How to Create a Compelling Hook For Your Book - Authors Empire Workshop Presentation Clip

But things have changed a lot, and I see a lot of advice out there that has not adapted to where we are and where we're going. And I spend a lot of time looking at where we're going. That's why I, as soon as I had the opportunity to create an interactive audiobook, I went, I'm creating an interactive audiobook. Not because I really want to talk to my books more. If anybody's written a book, you know, you eventually get sick of your book, and then you take a break from it and you come back and you're like, "Wow, this is really good." But, you know, for me, when I launch a book, I'm like, "I don't even want to see that thing again. I don't want to talk about it." But I create the interactive audiobook and played with it because this is where we're going. And it used to be a choice of, do we want to create an ebook, a print book, or do I want to invest in creating an audiobook? We are at an era where I don't think that should be a choice. We are in a multi-format situation. One of the things we talked about on my channel and in our company, Spotify. I'm very excited, again, going back to the whole, I don't want Amazon to rule the roost. I love what Amazon's done for us, but I don't want them to rule the roost. Well, Spotify's coming on strong. And I'm really excited about what Spotify has been doing, especially for folks who are podcasting. Because now they have partnered with a company and they're doing print book distribution. And you can take a picture of where you're at in the book, and it will sync to where the Spotify for Authors, where the audiobook is based on that. And, you know, poor Amazon, they go, but, but we've had WhisperSync for years between the ebooks, but it's only in their system, right? You had to have a Kindle and you had to have Audible. It didn't work, you know, outside of their system. And so there's other players coming on and doing this. And again, all these signs just point to, It is not about a singular book. And I do get people who come to us and go, "I'm just gonna do an ebook." Well, if you're just doing an ebook in the nonfiction space, it's okay if it's gonna be a lead magnet on your website. But the reality is, in nonfiction, the vast majority of your book sales are going to be in a physical book and an audiobook, depending on your market. Your ebook is not really going to move. You will do a 99-cent promotion and that will move it, I don't think a lot of them get read, right? Which is the other thing, because to me, it's not about putting a book in a reader's hands. It's about actually getting that book read, because the real magic happens when somebody reads your book and then can recommend it and review it. It's so, so important. And so, to do that, we want to have the format that our reader chooses to have. And a lot of people say to me, "Well, I'll do the audiobook later if my book does well." Well, that's fine. You can— Do that, 'cause it is an investment to create an audiobook, although there are more and more tools now to allow you to produce audiobooks in all kinds of ways for all kinds of budgets. But the thing is, the reader, when they go and they look for your book and they don't find it in the format that they wanted it in, there's no, like, notify me when this comes out button. So you've just lost that person because everybody has their preference. Somebody is going to only buy books in print. Somebody's only going to listen to audiobooks. And if you have chosen to do it in one format and that person looks and they don't see it, they've already forgotten about you. They're not coming back. So you've missed out on that opportunity to connect and to get that reader in, into your ecosystem. Okay. Goals. I think it's really important to think about what your primary goal is. Everybody has multiple goals. I definitely have multiple goals myself, But when you're creating your book, what is that first and most important goal? And it might be to sell as many books as possible. It might be to get leads into your business. Uh, you know, it could be speaking engagements, it could be earned media, whatever that primary goal is. You wanna think about that. But then I always kind of push a little further and go, okay, but why? Like, understand not just what that first goal is, But why is that your first goal? And I do that especially when somebody says book sales is their primary goal, because usually, you know, that's fine. Some people do have the goal of simply being an author and they want to make their living from books. I'll tell you, that's a very rare bird that makes their living solely from books, and they write a lot of them. They don't just write one book or two books, um, you know, in, in the author world, the authors that are making a living from books only, they're usually fiction and they're usually putting about a book a month, which I do not want to sign up for. My pace is like one every 3 years, so I am definitely not cut out for that. So, but I mean, if selling books and making your money, making money from solely book sales is your goal, you want to know that because that's how you're going to build all your infrastructure is around that, and you're going to You have to build an engine that produces a lot of books. Because you produce a lot of books, eventually you'll probably have one that sells decently well, and it can build on the other ones and go from there. Earned media is another one. It's usually not about the earned media, right? It's somebody says, "I wanna be on Good Morning America." We hear that one quite often. Why, right? So again, go to that next step and understand the why, because that helps you really get clear on what you're building. Because earned media