Nicolas Cole shows how to redirect clients who want to write a book toward his agency's 800-word thought-leadership articles instead. Articles build an audience and establish positioning faster, then get compiled into a book after 6-12 months. He finds the real goal behind the request and sells them what actually works.
The service that I built my whole agency off of was writing 800-word thought leadership articles. I can't tell you how many times I would have a conversation with a client and they would say, "The thing I care about is I want to write a book." What the novice does is the novice goes, "That's not the service I provide. Bye." That is not what I did. What I did is I said, "Why do you want to write a book?" The client goes, "Oh, I really want to position myself as a thought leader in my industry." Yeah, a book does that. But actually, books are— they take a long time. They're really hard. And by the time you have a book, wouldn't you want to have an audience? Aren't you going to need things to promote the book? They go, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right, you're right." So actually my service gets you ready to write a book and it helps you build an audience and it actually accomplishes the same goal. It positions you as a thought leader in your industry. And by the way, at the end, if we work together for 6 to 12 months, you will have a big bundle of articles that if you wanted to, you could work with an editor, smash it together and self-publish a book. So I took my service, I asked, "What do you care about?" They told me the answer and then I fit my service to what they care about.
What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Their Audience #writing #creator #writingtips
