Why Your Desired Business Results Should Determine Everything About Your Book (A Case Study – Part 1)

Posted on by Carol Abrahamson

Wondering why it’s essential to structure your book to achieve your SPECIFIC business growth goals?

If you’re looking for a straight line to remarkable business results from your book, this means those goals — and their particulars IN YOUR CASE — need to be not only the driver of all your book’s strategic decisions, but also fully “baked into” your book’s DNA.

To see how it works, let’s look at my first book. The moral of its story is the power of making a future book’s objectives shape every part of a book project. Though your details will differ, the lesson here applies to every author looking for big business gains.

My first book — the one that brought over $2 million in consulting revenues to my one-person business — had one goal: attract more clients. And to get that, I had a three-part secondary goal. I needed my consulting market (publicly-traded-company top executives within 50 miles) to know
• I existed (I was new to the state and had no local PR presence).
• I was nearby (local consultants were always considered in an attempt to keep costs down, and local networks and referrals facilitated successful hiring decisions).
• I had a beneficial expertise not otherwise being marketed in the region.

Here’s how that set of goals determined all the important strategic decisions I made about my book.

1 — Who was the audience my goals depended on to happen?

The 200 public company CEOs in the Bay Area. CEOs because their contact info was easy to get and because they (or their Admin) typically forwarded useful-looking info to the right inhouse people.

2 — What topic would those CEOs be impressed enough by to want to hire me to consult immediately, keep for a future need or forward to the right inhouse executive?

Verifiable content CEOs and their team could use to get big benefits but didn’t have easy access to or understand the implications of.

3 — What book type would suit both the content and audience?

A pithy spiral-bound training manual, substantial in size (by being printed on only one side of each page) so as to get delivered by the CEO’s mail screeners — plus no-nonsense in tone to appeal to the engineering mindset of Silicon Valley CEOs who were the major part of my market. (This was in 1987, so printed was the only format option.)

4 — How many copies did I need to have printed?

250 so I could give away 200 and have some left for future new CEOs.

5 — How would I distribute them?

I wanted every CEO to see my book so decided to give away copies — clipped to a one-page cover letter — using postal mail.

And the mailing started working after just a few weeks! And for years, I got phone calls from those CEOs introducing themselves and saying they had my book in hand that they’d kept in case they ever had a problem that required my expertise. For sure, none had read any part of my book, but it did its job spectacularly well in bringing in clients who then chose either my $15K, $30K or $45K consulting program.

So, in exchange for a year (part-time) of researching the content, getting it typed up (remember, this was in 1987, when typewriters were just beginning to be simple computers, and I wrote the whole book on yellow pads delivered weekly to a typist), edited, proofed, printed, bound and mailed at a total cost of $10K, within a few years I had a lot of new money in the bank and 100 new clients. By having my goals relentlessly drive all my book’s strategic decisions, I gained enormous focus and clarity, which created a straight line to big-time success. (No expensive or time-consuming detours or dead ends that would’ve been likely without that clarity.)

Let me add a P.S., in case you’re still not sure how this all works. If any part of my goals had been different — such as wanting a national client base and fame, or being in a market where I already had a PR presence, or being too shy to approach big-company CEOs I’d never met — my book would have had to be different too, if it was going to succeed. And the book I created in 1987 never would’ve so thoroughly changed everything in my life. Make sense?

How about you? Could our Ultimate Book Start System and broad business background enhance your book’s ability to deliver game-changing growth?

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