207: How to Develop Your Book and Big Idea (Part 1)

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello friends. This episode of the Pivot podcast is a special replay of a Momentum masterclass that I gave called your book and Big Idea. It will help you figure out how to shape your thinking for your next big idea or your first big idea. How can you serve? How can you contribute to the world? How can you take your blessings in disguise and transform them into something that will then transform the lives of of others? This episode is brought to you by what else My book Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one. If you can believe it, we're up to 193 reviews. You know, I almost never ask for things like this or focus on vanity metrics that don't actually move the needle, but in this case, with so many people talking about Pivoting and several other books called Pivot, I would be really grateful. And if you're someone who has read the book and you haven't yet left a review, would you help me tip it over that 200 milestone? It would make me so elated. I'd be very grateful. And I do think that it would help future readers discern and say, okay, yes, this is a book worth reading. So if you don't mind, head over to Amazon. If you've already read the book, you can leave an honest review. I'm not asking for any particular number of stars, but it would be awesome if you could help us hit that 200 milestone. It will be four years that pivot is out in September of this year. I hope you enjoy this masterclass and if you want to learn more and join us in Momentum, that's@pivotmethod.com Momentum. You can also watch a video version of this that has slides and everything@pivotmethod.com watch. Last but not least, download the Author Toolkit. It's completely free@pivotmethod.com authors that's, that's my effort to make sure that no one has to reinvent the wheel like I did twice. With that, here's part one of your book and big idea. Make sure you're subscribed to get access to part two.

One of my book mentors said to me long ago, almost 10 years now, it is not a question of if you will get published, but when and how.

This is more true today than even when he said it to me 10 years ago. This is from Michael Larson who wrote a book called how to Write a Book Proposal. That book landed me two book deals with major publishers. But it's so important to understand this. There are a lot of potential authors or future authors waiting to get picked. I certainly felt this way when I was working on my very first book, Life After College, that I started writing in 2008 and I felt like, well, I was scared to even write a proposal. I didn't even know the first thing about how you write a book proposal. Land an agent, pitch the big publishers. So with my first book I assumed I was going to self publish until I hit major roadblocks and just could not find the motivation to do it. This is really shifting your mindset away from I need to wait until somebody designates me good enough, smart enough, expert enough, well known enough, influencery enough, a big enough platform size. You do not need to wait. And there is nobody that needs to give you permission to get published to become a published author. Now we're going to talk about traditional publishing and self publishing. So part of this is also releasing your judgment and attachment around how that's going to happen. I've seen self published author friends where when I went to visit my publisher and in fact I went to into the president's office for some reason I can't remember why, but there was my friend's self published manuscript sitting on the president of the publishing company's desk and it did in fact get picked up for a book deal. So there was this misconception many years ago that if you self publish you're shooting yourself in the foot and that's really no longer true. Publishers want to see momentum. They want to see that you are generating interest and if a book is selling virally and it becomes a success, they're absolutely willing to invest more in a reprint and a refresh for that book. In this session. We're going to talk a little bit about my background, my journey around books and big ideas. I'm going to help you think about how to brainstorm your big idea. I'll share just high level on how to get organized and outline high level writing and editing and marketing. What this is is really a 10,000 foot view. A scan of all the different stages that are involved. We could spend an hour, if not a day, if not a month or a year on every single one of these maybe other than my background. So just know that this is a sneak peek. This is to give you the high level scan and then at the end we'll have time for Q and A and a few bonuses and also ways that you can kickstart your momentum and maintain it moving forward. Quick refresh on my background. I started my first website, Life After College, while I was working at a startup company I had left. I taken a leave of absence from UCLA at my junior year to work as the first employee at a startup in Palo Alto. And I was so lost and lonely and confused that I began reading dozens if not hundreds of self help, personal development, fitness, finance books, just how to figure out adulting. And the word adulting or the hashtag did not exist in 2005. But that's, that's the transition I was making and I didn't feel very graceful at it. So about two years after I started at the startup, I went back to graduate with my class and then I ended up pivoting over to Google in 2006. And in 2007 I actually launched Life After College as a blog. So I started blogging regularly 2007, 8, 9. Around 2008 I started working on the rough draft of the book for Life After College. And that's when I hit a complete wall. There was then a six month period, really kind of a dark night of the soul in 2008, 2009, where work wasn't going well, I wasn't happy at Google. I couldn't bear to open the Word file with my book in it. I was so overwhelmed I didn't know what to do. And then I decided, well, you know what, if I can't make it as an author, I'll at least act as if I'm a professional speaker. So in 2009 I went to the very first, for the very first time, the Northern California Speakers association chapter meeting. And there I happened to sit at the table with Michael Larson, the author of the book how to Write a Book Proposal that I showed you the quote from him, and he happened to give me a copy of that book. And if that's not a smack upside the head from the universe, saying, get back to it, and here's the very first next step, I don't know what is. So that fateful meeting inspired me to at least try to write a book proposal to. To at least try to find an agent and at least try to get a book deal with a major publisher. And at least if they all rejected me, I would know that I had tried. So I did find an agent by just cold pitching multiple agents. And Michael Larson also wrote a book, how to Find a Literary Agent, that's very informative. And in fact, it was a family friend who was an attorney looking at my contract for another agent. And he said, you know, I don't like this contract. It's. It's not in your favor. Can I introduce you to a friend of mine who's an agent in New York? And that friend, Sarah, ended up becoming my agent. She pitched the book proposal for Life after college to 27 or 28 publishers. 27 said no, one said yes. And that was Running Press, who's a division of Perseus now. There's been so much consolidation that they're a division of Hachette Book Group.