is one thing, but what is that earned media going to do for you? Now you're digging in a little bit deeper, and it's more important for that. Building your brand is great too, but what's the brand and why is it important? The problem with bestseller as a goal, that being a bestseller is fun, right? It's great. The challenge with coming in is that is your first goal. So here we went through what's your primary goal, but if your primary goal is to be a bestseller, which we used to hear like universally, we hear it a little bit less. So I think people are getting wise to that game, right? You guys remember I said, you know, it's a game. So let's, let's know the rules and know what game we're playing. But being a bestseller. So when I hit number one, I only did a print book. I was playing the Amazon game because Amazon has bestseller lists based on format. So when I launched and I drove sales initially, I drove them just to the print book. I didn't launch the ebook until 30 days later. I don't recommend you do that for the exact reason I just said, right, which is we want to be available in the format that our reader is buying in. But I was playing the game, 'cause I had decided, you know, Wiley, I'm gonna do this better than you've ever done at Wiley, and I did. They have not had a real estate book in Canada go to number 1. But I was playing that game, right, as choice. I had trade-offs. There were certainly people that would've wanted an audiobook, that would've wanted an ebook, that there was not available in that format. So bestseller is a game. Even if you are going for one of the newspaper lists. So USA Today, that's basically the main one that's available to self-published authors right now. You think the author with the most sales in a week is getting USA Today bestseller? Yeah. And it's interesting because it's not even— we've actually had authors on the bestseller lists at the same time as we've had authors selling way more books than the ones on the bestseller list. And it's because the USA Today bestseller list is a specific list of stores, right? So if you know the stores, you can sell your books through those stores and make the list. That, it's a game. So what are you giving up to go after that? And why is that important? Because again, I mean, it's, it's fun and some people just really want to check off bestseller on their list. And so, I'm never gonna say don't go for it. I just want people to understand what the trade-offs are when you choose something as a goal, because now, and you're going to meet, you're gonna meet one of our USA Today bestsellers tomorrow. And what he'll tell you, he was exhausted after, right? Like the push he had to put into that. And we had a panel, a virtual panel a little while ago where we had a couple of them on there. And they all said the same thing. They were like, "I was so exhausted, I could barely do the things I needed to do to actually capitalize on what had just happened," because of the marketing push that had to go into hitting the sales in those places in that short amount of time. So again, go for it, but know that it's a game that you're playing, and you have to kind of know what trade-offs and what you're going to do to leverage it. I also will, my last bullet point on there, I mean, everybody claims to be a bestseller and an award-winning author, and they probably are, right? Again, in a category, in a, you know, there's lots of awards that you can win. So is it really a differentiator? Like, is, and that's the question as you focus on it as a goal. Again, it can have value, but just understand why you're going for it and what you're going to do with it. All right. So the hook, and this is where we're gonna start building out a bit of your map. So the hook, we touched on it already. This is the outcome of the outcome. With your unique perspective. So the one example— or not example, but the one explanation I already gave you, which is we don't want it to just be inspirational or motivational. We want it to have transformation for that specific reader. So it's not just the first outcome, it's that second outcome, and it's with your unique lens on it. This breaks it down a little bit more, and I've got a few examples. But the thing to remember why it's so important is, again, the reader isn't buying That motivation. They are buying what's in it for them. What transformation is going to happen? So even if you're writing a memoir, we're still thinking about what is the reason the reader is picking this book up? Why do they want to know about this particular story? So that means you need to know who your reader is. Now, a lot of people come to me, and I get this one all the time, "Oh, it's for women between 40 and 60." I was like, great. Do you know how different? Like, okay, I was a geriatric mom, okay? That's what they called me at the hospital. I was a 40-year-old mom having a baby, okay? I'm geriatric according to the hospitals. That is a very different stage of life than the majority of my friends that I grew up with that had their kids in their 20s. So 40, but we're all 40. I run a business. Some of them are stay-at-home moms. Some work for companies. Some work for Fortune 500. Shop. Very, very different. We have different problems. We might have certain universal needs, but there's different things. And so knowing what I'm worrying about in the middle of the night versus what one of my friends is worrying about, that's really, really important. And so if you know your reader so well that you can kind of go, okay, it's 3:00 AM. This is what they're thinking about. This is the way they're talking to themselves in the middle of the night. Now you're starting to know your reader. Because that dialogue that's happening in their head is really important to know. In