All Things Book Marketing - Thought Leadership

Same amount of guests as my IQ.

Alrighty.

And people are just starting to join in here.

Very nice.

Cool. Happy Wednesday, everyone. Just for our couple of attendees so far, and I know we've still got a minute here, but if you want to share where you're based, where you're— where you do your work, what your focus is, certainly would love to start a little bit of conversation going in our chat here and, you know, again, share ideas with each other and start, you know, loading it with questions because we will have plenty of time for questions. As we move through.

Definitely seeing some familiar names. In the chat here.

How's everybody doing?

Looking forward to this holiday weekend coming up.

Absolutely.

Great content, William. Interested in building platform and social media. Great. Hi, Richard.

Great to see you as always.

Yep, Peter, thank you for joining us. We were talking a little bit before we officially signed on, and this is one of the most common questions we get, right, Marissa? When we, as you know, the book publicists, are talking with authors about, okay, I have this book, or I'm thinking about writing this book, and You know, what else can I do besides sell my book? So we're really excited to dive in, and, and this is Peter's 100% expertise. So we are, um, just full of ideas and topics here to dive into. Absolutely.

I cannot think of anyone better to join us than Peter. I mean, if you're gonna have a website, a podcast, everything says thought leadership leverage. You know, he's your guy.

Yes. And I'll tell you, Peter, almost, almost every single author that friends me on LinkedIn or that looks like a good contact in the publishing, you know, personal branding, I would say 99% have already connected to you. I'm like, oh, well, they already know Peter. You, you are everywhere.

So, um, and he's got a good name. Yes, exactly.

Yes, yes, he does. Yeah.

Wonderful. Well, we are at 2:01. I'm gonna give everyone a minute or 2 more, start trickling in. But this is a great time to kind of kick off our introductions, kind of talk about our webinar today, and, and really get the conversation going. I know we've got a lot of ground we'd like to cover. So this, of course, is being recorded, so everyone knows, and will be available on the Smith Publicity website. Following the webinar. So if you, you know, if you're someone tuning in later on and not here live with us today, we're excited to have you tuning in as well. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and get us started here. So welcome everyone to the 3rd installment in Smith Publicity's 25th anniversary webinar series. I'm Marissa Eigenbrode, and I'm going to be your moderator for today's session. So far this year in our webinar series, we've covered author brand and platform development, as well as assembling your indie publisher dream team. And today I'm excited to welcome 2 individuals who eat, sleep, and breathe everything thought leadership. We have Sandy Smith and Peter Winick. In today's webinar, we'll be focusing on the important discussion of monetizing your thought leadership. As book sales are often just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how nonfiction authors can generate income from writing a book. So I'm going to go through a quick introduction of our panelists today. Sandy Smith is the president here at Smith Publicity. Sandy's passion is working with clients to create and execute tailored book publicity strategies. She regularly writes and speaks at book industry events on the topic of book marketing and author expert promotion. And Sandy is a smarty pants, earned her BS in art and MBA from Northeastern University. Peter joining us. Peter Winick is the host of the Leveraging Thought Leadership podcast. Shout out to Peter for having many a Smith publicity author on the podcast. We appreciate the support. He's also the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. For the past 2 decades, Peter has helped individuals and organizations build and grow revenue streams by designing and growing their thought leadership platforms and acting as a guide and advisor for increasing business-to-business sales of thought leadership products. Peter's clients include New York Times bestselling business book authors, members of the Speakers Hall of Fame, recipients of the Thinkers 50 Award, CEOs of public and privately held companies, and academics at prestigious institutions such as Yale, Wharton, Dartmouth, and the London School of Business. We'll certainly share, you know, links and everything later on, but you can connect with Peter at thoughtleadershipleverage.com and through LinkedIn. So thank you both so much for being here with us today and leading us through what's going to be an exciting conversation.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. And congrats, 20, 25 years in any business is impressive, in professional services even more so. So kudos to that.

Thank you so much, Peter.

