Timothy Jacobs: How Can Writing a Book Transform Your Business and Personal Brand?

Welcome to Media Minds with your host, David Wolf.

Tim Jacobs has written and built his own unique story. Originally raised along the Connecticut shoreline, Tim joins us from the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee today. From 2018 to 2025, you and your wife, Tim, you took your entire life on the road. You know, Charlie, as I understand that you traveled the East Coast, in an RV. I want to hear more about this collecting. These are experiences that most people just dream of doing. You have actually done them. But in terms of your media and all of that, you've authored and published 18 books, one featured on C-SPAN, and 450 or more articles for newspapers, magazines nationwide. Tim, you teach writing and publishing with a passion. Helping professionals turn their ideas into influence, as you like to say. And today your company, you're leading JWC Publishing, which co-publishes our Legacy book series. And you're the co-owner as well of Magnus Media Group and also the co-founder of the Academy of Ghostwriting. And as I understand it, earlier you launched and served as editor of Patriots of the American Revolution magazine. Wonderful. Um, and then, uh, freelance writing dating back to like 1988. You've spent decades and decades helping others capture their own stories, teaching them how to leverage them for real business growth. Tim, welcome to the program. And I want to hear more about the— what, what prompted you or inspired you to, to do this RV traveling thing?

Yeah, as, uh, you know, my wife has, you know, 5 adult children, and as they all started to have children, um, they all happened at the time to live up in Syracuse, New York, and we lived down in Florida. And we decided, you know, instead of the families coming separately at times just for like a week, or we go up there for a week and a half, Yeah. You know what, if we just had an RV, we could just go park in their driveway. We could connect power, we could connect water. We're there, but we're not staying in their house interrupting dinner time, nap time, all those kind of things.

Right.

And, you know, she ended up with 12 grandchildren. The oldest is 11 and the youngest are 3, and the first 11 are all girls. And the last one's a boy.

11 girls and one boy.

So we would, yeah, one boy at the end. So unbelievable. Gives me permission now to buy GI Joe stuff. So our whole plan was, why don't we go up there? We could be there for part of spring, all of summer, part of fall, and you really get that grandparenting time versus a week here and there out of the year. And then some families, Things come up and they can't take a break. They can't get down to Florida or we can't get up there. So we just sold everything and just started going up and down the coast to different places. And then as they moved outta Syracuse, we would just go to those places where they are. But we did that full-time for 6 and a half years.

6 and a half years is a long stretch. And, and because of the work you do, you really can be a digital nomad, right? I mean, you, you can really be anywhere. It's your, it's your brain, your creativity, and your talent as a writer and, uh, Yeah.

As long as you have internet and a phone, you could pretty much run the business.

That's it. So many of us are— it's so beautiful. No, it's great. So your first book was published in 1996. Tell us a little bit about that and that experience.

Yeah. As I said, I grew up on the shoreline of Connecticut. I was very close to the Connecticut River. And the Connecticut River is like, I think it's 410 miles long. And there was this old wooden Victorian Opera House built in 1876 that's still standing. One of those stories of, you know, it was one signature away from being demolished and then a group got together, you know, at the time it was just a bunch of elderly ladies got together, ended up saving it, raising the money to purchase it. And it's gone on to produce, well, at the time I did that book, I think it was 20 musicals that earned Tonys and went on to Broadway in New York. And who knows what they've done, you know, in the 20, 30 years since then.

Yeah.

But, um, mainly what I wanted to do is I wanted to write a fictional ghost story using that as the setting. 'Cause you have the opera house across the street, you have the Gelston Inn, which has 6 rooms, a restaurant. And back in Goodspeed's day when he had the opera house across the street was his mansion, which burned down and never got rebuilt. So the whole scene is right there. All the elements you need for a ghost story. And I could find no book whatsoever on the history of the Goodspeed Opera House. So I just started to do my research. And next thing you know, I got a box of magazine articles, newspaper clippings, just, you know, and the internet was new, so it's not like you could just punch in Goodspeed and get all this stuff. It was all, you know, uh, going to the library, the historical societies, things of that nature.

Mm-hmm.

And a friend of mine said, you know, You know more about the opera house right now than anybody. You have all the information. Why not write the book you were looking for? And I'm like, oh, you know, they have a membership. You could sell it to them.

I'm like, oh, you know, need some other information, right?

Yeah. This is my first step into this kind of thing. And, you know, I did the book in 1996 and I sold over 2,000 copies just during that summer when it got released.

