An entrepreneur who wrote six books explains why you should write one: it builds credibility, markets your business, and shapes your culture. He walks through the whole process, from dictating chapters with Otter to using Amazon Print On Demand for distribution, and warns against recording your audiobook across different studios.
Chapters
If you're an entrepreneur today and you have not written a book, you are massively, massively missing out. But I'm going to actually give you some of the key lessons that I've learned in writing six books. And I currently have my seventh book in the works and almost ready to go to print. So let me walk you through, first, why you need to have a book as an entrepreneur, and then secondly, my big lessons of actually having a book in place and getting it to completion. So the reason you need a book is to actually establish credibility. It's easier than ever to get a book out the door and to do it properly. So four of my six books, I worked with an organization called Scribe Media. Scribe was founded by Tucker Max and Zac Obrodt. They sold the organization after a massive collapse that happened. That's a whole other story. But the company is back on its feet and doing extraordinarily well. They've done about 600 books in the last 12 months alone. So Scribe Media did four of my six books. But the reason you want to have a book out the door, it establishes credibility. It's a great marketing tool. It drives culture inside of your organization. It will help attract new employees into the organization. It'll attract bankers, it'll attract investors, it will attract partners, and it really is a good marketing tool. Even if no one reads the book. The fact that you can put one in front of people that looks good, feels good is a huge actual kind of grounding for the entrepreneur. So let me give you the core lessons that I used in actually crafting my books. Number one, it's easier for me to think out loud than it is for me to type. So when I did my first book, Double Double, I used a system called Dragon Dictation. Now it would be like Siri or Otter, where I actually first created a table of contents for what my book was going to cover. And then for each chapter, I created a core outline of like five to seven bullet points that I wanted to make sure that I covered for each chapter. Then I literally walked around. Nowadays you'd be holding your phone or using a headset, and you're actually going to just talk about the core points for each of the chapters. Just kind of ramble off the top of your head. Think through all the stuff that you might talk about for those core points. And again, you're the author. You're going to know the content well enough to talk about it. Pace, allow yourself to think out loud and just get that stuff out of your head and somehow have it transcribed after you do the audio recording for each of your chapters, take that and give it to an editor. Again, I use Scribe for this process. They actually interviewed me six times and kept going back to ask more and more questions, to get more and more detailed information from me, to get all the content out of my head. Then they, as the editor, or you can find your own editor, can actually take all that content and properly lay it out properly. Make sure that it's in flow. Ensure that you have all the questions answered. Kind of the who, what, when, where, why and how. For each of those sections that you want to include, make sure that you think about experts that you can include in call outs or in little breakout parts of the chapters. As an example, in my book the Miracle Morning for entrepreneurs, I had 10 other entrepreneurs give me their morning routines and I included those in the book as examples for the reader. So you can include things like that. Go check out the Second in Command podcast on YouTube, Spotify and Apple. We've interviewed over 450 of the top secret COOs on the planet. The editor will take all of that content and lay it out in a way that it starts to make sense. It's in flow. Then you can take the rough draft. It's probably 90% ready to go to print. Maybe it's not entirely typed out perfectly. There might be a little bit of grammar, you're not going to have all the punctuation, it's not going to be ready for pre press. But you'll take a PDF of maybe three to four different chapters or even a word document is better and send that to three to four potential readers. Maybe it's entrepreneurs. Whoever your target audience is, have them read a few of the chapters of your book and come back to you with feedback. What sucks? What's confusing? What needs more explanation? Maybe what was too wordy? Where were you selling a little bit too much? Take all of their feedback into consideration and you can do a couple rounds of editing to incorporate that where it makes the most sense into the actual transcript. Then you'll go through a couple rounds of editing. You're not an editor, you're not a writer. Don't even give it to somebody your team. Give it to a professional writer who can actually get it ready to go to print. Scribe even did that for me and then we actually took it and placed it out on Amazon. I would never, ever, ever print books in hard copy again and put them into a warehouse and run my own fulfillment. I did that for four of my six books. Now I do everything with Amazon, Print On Demand. My books, my six books are now available in every single country that Amazon sells into. They're paperback Print On Demand. They look perfect, they feel perfect, and I just make money kind of on autopilot. You can also actually get an audio version of your book. And I recommend that you go into studio and do the auto recording. Don't make the mistake that I made in doing the audio recording for my first books, which was getting another spokesperson, I guess, to actually do the recording, do it yourself, go into studio, do that recording, get a video of you doing the recording so you have those videos. You can do the sound bites, you can use those on social media and make sure you work with a really good studio and give yourself enough time to able to go back into the same studio with the same setup to do the actual pickups. Problem that I had was I did all my initial recording for my book, the second in command in Dubai, and then I did the pickups. The kind of mistakes that needed to be edited in a studio in Tel Aviv. And you can actually hear the sound quality is off. So I'm probably going to have to go back into studio now that it's been about a year and a half, and I'm going to spend two full days rerecording my book again in my own voice. So it's going to be agonizing, probably worth the process. Or maybe I have to go back out to the editors and get the sound quality adjusted so it sounds a little bit better. But don't make that mistake. That's how you'll get a book in print. If you want some ideas on how to actually get your book out there and getting some big exposure, that'll be another whole video.