Tim Ferriss as well, by the way, for four hour workweek had 27 rejections and one yes, this is normal. And I had rejections on everything from, nobody will buy this book. Young people don't buy this book. You don't have any hook. There's no big idea here. I heard it all and there was no way that I could listen to any one rejection because some of the rejections even contradicted each other. So it's really important that if you get to the pitching process, you don't take it personally because everyone has a different opinion of how that book is going to go, what they're looking for as a publisher, what they've already published, what they have in the works. So it's not a personal process, you're just looking for one. Yes, I left Google in 2011. That's when I launched my business full time and moved to New York. And in 2013, by the way, before the Pivot book deal that came in 2014, 2013, I wrote a proposal, took it to my agent, and at the time, I think the proposal was called the Human Pivot. It was like, how can people be as agile as startups? Something about where I was at in my life. That's what I call my Apocalypse Year. My Agent wrote at the top of the proposal as feedback. You sound unhinged, as in, this is still a work in progress, as is your life. You need to tighten this up and come back to me, by the way, once you've established yourself as more of an expert in career change, because right now, you're only known for life after college. So it took me a year, and then we pitched to publishers. Thankfully, in 2014, we actually had two who were interested. So whenever there's one or more publisher who's interested, you can get a higher advance because they'll usually bid against each other a little bit. And I was really super grateful. It was a dream to work work with Portfolio, which is a division of Penguin Random House. Pivot launched in 2016, and that's at the point where I baked into the book business pilots for different scalable streams of income. So momentum, my private community for solopreneurs that launched in 2014, actually, while I was working on the book. But I knew that once the book came out, I wanted to be sure that when somebody put the book down, whether they were a solopreneur, a career changer working in a company, a manager or a leader, an hrbp, somebody higher up in the organization, I wanted every single one of them to have a next step to be able to take with Pivot and with my business. But I had no clue what was going to land or what was going to stick. So part of writing your book and figuring out your big idea is really understanding, what is this for? You've probably heard people say a book is like a business card. It is definitely not a moneymaker in a direct sense of the word. I still haven't earned out my advance on Pivot, but it is a business card. It is one of the best ways to build credibility. And not just build credibility because you get to put the word author next to your name, but because you have to refine your ideas to such a crisp, sharp, communicable state just to finish the book that it puts you on such a springboard into everything you'd want to do next. I just looked today, it's 30,000 copies sold. So, I don't know, sometimes it goes up and down because there are returns. But I've been very grateful that since Pivot launched, I have been able to work with large organizations, and it can generate a lot of momentum for your business and for whatever's next. But it's really important that you think about, well, if the book is a huge success, what would be happening in my life and work so that you give as much thought to those what's next than to the book itself. And a lot of us think, oh, writing a book, it's so hard. And we put all of our energy and then by the time it comes to thinking about how do people engage with you once the book is out, you're already wiped out. You're already burnt out. I made that mistake with my first book, Life After College, and there was just no sustainable way that people could stay engaged in a business sense. I certainly had, like, my free newsletter, but I just was too tired and too burnt out by the time the book launched and I hadn't given enough thought to organizing the back end of my business.