Beautiful. And it sounds like this was a new kind of writing process for you at the time, this idea of researching and then Historical fiction, right? I mean, that's really the—

yeah, well, the book, that's what it was going to be, was kind of like, I always say, like if you think of the movie Titanic, the history is pretty accurate, and then this Jack and Rose story is weaved through the history of it, right?

Exactly.

That was my intention. But what I ended up doing was just writing the nonfiction history of the opera house and the biography of William. Yeah.

Okay. All right. So ultimately it was the actual story as researched.

How cool.

Wow. And good sales for that first stretch there. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

So I, you and I agree on this and I think it's, it's known that authors are really in a business and, uh, but turning that upside down, you have said that writing and, uh, or that every business owner should write a book. So. Unpack that for us. When you work with authors, how do you like to approach, uh, that subject matter with them? The idea that they are a business and should write a book.

Yeah. Um, one of the first questions I might ask them is, what was the last event you were at where either you were a keynote speaker, maybe you were held one of the breakout rooms, maybe you were on a panel, and they'll tell me about that experience. And then I'll be like, how would that experience been different if you had a book to give away? Yeah, or a book to sell at the back of the room. And that really kind of makes them think like, you know, two other people on the panel were doing that and I'm sitting there watching them or I'm buying their book.

Exactly. And, you know, the thing about it is, is when you're at an event or even a podcast or any kind of sort of real-time event that comes and goes over the horizon, the book captures the experience for those who were participating there, whether they're in the room or watching you in some other way. And it, it's a static product that now represents that experience for them and the memory of you. And then, you know, obviously to monetize as well. So I'm right with you on that. I think this has been going on— the back of the room sales thing has been going on for a long time. But I'm imagining in your line of work, you help a lot of folks take their business and extrapolate their experience and the business itself and create the subject matter for a book, right? That process.

And, and it's also too, I also say, imagine a conference you want to go to, but for whatever reason you can't attend. You can still get with that organizer and say, hey, look, I'm going to ship you 100 books. Can you just hand them out to all the attendees? Or if you know everyone, you know, usually these conferences, they'll be like, yeah, we have one floor blocked off on the hotel for rooms. Drop 2 books in each room for me. I'll ship them to you. Yeah. You know, you're not there.

The book is a marketing tool. Yeah. Yeah.

I always say, you know, a book is one of those, it's a very unique format because a book is something people commit time with.

Yeah.

I, if, if you have a book and I'm like, ooh, David Wolf has his next book, I gotta read this. What do I do? I silence my phone, turn my computer off, the TV's off. I'm just relaxing. I'm going to spend an hour, hour and a half with you now. You're not even in the room. I might not even know you, but I'm having a conversation with you because you're talking to me. No one's going to be like, I'm going to go to David Wolf's website for the next hour and scroll around. No one's going to do that.

No, that's right. Just by design, it's just not the way we're wired. It's not the way of the world. Yeah, yeah. The book is a tool. You ghostwrite, or as I understand it, you help, business owners or any author that, or aspiring author to create a book. Um, is the, the approach that you take wildly different depending on the case by case, or do you have a specific way that you, you approach helping them with structure, with, you know, and, and all of that?

Yeah, I, I would definitely say, uh, guaranteed every project's different client to client, business to business for sure. That's going to be different. It really comes down to what is the purpose and the goal of that author. You know, if they're coming in and it's just like, I want to write a book, I want to be a New York Times bestseller. Well, we all do, but I can't really help you do that. But if you want some serious ROI from your book, you could do your book, print 500 copies, give them away, get 6, 10 clients out of that. What is that worth to you in ROI? Whatever you charge per client. How long does a client stay with you? 6 months, a year. And then they're going to be referring clients to you when they're done with your, you know, with the training, with the course, with whatever you offer.

Absolutely. I've also— one of the members of my team has used the expression ROR, return on reputation.

Yeah.

Yep. You know, because there's a thing. It's not easy to sell books. You know, you've got to market them. You've got to push them out to market. So rather than thinking and staring at unit sales, and I think this is probably unique to the, to the nonfiction author with a business where they're using the book to promote themselves, their brand awareness, all of those things, to think of it in terms of return on reputation. In a way, you just telegraphed exactly that. It's reputation, the ability to retain clients, return on reputation.

Yeah, that's what I tell people. If you're just to do easy math, you know, if you put your book out and let's say it retails for— you're selling it, you know, for $10. Okay, 100 people buy your book for $10. That's $1,000.