And being a child prodigy and starting a business at 3 is another accomplishment.

Well, well, yeah, absolutely. And I have no gray hairs or anything. So it's great. No, it's been a wild ride in terms of book promotion, expert promotion, and thought leadership. It has changed and it keeps changing. And what's exciting is the opportunities are endless. And that leads to perhaps our first question, Marissa. Like—

Yes.

I have a book. I'm thinking about writing a book. I published a book a year or two ago and I think there's more I can still do. You know, Marissa and I are in the fortunate position where we get to talk to authors sometimes in the creation process more often as they're planning out my book launch in the next, you know, 6 to 9 months. And again, sometimes well after the book is published. But sometimes we really get to talk to them about why did you write this book. And the question I always ask is, okay, if you invest in publicity, you're investing in getting more, more people, more eyes, more, more attention to your ideas and your your brand, your leadership, your company, whatever, however you're putting yourself out there. And the question I ask is, what are you going to do with this new attention? How are you going to monetize this? How are you going to make the most? It's not just investment in publicity, but it's your investment in creating this book, writing this book, and your time. And I know Peter talks a lot about time as valuable for these authors. So You know, authors come to us from a wide range of answers to, huh, I've never thought about that, that's great, to, I know this is a big nut to crack. And a few come with really specific plans and they have, this is what I'm going to do. So Peter, I'm going to, I guess, turn this over to you and say, what should these authors be doing? And some, some really good parts.

Well, I think, I think the first thing is to get an education. Right. So, and you and I have chatted about hearing some of the same things. I think a lot of folks, when they're going down that path, think, hey, wait, there's money in books. Hahaha. Right? Like, oh, I don't, you know, I'm going to get a big fat advance and then rainbows and unicorns and, you know, all that sort of fun stuff. So, you know, unless you've been the Pope, that's probably not going to happen. So the straight-up economic model of publishing is broken today.

Right?

Mm-hmm. It's broken for the publishers. It's broken for the author. Maybe not so much the reader because you can get more books at cost-effective prices or whatever.

Right.

So I think you have to first figure out, writing a book is not a business model, period. Right? So the point is not how much you're going to lose, but making money, number of units sold times some revenue per unit is not the math that works in books. You have to look at this and say, if I'm going to invest in a book, and the way to be honest about that is opportunity costs, because a year of your time is worth money, right? Nobody's going to do that for free. Hard costs like PR that are necessary investments. And then other ancillary costs you might have, ghostwriters, et cetera, et cetera. So if I'm making a 6-figure investment in the business, great. That's what it is. So first question is, what business are you in? Who are you serving? And how are you serving them? And the critical— we'll get to some of the answers to that, but the pieces, answer that first, right? It's not, oh, I'll figure that out after the book's out. That's like saying I'm gonna, you know, get into business, open a store in a mall, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, after opening day, I'll figure out what I'm selling, who I'm selling to, how to design it, how to position it. That is not the right answer. So—

Right. That's a great analogy. I'm gonna steal that in the future. And because—

With or without attribution.

Probably with, with, for sure. Yeah, you know, but one thing that you talk about, which I think is a really great point to kind of the backup education is, are you launching a book or are you launching a platform? Talk a little bit about that, Peter, because that's a huge concept.

Yeah, so I would, I would say you're always launching a book. You don't always launch a platform. A book launch should be in support of a platform. Now, it might be a new platform, so you're simultaneously launching both. In more cases than not, the book is in support of a platform that exists that we're looking to elevate what it has. And if you're not sure what the platform is, book title and platform name are not the same things, with a couple of exceptions, like 7 Habits by Right. They're interchangeable. For most of us, it's not. So you have to crack the code on the platform first, which is broad enough to give you some leeway to do some creative things and interesting things, yet narrow enough so people know where to file you, what tool in the toolbox you are.

That makes sense. That absolutely makes sense. And sometimes we're asked, what should my website name be? What should my book title be? Or we're asked about the subtitle too. And boy, they're important foundational questions, because you have to have this plan in place, especially for what you're putting in your store and who you're selling it to as you're making these pretty big decisions, as you are again investing your time and energy in creating this asset for your thought leadership brand.