Pivot is now the course textbook for the Stanford Strategic Pivoting Course. And this was my second year teaching it with Alex Rodriguez, who is in the middle, and Allison Kluger, the professor. So it's fun. Part of writing your book and coming up with your big idea is also learning to let it go and seeing who adapts the material, who takes it, how does it live on beyond you? I say at the back of Pivot that every. I quote another author saying, every book has a soul. And I believe that every reader infuses your book with new meaning. And every book, it's its own living, breathing entity. Someone told me the advice while I was working on Pivot. She said, you can talk to your book. And so I did. I talked to my book the whole time I was working on it. And when the book launches, it's really not in your control anymore. You set it free and you let it be what it wants to be in the world. As Tosha Silver said with outrageous openness, one of my favorite authors and favorite books, she said she just imagines that her book finds the perfect readers at the perfect time. And who is she to say? Who are any of us to say how many books need to be sold and how the book needs to do in order for us to deem it successful? That's not our business. Our business is to do the best possible work that we can and then set it free in the world and delight in what I call the serendipity popcorn of what happens once you set that work free. One thing that worked really well with Pivot, and that I do think has helped it be as successful as it is today, is framing the book around Pivot method. So now I often say, and you'll see it on my website, pivot is a mindset and a method. There's Two parts to it. There's the big idea, what's this all about? And then there's the what's next? How do you actually apply. So pivot mindset is growth oriented. I call them readers, high net growth. It's about being agile. It's about navigating change and uncertainty and insecurity and anxiety and all those things that have held me back for so much of my life. And then the pivot method is how do you get practical with it? And brass tacks.

Consider for your book. And book is really a placeholder for your body of work in a way, because it might be a book, it might be a podcast, it might be a podcast album, it might be a TED Talk, who knows? But for now, because we're here talking about your book and Big Idea, take a minute to reflect on what would you love this book to help you achieve personally and professionally?

Imagine you were to get a book deal. Imagine you write the book, you give it everything you've got, and you launch it into the world.

A year from that moment, what would be happening for you?

In a way, a book is a means to an end. We think that the book is the end. Great. I'm going to become an author, and then my life will just magically transform in all these ways. And it might. I mean, maybe like me, you have this itch. You just know that your calling is to be an author. That I always knew that for a long time, even when I was younger, I just didn't think it would happen. In my 20s, I thought, oh, yes, when I'm in my 50s or 60s, I'll have enough credibility to write a book. Beyond the book itself, what would be happening for you?

One thing that's really important about this question is that it might change the book you write.