my book, More Than Cashflow, I open it, I think it's either the introduction or the first chapter, but I say, sometimes I think a job at Starbucks would be easier. Do you know how many people, and see, Andrea's laughing, 'cause she does quite a bit of real estate as well. And do you know how many people came up to me and said, oh my God, that's what I've thought too. When you're dealing with the tenants and the toilets and all the things breaking down and the property managers, I had property manager rob rent money from me too. Dealing with all that fun, you think, "Those people at Starbucks, they get benefits. They get coffee." So that was me, 'cause I wrote the book for myself a few years prior. But if you can write something that somebody comes up to you and goes, "Oh my gosh, I've thought that too," that is when you know you know your person. And that's what we're going for. The demographics are useful to know a little bit, but that when you're thinking of your hook and you're writing your book, what we're really trying to connect to is that reason that they're going to pick this up. And we have to hit them with that early in the book, right? I see a lot of books where the early pages are a warmup, right? It's like the introduction goes, you know, waxes poetically for pages, but it's really a warmup for that author. But that's not who we're selling the book to. We wanna hit that reader right away and go, I get you, I see you, I know what you're going through. And when you do that, you connect to them. And so that's where the hook is so important, because you know what you're offering that specific person with that outcome of the outcome. This is Michael Brenner. He brought us a book, it was called The Empathy Formula. And he'd had a couple friends, very, very good friends I'll tell you, tell him that the book was trash and that he should not waste money on it. And I say they were good friends because we have a lot more people that come to us and say, my friends read it and said it's great. And we're like, oh, they lied. They're not good friends. But his friends were honest. And it really wasn't that The Empathy Formula was bad. It was that the people who need empathy, they're not buying this. They don't think they need empathy. And so this was the book, The Empathy Formula. And he brought it to us and was talking to somebody on my team. And he was telling them about like the 21 jobs that he had held and how everybody in these jobs thought they had to be mean to get work out of the team or they had to be mean to get results. And it was just in that conversation where he just kind of blurted out, "Mean people just suck." And they kind of went, "Wait, that's the book." Oh, that was you? So this is Sarah. I didn't know who was having the conversation. So Sarah, this was Sarah's conversation. That's where Mean People Suck came up. And ultimately, It's still the empathy formula. It's still the empathy formula inside. It just is positioned around mean people suck. And that became a keynote that he was giving, and he would wear this green shirt that said mean people suck, and he would go on TV. But the hook was that how empathy leads to a better life and bigger profits. Still the empathy formula, but now it's packaged in a way that's going to appeal to people. And that's really what your hook is. This is another one. I love this example because I got to witness how powerful a great title that kind of is your hook at the same time. I got to witness it in action because one of my friends that owns a business here in Vegas, they were moving into a new great big warehouse. They build the booths that are at like the Consumer Electronics Show. That's the company that she has. So they have a giant warehouse and she wanted to have a great big grand opening of this warehouse and have a speaker. And so she said, I want somebody who's kind of motivational, like a mindset kind of person, and this and that. And so I told her, I said, well, I have an author, and she wrote a book, Head Trash. You know, she's a really good speaker. She goes, head trash? Yeah, her. Now she got a proposal, they talked, you know, it wasn't like an instant booking, but she didn't even look at the other ones that I proposed. She said, send me her. And so that was where I got to see firsthand the power of a title that is really your hook. Right? So getting that positioning from the beginning, because it's the leading killer of human potential is her subtitle, Head Trash, kind of sells it. And so I got to see that firsthand, what that does for you. So this is why it's so important, because it takes time to get to something that is an immediate, like, people get it. So the simplicity is actually the hard part of this. but when you get it, you get those instant, yes, that's it, that's who I want. And now we wanna go a little bit deeper into the reader, which I think, you know, from the examples, we actually were pretty strong on the reader, but you're not writing for a demographic, you're writing for a human. And I think it's really important to connect to that person. I have this one, I have one video on YouTube that's called like, you gotta be a mind reader. And really all it just means is you need to know what they're thinking about. But there's lots of ways to do that if you don't really know the language they're using or what they're thinking about. You know, you can go on all the forums, you can go on social media, you can start to see where they're talking and what they're talking about and the language that they're using because it's not just the emotions that they're feeling, it's also the words they're using to describe them. That is really important because you might be talking about the same thing. We had an author, He wrote a book on recidivism.