I would also say, don't, you know, most people particularly first-time authors think they have this vision in their mind because words matter. So tell someone author, what do you think? You know, thoughtful, smoking a pipe, you know, the plaid on the jackets, you know, all my friends are going to think I'm smart, whatever the case may be. I'm going to do the research. So they do it in isolation, right?

Mm-hmm.

And then they unleash it to the world. There's no reason not to collaborate and integrate some business development with content development and some testing of hypotheses. It is not wise to put out a brand new concept in a book as part of a book launch. You should have been using the internet to test in blog form or go on podcasts and test or whatever. How do you know that this is a real idea, that you're solving a problem that people will put resources against to solve, and to whom, and in what context? And I think it's unwise to, you know, the first time any iteration of those ideas to be unleashed is pub date.

Right. Right. One of the conversations I have with authors is really going into, to your point, who is your advice for? What are these— who are these ideas for? And oftentimes it might be a leadership book, right? And they'll say every manager. Everyone will—

Wrong answer.

If it works for everyone, it's for no one. And then it really starts these great conversations and those aha moments happen where it will be, okay, it's for leaders. Now let's dive down a little bit into this. And they'll say, well, it's really for HR leaders who are pulling together learning and development, career development programs. I'm like, okay, we're getting a little narrower. Who is this for? or new managers, mid-managers, C-suite, we get a little bit further. And then I'll say, well, although your book might be great for HR professionals who are designing C-suite, you know, continuing ed type things.

Yep.

Now, for your business plan, who do you wanna work with? You might hate lawyers, you might love lawyers, you might be in the tech space, you might be in manufacturing. And that kind of gets them like, wow, because the more that you, as you said, like test, like who do you want to work with? Who, you know, what, what are you offering these people? Um, it just really helps with their book and with, with our work of publicity. Instead of going up here, we went from every manager, every professional, down to a really cool niche audience.

Yeah, and I would say that the one is I totally agree with, if it's for everyone, it's for no one, because you— it can't possibly be. If that's meant to be, it might happen, but you have to really start with the niches. And I think sometimes people get lazy when it comes to defining their niches when they only look demographically. If I ever know that, you know, oh, managers 32 to 44 that make between $60K and $130K. Okay. That's lazy marketing. You need to throw some psychographics in there. Say, well, what is it about those people? Oh, it's the first time they went from being a high-performing individual contributor to a team leader. Ah, so they're nervous. Ah, so they're stressed out. Ah, so this is a pivotal point in their career. You have to layer on that, the psychographic emotional component to it to say, not only for these people, but these people right now struggling with these issues, it's custom made for them.

Right. And then, and then Peter, besides the book, because this is what we say, okay, people come to your website, let's talk about that. But what, what are you doing to nurture them? Well, you have a book for sale, but maybe your next price point is, you know, a 6-figure consultation package. And there's usually some things in between there, right? To—

well, you have to be You know, and I think what happens when people get into book mode, because there's deadlines and deliverables and your publisher's yelling at you and, you know, all this other stuff, they kick the can down the road of what they're— of being self-serving. And you've got to be self-serving first when it comes to this. So to me, if you can't clearly articulate who am I serving, how am I serving them, what is the client journey, you know, once they get the book, you're not ready to publish. And you might have another Tale of Two Cities, But you're just not. And you have to be really clear and say, oh, for this group, the first step is buy the book. For this group, it's buy the book and join a mastermind or bring us in as a consultancy, or we have a video-based learning, or there could be 10 different versions of that. But you have to be really clear because if you think about book as the beginning of the relationship, if it's all of the relationship, you lost.

Exactly. Exactly.

