systematic, aggressive marketing plan is essential to make sure you launch well. Some ideas for doing this:

• Announce on your LinkedIn profile that you are writing a book. Ask people to DM you if they want to be beta readers. Track them in a spreadsheet or CRM.
• Share examples of your behind the scenes process - as you’re moving index cards around to figure out your outline. As you’re interviewing experts or clients.
• Think about bonuses. Just like we use “content upgrades” give prospective clients opportunities to raise their hands with our long-form content, so too can we provide bonuses as a way to get folks who read the book into your email list. Bonuses can be artifacts from the creative process - recordings of the interviews you did to put the material together. An audio or video summary of key ideas within the book. Checklists or examples of how they can implement some of the ideas. Be creative.
• As you get closer to launching, ask your network and your beta readers to pre-order the book. Pre-orders can go a long way toward landing on the “new and noteworthy” sections of Amazon.
• Also ask them submit a review once they’ve read it. Provide an incentive for leaving a review - a free 30 minute strategy call, or free access to those same bonuses you made, or a special group call with one of your most credible interviews.
• Create a list of potential podcasts you can be on. Let them know you’ll send them an advance copy of the book, as well as an outline of the key ideas in the book. Podcasters love to interview people that have books. And selling the “exclusive” opportunity to interview you to coincide with the launch can be a compelling hook.
• Ask your friends, family, early beta readers, clients, and anyone else on your email list to tweet or post on LinkedIn when you launch.

How to write a book (almost) effortlessly.

As you know, we’re big believers in creating short-form content, primarily on LinkedIn, as a way to generate awareness for your business. And this only works when you share practical, genuinely useful insights.

It turns out that each of these posts, if done intelligently, can become one piece of the larger puzzle that is a book.

When we sit down with clients to start an Authority Marketing program, we spend time creating what we call our client’s “unified theory” around their domain of expertise. Basically we try to codify and write down a comprehensive outline of what they believe to be true about their space, that informs their unique point of view.

This document looks an awful lot like the outline of a book.

The actual book outline is most likely a subset of this larger document. But we have something to work with.

And, as we create content in the months that follow, we start to pick off pieces of that outline. Fast forward a few months and we have a v1 draft of a book. It’s going to be disjointed and require substantial revisions, but editing is easier than creating from scratch.

The end result - we get the benefit of awareness building via our short form posts, and eventually have the basis for our book. It’s a pretty effective setup.

Put Authority Marketing on Overdrive

A good, useful book can be a catalyst that magnifies everything else you do from an Authority Marketing perspective. And while it’s absolutely more work than any other marketing activity you’ll do, the rewards can be huge and lasting.

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