The Right Background to Make Your Book Catapult Your Business to the Next Level and Beyond

I’ve been slipping in and out of the publishing industry for most of my working life. Initially, I was a manager at McGraw-Hill for a few years in the 1970s. Then, a decade after leaving the industry, I wrote my first business book in the mid-1980s and two more late in the decade. A seven-book series followed — that sold in five countries and totaled 1,600 pages — as I built a corporate consulting, training and retained search business while advising CEOs and CFOs of hundreds of companies about their marketing in the 1990s. And I wrote five more in 2005 while creating a B2B and B2C business in the home building and remodeling industries.

So what brought me into the industry big-time now? Oddly enough, just as I was re-inventing myself after the housing industry collapse of 2007, I started meeting dozens of executive authors whose hard work to write a book had brought them little in the way of results. I was astounded because, as a neophyte with none of today’s tools that make book writing and publishing relatively easy, my first book had brought my one-person, home-based business over $2 million in consulting revenues within a very few years. How could their labors, with all the enabling tools of the ensuing 20 years, have brought them virtually nothing?

I immediately recognized the problem: the executives I’d met had not engaged a broad business expert who knew how best to leverage their business with their book and vice versa — someone like me who could accelerate the thrust of their business because they understood how the business really works, such as my Prior Work page describes. So of course their results were miniscule. Instead, they’d hired typical publishing consultants whose dominant experience was garnering bookstore shelf space and dozens of high-profile book reviews and media interviews — notable accomplishments indeed, but those are victories that barely register on the results meter for most executive authors.

I realized there were very few experts like me with the right skills to help execs achieve the long list of powerhouse results that are possible. And it didn’t take long for me to jump into the fray by deciding to be the one to help executives everywhere create results that reflect the enormous potential of writing a business book.

So how do I know so much about the larger-than-life opportunities that only executive authors have? Or what it takes to have a successful book? The story of my first book says it all …

Like most executives who know how to create synergy between their book and their business, my first book was a home run.

Truth is, I never dreamed a book could change my professional life so completely when I wrote my first one in 1986 — long before the technology-driven revolution in publishing made it easy for executives to have a book that explodes their income, impact and influence.

Since the late 1970s, I had been developing some new ideas about the key concepts of my profession, and in 1986 I was ready to take them public. Using hundreds of facts collected during six months of reading The Wall Street Journal and several financial industry magazines to prove my ideas and fill most of my pages, I created a 200-page book (with text only on one side) and had it spiral-bound and copied at a local copy shop (for you younger executives — at the time, copy shops were the only affordable means to create a few hundred books). With a title page on my letterhead that was protected by a see-through plastic cover, my book of hundreds of bulleted facts dispelled many myths my profession had been built around for decades, and it revealed a completely different view of my profession’s target market and stakeholders than had ever been seen before.

What was I trying to accomplish? I needed to differentiate my 3-year-old Silicon Valley consulting business — I also needed parts of my market to know I even existed — and I hoped that mailing a free book to each of my 250 local prospects would do the job. (My marketing brochure described a dozen actual corporate results via mini-case studies, and a book of background concepts backed by facts was a perfect companion piece.) Accompanied by a letter about why I was sending it, I hoped each book looked valuable enough to get through the mail-screening secretaries to my targets.

The results were truly astounding — spectacular even — and doors started opening that I never could have imagined. I suddenly had visibility and wealth beyond my wildest dreams.

• First, I noticed the start of what became a steady stream of invitations to do media interviews with the San Francisco and San Jose business press.

• All that free PR in publications my prospects read led to other kinds of doors opening, such as opportunities to guest-lecture for what became 10 years at Stanford’s and Santa Clara University’s graduate business schools. In addition, San Jose State’s continuing education co-ordinator found and asked me to design and teach a series of night classes that she hoped would become their newest professional certificate program.

• I also realized some of my mailed-to prospects had circulated my book within their company when their employees who attended my profession’s local association meetings mentioned being impressed by it. Those peers started recommending me to speak at various associations’ chapter meetings and conferences throughout the Bay Area. I was also nominated and became president of the Silicon Valley chapter of my profession’s national association — its fastest growing chapter.

• In fact, I had clients so eager to work with me that several of them (five that I recall) fully pre-paid for my $30,000 consulting program, expecting to need my help within a year or two. But their need never materialized — and not one of them asked for their money back when it became clear they wouldn’t be needing my expertise after all. Others signed on with me — again at $30,000 a pop — without anything more than a brief phone conversation about how I could address their specific issues. And no one tried to negotiate my fees down.

• All the media coverage and professional association visibility helped visiting East-Coast dignitaries from both NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange find me. I was a speaker at their local and regional meetings for a decade, addressing the very corporate executives who were my prime target market. How great was that not-so-subtle endorsement from such prestigious institutions!

• I also became the main speaker at a 17-city, one-day seminar that Ernst & Young (one of the world’s largest accounting firms) created in order to meet new CFO prospects for their audit and tax services — another great endorsement from an industry leader!

• Following that national tour, Woodruff-Sawyer — one of the largest Bay Area insurance companies selling directors & officers (D & O) coverage — contacted me, saw my client list and realized my clients didn’t get sued as often as the rest of Silicon Valley. As a result, they offered a monumental six-figure annual premium discount to my clients (attributing the lawsuit differential to the quality of my consulting and training efforts). Of course, that brought me many new CFOs who hoped I had time to work with them so they could get the discount.

• In addition, for over a decade my reputation as the go-to top authority in my field led to being invited by over 20 local PR and communications agencies to be their on-call senior expert and member of their team whenever issues relating to my expertise arose with their clients (I often worked with several of the agencies simultaneously). Many also presented me as part of their team when they pitched prospects who were seeking help in my expertise area. Moreover, several of them also paid me to train their staff about the basics of my field, and all of them were an important marketing channel and revenue source that I’d never anticipated.

In summary, my $10,000 investment in 250 copies of my book led to over 100 new corporate clients, and my consulting business went from less than $100,000 in annual revenues to bringing in over $2 million during a handful of years. All from the visibility and open doors that resulted from my first book. And even more surprising, for almost 12 years afterward I received phone calls from the CEOs I had mailed to, introducing themselves and inviting me to meet with them. They told me they had kept my book because it looked impressive (though I’m convinced none of them had read a page of it!), and they had kept it for the eventual day that they anticipated they’d need my kind of consulting help. Typically, there was no one else they were considering working with because they already perceived I was much better than my competitors.

And that’s not all … as I enjoyed the success of that first book, I created and self-published a series of seven more that further detailed my revolutionary take on the industry — books I priced at $249 each ($1743 for all seven) that sold in five countries — which became a lucrative new profit center during the same years my consulting revenues soared. Plus the series became the curriculum base of a corporate training school I opened that became another high-profit revenue stream for many years.

So that’s the story of how I learned about the big results executive authors can achieve. Let’s get together and make your story a game-changer too!