And Gregory Lebede.

Yes. I wasn't going to throw him under the bus by saying his name. But I mean, if you look up recidivism anyways, but I was like, are the people who just got out of jail using the word recidivism? Because I had to look up what recidivism even was, to be honest. Okay. I didn't know. But yeah, so this is the language in— his book's actually done pretty well. He knew his market, but in my mind, I was thinking that recidivism wasn't gonna be the word that they would be using or that they wouldn't relate to. And so that is one of the important things. I don't think I made this up. I think somebody said this to me one time, but if your reader doesn't feel seen, they're not gonna see your book, right? This is a really important piece to kind of focus on. And one of the things I always think about is what have they tried that didn't work? Right? And how did that make them feel? What happened afterwards? When you know that kind of stuff, you're able to write that very first story and connect to that person. So you want to know the outcome that they're seeking, the words that they use. Again, demographics aren't irrelevant to this. They're just not the only, or, and they're not even the most important piece. Um, and hopes and dreams, really important. The fears, The things that keep them awake in the middle of the night. Sarah and I always have, you know what I thought of last night? We didn't do this. This is our 3:00 AM. So what is that 3:00 AM thing that pops in your head and you go, oh, I didn't think of that, or I'm worried about that, or I'm excited about that. Those are all things that are completely valid. But for me, it's kind of that thing in the middle of the night, but for other people, it might not be that. And then where they hang out, yes. I was just thinking I'm missing something. Where they hang out is important for a few reasons. One is obviously now you know where to market, right? Now we can get in front of that area. But the other thing is when you know where they hang out, you know who they're familiar with, you know what concepts they are familiar with, and now you have another connection point. Because again, if you know where they're hanging out, you know the language that they're using, you know the people that they're following, you know some of the frameworks they've already been exposed to. So if you have something that's a little different than something they've already been learning, you're able to say, okay, you've probably heard of this, but here's another way to look at it. And so understanding where they're hanging out and what's going on in that circle, whether it be events or podcasts or different things, 'cause hangout isn't necessarily in person. It can be online. It can be different forms, but it's really understanding who are they paying attention to? Okay, this is Benjamin Hardy. Some people, and I don't know if anybody's heard of Benjamin Hardy, a few people. So he's in the entrepreneurial world that I travel in. He's very, very popular. He's written a lot of really incredible books. One of my favorites was 10x Is Greater Than 2x. And then he recently came out with a book on scaling, which is what I brought him to Vegas to speak to my entrepreneur organization chapter about. But it's really interesting 'cause a lot of people don't necessarily know who he is, right? So in this room, 2 people put their hands up and said, "I know who he is." 3 people, so thank you, okay. But, you know, for in my entrepreneur world, like everybody or 90% is gonna say, "Oh my gosh, that's Benjamin Hardy." And so it's really important to know who you're writing for because his stuff is really great for that entrepreneur. It's not, if you don't have a business and you're not trying to build something, it's not going to be for you. So when you know that, it's okay. Like I don't think he would be sad that you guys don't know who he is because he's written, he'd be really sad if he walked into an EO meeting and people didn't know who he was, walking up to him. Okay, here's a funny story. We just had Mike Michalowicz. Does anybody know who Mike Michalowicz is? A few people. He wrote Profit First, Pumpkin Plan, Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. So we had him here and somebody went up to a different Michael. They're like, I'm so looking forward to your speech. And it wasn't him. He was actually a bank. He had a bank, but he had like a similar face, but his name was Michael. So the person thought he was the speaker. Mike Michalowicz thought that was hilarious. So it depends on your room, right? It really depends on who you're talking to. So knowing who your reader is is really, really important because you are not for everyone, and that's a good thing, right? That's a really good thing. Okay, I'm actually gonna pull Sarah up here because one thing Sarah, I mean, Sarah does a lot of things really, really well. One thing I can do is I can always put the spotlight on her and have her talk about our authors and talk about their readers and kind of the journey that they've gone through to kind of create the book and what they're doing with it now. And so we'll start with Shannon Russell and talk about her, and because we've talked about the subtitle and the the hook and things like that, let's weave that in, but we're focused on readers and kind of the goal that they had with their book. Yeah, absolutely.