Right.

But what if you gave away 100 books and got 3 people to sign up for your course that you charge, you know, $10,000 for? You just made $30,000.

Right.

And it's the same amount of effort.

As you, from your experience, and this question has been asked probably all over the world so many times, but I'll ask you, get your your, your thoughts on it. Mistakes that authors make, uh, from your experience working with people. What, what's the, what are some of the myths and misconceptions that you need to talk them off the ledge about? Or, or just observationally, you're seeing them, authors do these things and they shouldn't.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, I, I'll say like the top 3 are one, they don't have clarity. They don't even know who their book is for.

Wow.

But you know, I find a lot of people, they, they want to have a book, but they don't know why they want their book. And that has to have a discussion. The second thing they do, especially in like the, the business book, the CEO, the entrepreneur, the business owner, is they try to cram, you know, 30 years of their experience and knowledge down to 200 pages. And you can't do that. Just, Pick one thing about your business, the biggest problem that you solve for people, what the results are, part of the process that becomes your book. And for all the other things, you could do other books down the road. But, you know, no one cares about what the Jimmy Carter administration did that affected your business in, you know, 1977. It, it has nothing to do with the problem your client has right now.

You know, it's a lot like business itself, Tim, as you say this, you know, it's, it's, It's just taking that way of thinking, reverse engineering it out from the problem you're solving for an end user, a customer, a client, and creating the subject— well, the content from that reverse engineer process.

Yeah, that's exactly— that's what I always say. When a magician wants to create a trick, where do they start with? They start with the reveal. Oh, here's where the ace of clubs comes out of the deck. Then they reverse, how are we gonna do all that? And once they have the mechanics down, then they go back and they create the story to tell you while they're doing the trick. And it's the same thing with the book. What's your result for your clients? And, you know, just kind of pedal that back. And then the other, the third challenge would be what we just discussed is getting them outta this mindset like, oh, it costs this much to do a book, I need to sell X amount of copies. No, you don't need to sell any copies. Right.

Use the book in all the other ways you've outlined here today. Yeah, it's good to be with you. Anything else that I haven't asked you that you'd like to share with our audience today other than how we can— they can get a hold of you for the brilliance you bring to their process?

Yeah, my website is TJacobs@jacobswc.com. My website is jacobswc.com. You can easily find me on LinkedIn and also Substack. Um, those are the places I kind of hang out.

Um, as far as how is, how has Substack changed your, the world of publishing from your perspective?

What I like is Substack is basically for writers. It's for people who want to, so you can go on there and just drop, uh, you know, pieces of your memoir. You could just drop in pieces of this is how I run my business and there's no there's no algorithm there. How they, how they kind of built it, from my understanding, is if you post regularly for about 30 to 40 days every day, they get to know this is the kind of writing that you do, and then they start putting that in front of those people who enjoy that kind of writing. And that's how you start to build up your following, your subscription list, things of that nature. So yeah, it's not like LinkedIn where everyone's like, oh, you got to post at 8 o'clock EST and you got to in the comments and you got to do this, you got to do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It takes that gamification out of it, that algorithm that we have no control of. It's more of an organic algorithm, actually, a human. Yeah, yeah, the content is driving it. Yeah, that's cool.

And you're not penalized on Substack for, you know, there's some people on there, they'll post once every 2 hours, where on LinkedIn, you know, if I do a post, here it is, and then 3 hours later I do a post, well, this one gets buried now, right?

Goes out the horizon. That's right.

Yeah, Substack, it just, it stays, you know, and you'll scroll around and you'll see people repeating posts and put them in different places and, you know, everything. So I just like it because you could find stuff that you really want to engage with, uh, things that you really want to read and learn about. And there's no, you know, there's no real, like I said, there's no algorithm, there's no game to it.

Very cool. Tim Jacobs, thanks for joining us today. And you are actively looking for authors to work with now, I would presume. You're still very actively doing the work you do, right?

Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we're getting— I mean, the Magnus Media Group, which is probably my newest venture.

Yes.

You know, we're, we're, I think like next month we're about to go from, you know, we've launched and we're kind of out there and, you know, we're getting close to probably signing up about 8 or 9 authors.

Oh, that's fabulous, Tim. Oh, that's fabulous to hear. So, all right, great. Thanks so much for joining us. I hope we'll do it again. Enjoy your day and we'll see you next time.

You too. Thank you.

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