If you're too focused on the big idea, sometimes it can create distraction. Here's what I mean by that. So I had a friend who was working on a book, and she told a friend of ours who was already a published author with the idea, and he said, well, do you want to be hired for that? I think it was the original book was about the digital age and kind of being always on 247 in a global economy. And when he asked her that question, she said, you know what? No, I don't want to be known for that. And I don't want to consult around that. I'd really rather focus on organizational culture change and redefining how we work and what an innovative company culture can be. So she ended up writing a completely different book. So you want to think when this book is out, if it's really successful, and if people are interested and they want to hire you, what do you want them to hire you for? What do you want to be known for and how is this going to translate? And again, we're talking about nonfiction here, so it's a little more business oriented than it might otherwise be if you're writing a fiction book. But really think through, what do you want them to hire you for, and is your book going to be a good jumping off point for that, or do you need to make your book more specific in some way so that it can help you reach those broader business and personal goals, let's say on the personal front? Well, I want to become well known or known for my ideas or invited to speak at industry conferences. So there again, you just want to understand what does that look like if you want your book to help you earn income and free up your time, something I'm often asking in momentum, how can we earn twice as much in half the time with ease and joy, while serving the highest good for all involved? Well, the book itself is not going to do that. The book itself is not earned twice as much in half the time. It is a way to help you get there. But then you want to think, what can I build into the back end? Or what business pilots can I build into the book to then free up my time and income? Because the book, again, is really a calling card, a business card, and it is a big credibility builder and it can be a differentiator, but you just want to think that through so you can work that into the book. Even when I, in the back of Pivot, I shared a couple next steps for companies that didn't exist yet. And I figure, okay, well, if somebody reaches out and they're interested in the career conversation toolkit that didn't exist, I would create it. Because I couldn't create it at the same time I was writing and launching Pivot. But I knew, okay, I have some time. I'm going to at least include it in the back page of the book. And if someone wants to hire me for it, I'll get on it. Weirdly enough, certain things that I thought would fly off the shelves totally didn't. And then other things like Pivot licensing, now helping organizations run Pivot programs even without me there, have taken off. So it's also part of this, as what I share in Pivot is about being open and running small experiments when it comes to brainstorming your big idea. I love this quote from Margaret Atwood. She says, I never start with an idea. Nobody knows where ideas come from. If you immerse yourself in something, you will get ideas, but you have to immerse yourself in it first. And this was from her masterclass, which is really excellent. I've done a few master classes that I really love. What's interesting about a big idea is it's just a hypothesis. You think sometimes you might think, oh, I have to have it all solved before I can write my book. And that's not the case. As I mentioned to you, I took a proposal called the Human Pivot to my agent when we pitched to and got the book deal with Portfolio, the business imprint of Penguin. It was for the pivot method. And then a little ways into the process, somebody at the publisher said, why don't we just call it Pivot? And that was the most brilliant idea. And it wasn't mine to just shorten the name of the book to Pivot. But I was so happy because it made the title so punchy and active. And a lot of people now even mistakenly introduce me at events, and they'll say, author of the Pivot Method. But the book is called Pivot. So the idea has evolved. And by the way, the fourth stage of the pivot method, when I was first starting the book was Leap. And my editor said to me, it strikes me that the whole point of the pivot method is to reduce risk, and that by the time you're at the fourth stage, it's not really a leap anymore. Haven't they reduced risk enough up to this point? There again, she was absolutely right. So we called it Launch instead, and it just made so much more sense. But you cannot expect yourself to have every single detail of this big idea worked out. Once you commit to writing a book and to owning and being a spokesperson for this general theme, in my case, navigating change, then you start to read all the books, articles, podcasts, you do interviews, you talk to experts, you talk to people going through it, mine your own experience, and that idea evolves. But it's not until you commit and raise your hand and say, yes, I am going to work on this idea and I am going to work with this idea, then you get the privilege of unearthing all the nuance and detail. And that is where the differentiation happens. It is not from if I just raise my hand and I say, I want to write a book on change. Well, we could point to so many books that already exist about that, but Once I commit to that big umbrella, then the details start to emerge and then you can think, you know. I had a coaching framework that I had been using since I went through coach training in 2008, but it wasn't distilled into a four stage framework. It was about six or seven steps. And I knew, being an avid reader myself, I knew that no one's going to remember six or seven steps. In fact, I was just preparing for a podcast interview tomorrow and the author says in his book, there's just handy six steps, six things you need to remember. And I thought to myself, I already forgot them all. I don't remember. There's no way I'm going to remember these six words. I have a feeling people don't even remember the full pivot method. But usually three steps is plenty. So, yes, there may come a point where you take something that you have and you got to package it to make it a little more memorable for people. But that's different from immersing yourself in this idea. First, the best way I think, to think about your book and Big Idea is what I call book Rx, as in book prescription. And this has helped me every single time I've been working on a Big Idea. So book Rx, imagine that two of your friends are talking and one of them is venting about a problem, so the other one replies, ah, then you have to read this book. So when I was doing this thought exercise for Pivot, I imagined that two people were talking and one friend is saying, ugh, I'm just so bored at work, I just don't know what's next. And then the other friend goes, oh, well, then you have to read Pivot. I find myself often giving book prescriptions to other people. So they tell me their problem. And I've even tried to do a few episodes of the podcast in this format. They tell me their problem or what ails them and I go, oh, well, then you have to read, or blah, blah, blah. So I'm doing this naturally all the time. And this is really helpful when you think about what is your book going to be a prescription for? What are two friends going to be saying to each other where one of them goes, oh my gosh, well then you have to read this book by so and so. And a lot of times when we think about Big Idea, we're so top down and in our own heads and even immersed in these little micro niches of the Internet where like, so everyone already knows the lingo. We're talking about things like book and self employment. And really you want to put yourself in the shoes of two non entrepreneurial friends. Like two people that aren't immersed in the whole book world who are just talking, venting and one gives the other a solution.

A book and a book proposal should answer three why's so even if you're going to pitch literary agents with a book 2 paragraph email why me? Why now? Why this book? All three of these are important. Why you? Why are you an expert on this subject matter? Why are you the messenger for this work? Why now? Why not 10 years ago and why not 10 years from now? Why do people need this now and why do they need this book? How are you going to be different from what else is out there? What is missing in the marketplace? Bonus what's the big idea? A lot of publishers now don't just want the method, they want the big idea. What is the TED talk? What is the culture change? Some TED talks and Seth Godin did a blog post on this a while back. Some talks are about big ideas and inspiration and then some talks are about action and implementation. For a lot of publishers and a lot of books, you want some big idea. Ideally that's kind of counter to the status quo. What's already going on. Another way to really distill your big idea and make it sellable to an agent, a publisher, a market is this formula. And I didn't make this up. But you try to fill in the blanks of x meets y4z.