So the best part about my job is I get to talk to every single one of our authors and get to know them very, very well, as some of our authors here know. And so Shannon was an author who came to us because she wanted to expand her business. She runs a career coaching for midlife women who are looking to pivot their career, and they are afraid because sometimes changing mid-career means losing income, losing schedule, losing a lot of things, building new contacts fresh. Her goal with the book was not only to expand her business, but also get invites to be on stages so she could reach more of those women. And so she came with us with a book, she came through our course, launched the book, and I'm actually gonna be talking a little bit more about Shannon this afternoon and some of the amazing, cool things she's done with her book. But she came in with a very clear idea of exactly who her reader was and what they were afraid of. And that's what differentiates not just her book, but also her coaching business. In the middle here, we have Joel Benge, who is a really fun guy. Be a nerd that talks good. Transform your technical knowledge into powerful messages. Now, Joel runs a consulting business where he works with organizations to basically bridge the gap in communication between engineering teams and leadership. This is a problem that has existed for decades. If you ever saw that movie Office Space, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I talk to engineers. Engineers don't like to talk to people. That is exactly what Joel's book was covering. He wanted to write this book specifically to build up his credibility and bring in lead generation so he would get more companies coming to him and learning his communication tactics. Matthew Harmody here, Dr. Matthew Harmody, his book just came out in November, Ascending America: 50 Kidney Donors, 50 Peaks in 50 States, One Record-Breaking Journey. Okay, so you can tell right away that this is not a book that is building a business, this is telling a story. This story specifically is about living kidney donation. Dr. Harmody is not only an emergency room doctor, but he's actually a living kidney donor, and this is a a big issue. I don't remember all the statistics. Essentially, there are not enough kidneys for all the people that need them. He wanted to build a book that was going to bring awareness to these ideas by telling the story of his team that did all 50 peaks within the United States, the tallest peak in each state. His whole mission is bring awareness to this idea, get out and speak on stages and share their story with more people so that more people will donate kidneys.

They were all living kidney donors.

They were all living kidney donors, yes. So 3 very different books, but all of them were looking specifically at either lead generation, getting on stages, or sharing a message that was going to impact more people. And they all do it through their books.

Awesome. It was actually Sarah that taught me this, you know, there's buyers and there's readers and they're not always the same. And especially when you're a speaker, you have a different buyer than you do a reader. and yet your job is to appeal to both of them, right? So we're writing a book when we want to get more paid speaking engagements. We're writing a book that the buyer, you know, being the person who's gonna put us on that stage, that they're going to be excited about, but they're excited about it 'cause it's gonna make them look good for finding you and putting them in front of the reader. One of my favorite stories, we had a book on, uh, tactical lockpicking, right? And so it's a book on how to get through locked obstacles to save lives and reduce property damage. So the market basically was first responders, right? But in the marketing for that book, an interesting thing happened, and I think it was Sarah got the call from a crime writers conference that said, "Hey, we would like to have this guy come speak and teach everybody how to pick locks so that they can write more accurately about it in their book." So, and I only share that because a lot of people are afraid of excluding people when they go niche. But what that does is you have an instant, like he was to this date, the best wins we ever had because like everybody that Sarah and her team pitched for him were like, yeah, we like, heck yeah. Like that solves a problem that we have and it's exactly what we need. And so he immediately had traction, right? If you can imagine 75% of the people that you reach out to want to interview you, pay you, whatever it is, that's what he had because he went niche and he solved a very specific problem that a very specific audience has. And he had opportunities outside of that niche because there's still people that will want what you have. It's like, I've been to events that are for women and there's men there. So you don't, it's okay, right? But at least you'll appeal to somebody very strongly and other people are gonna go, well, I want that too.

And just one quick note, and I'll, 'cause we're running a little bit long, but I would also say that just because you niche down to start, you're going to learn over time who is reacting more to that message and that builds in. So if you start with women, but you're hearing from men, "Hey, this is how it's helped me as well," you can then develop more products that are suited to that secondary audience. But you don't have to start there. You can start with the ones you're gonna help the most, and then as you're building out your empire map, maybe in the future, my next phase is rolling out products that are specifically geared towards men and women. But you gotta start somewhere.

Yeah. And actually, with that in mind, I'll mention Linda McGoon. So, Linda McGroon wrote this book, Live Free and Hike. It was really about her story. She was in a very controlling marriage and she loved to hike and her husband wouldn't let her hike. And when they were separating, she found out that he was being convicted of a whole bunch of, like, horrible crimes that he committed while they were married. So, she set out on this journey to hike 48 summits to heal. And so, when we were working with her, We were working on a few different— I mean, Sarah could speak to the audiences, but I think where her book landed was not exactly where we thought it would, and that's where sometimes it happens. But it had traction, you know, she had traction. She had an audience that wanted to hear from her, and that built the traction. She got a library gig. That library gig went so well, she's now the— like, she's— Linda's our library person, right? She goes from library to library doing events, and the libraries call her now.

That line in that middle image is from the American Library Association conference where she was doing a signing. I just had her book cover up, and librarians were lining up to talk to her.

Like the famous authors, when you go to the American Library Association, you have the major publishers and they have their famous authors, and when they're doing the signing, they have a line. Linda had a line. It was awesome. And that's her at a— that's a bookstore. And then she's been on panels and things like that too. But I bring it up because she wrote for one person and other people said, hey, I really am interested in this too. But you start with that one person.