Someone told me to do this for life after college. So I ended up saying life after college, Twitter meets what color is your parachute for Millennials or for. And then actually another way I said it because I never even used the word millennials. It was 20 somethings. But I used to say life after college. A portable Life coach for 20 somethings. Look, X is kind of this first notion. You're combining things in a way that people can understand. As you play with your big idea. This might actually help you land on your big idea by trying to understand.

New thing. Your big idea is X meets Y for Z. What are these two? So when I said Twitter meets what color is your parachute? That kind of people get it. It was 2008, 2009. They knew what Twitter was. It was just emerging. And the book Life After College was a bunch of tweetables. There was not, it was not a like deeply researched book of essays. It's tweetable kind of tips, quotes, questions and coaching exercises. So Twitter meets what Colors yous Parachute? The seminal book on Career growth and career change for 20 somethings. And now people get a sense for what it is. And if you're like one of my one star reviewers, you would say about life after college, if you've never thought about anything ever, this book is for you. Shout out to Manny. Okay, so that's my side note. You can't let negative reviews or the fear of them hold you back because they're going to happen and then they're just funny. The title idea test. So I call it the Treadmill test or the beach test, which is this is the title of your book or big idea. Something that someone would be willing to have face out at the gym or the beach, who is willing to carry your book face out on the subway, face out running errands. And then what are the books or the titles that you're so embarrassed about that you only buy on your Kindle? You know, Byron, Katie, I friggin love the book I Need you'd love Is It True. But let's admit the title could be a little embarrassing if like you're on the subway and there's this book I need you'd love Is It True and you're like sitting there crying and reading and you're like, oh no, you know, everyone knows this intimate thing about me or this thing I'm trying to work on in my life. One of the potential subtitles for Pivot was push past career plateaus. But who wants to be immediately tagged and identified as being at a career plateau that was not going to pass the book the beach or the Treadmill Test. There are some books that I like to catalog everything I read on goodreads. There's almost 600, if not more there now. But there are a very rare few books that I'm not even willing to to indicate on Goodreads that I have read with the subtitle. I thought about with Pivot and I saw Gary Vee do this in Jab Jab Hook, where the subtitle is actually a tweetable. So with Pivot, the subtitle is Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one. It's a tweetable. It's already distilling a big idea, which is that the traditional career ladder is out. We can't plan 20 years from now or even five years from now. Those days are gone. The only move that matters in your career planning is your next one. So that was kind of the big idea of Pivot. Take the pressure off of having to know 3, 4, 5 moves out in Gary Vee's book he actually had every single chapter title was a tweetable and there's no reason you can't do the same thing. So I really love books that I see now that have a lot of short chapters that kind of makes the reader feel that they're flying through, and then the title can already convey the big idea. What is a book? Especially if it's nonfiction, it's really a series of essays or blog posts. I did not write Pivot in a linear manner. I did not just open a Word document and sit down and start writing and then stop. I would have poked my eyes out. There's no way I could have done that. Instead, I had the whole book outlined and I wrote essays for whatever chapter, whatever section of any chapter that I felt inspired about that day. So I didn't write in a linear fashion. I wrote in terms of I wrote in Google Docs that were in folders. I got that idea for that setup from my friend Shane Snow, who did the same thing where every chapter of the book becomes a folder and then you just write essays and drop them in all in their own Google Docs so you don't have to write in a linear way. And when you do it that way as separate essays, every essay within the chapter can even have a tweetable. I made a point with Pivot that every essay, each chapter might have had four to six mini essays. Every essay title was actionable, every chapter title was actionable. So it conveyed something. The chapter on money Fund your Pivot Runway. It's a verb. Fund your Pivot Runway. It's not even called money or Pivot Runway. It's an action. So every step would take you through a process.

That wraps up part one of your book and big idea. Stay tuned and make sure you're subscribed to the Pivot Podcast to get part two of this workshop recorded in March. Remember, if you want all the resources mentioned, including my free Author Toolkit, check out the show notes@pivotmethod.com podcast and the author Toolkit in particular. You can sign up for@pivotmethod.com authors until next time.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter at jennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.