Absolutely. Peter and Sandy together, I'm curious of your thoughts on the fact that we're talking so much about target audience here and how critical it is to zero in on who that is. I know in a lot of conversations that I have with authors, they're concerned with niching down too much. They're concerned with, well, what if my content is really only speaking to this specific audience? How do I scale? How do I then expand it? How do I grow into other audiences? So what are your thoughts on kind of taking it from where you start and then getting to that next, which is bringing in other audiences too?

So I might have a little bit of a different take than Sandy, which is fun. But I've talked more people out of writing books than anybody I know. because they could never write the book, right? Peter, you're talking. But because they're not ready.

Well, because they're not—

you can still get PR for something else, but because they're not ready. You know, they're just not ready for it yet. So what I mean is, if— first off, I think there are very few instances where the niche is so small that it's not a market to serve. Now, the real question within the question there that I hear is, is a book the most effective way to get there?

Right?

If your market is really, really small, But like, for example, everybody's writing books for the CEOs of Fortune 500s. Okay, let's do a little math. There's exactly 500 of those people, right?

Give or take one.

Yeah, give or take one, maybe someone passed it or whatever. But then you can look under that. Well, it's actually a book for people that might aspire to that. Now it's times 10, times 100, times whatever, right? And if your market really is CIOs of Fortune 1000s in the Valley, whatever, maybe a book isn't the smartest way or smartest use of thought leadership to connect with them. It could be articles. It could be podcasting. It could be other things. I mean, a book is ultimately a mass market product. And if the market isn't mass enough, wrong product.

That's a great point. And Peter, I'd love to hear from you some additional Examples. I don't know if that comes under your word productization, but you mentioned that an author's intellectual property is something that you probably see is underused, right?

Totally underused. Yeah. So first off, most thought leaders need to be in the room or today in the Zoom in order for ideas to be exchanged and thus dollars to be exchanged. So by definition, to me, that's a practice. That's a business model, right? Lawyers have practices, doctors have practices, whatever. They're not the most sexy business models because they're limited, right? And even though they might be charging a pretty penny, they can't be in this Zoom right now and having their intellectual property yield them a dividend elsewhere at the same time. So I think that's exactly right, is what— how do you figure out how people use the work? I think a lot of people are overly focused on making themselves so relevant That half of our clients come to us and say, geez, Sandy and the team's done such a good job, make me irrelevant. I'm too much of the product. Right. And—

Yes.

Yeah.

And it's a, you know, hashtag good problem. Right. So if they've been the shepherd of, or so associated with the brand, how do you create the derivatives at different price points? And price points are great ways to effectively discriminate. Hey, listen, if you want the author, that's got a lot of zeros. If you want a video-based learning program, That's got few zeros.

Right, right. And so in your work, do you really help authors take their ideas into those kind of examples of the video-based, you know, learning programs? Because that's what people say to me. What can I do with my book? How can I break this down?

So I would say yes, but I'll put an asterisk there. And more often than not, authors and thought leaders are drowning in activity. So, my clients like yours, Andy, are Type A's. Some of them are literally best in the world at what they do. Right?

Right.

Smart, Type A, working hard, 20 plates spinning, et cetera. So, it's not lack of activity. It's lack of productivity. Right? So, and to me, that's all about the strategy. So, you could talk yourself into, ooh, I should be on Clubhouse. Oh, I should do a LinkedIn. There's so many things you can talk yourself into because they sound great. But unless you have a strategy that dictates what you're doing in what sequence against a series of objectives, and conversely what you're going to say no to, you're going to flounder.

Right, right.

Yeah, absolutely. Sandy, I'd love maybe if we can kind of together share— I have one in mind too— but some examples of some Smith clients who seem to do this really well. You know, and really take the book and expand into the productization, you know, kind of space. And, you know, I think one that comes to mind for me right away is the star of my LinkedIn post today that I did this morning, which is Doug Conant, former CEO of Campbell Soup.

Oh yeah.

And yeah, so great. We had the opportunity to work with him on his last book launch around The Blueprint. Came out in March 2020, a really special time to launch a book. And again, went so well and really made the most of an interesting month there. And you know what I've seen with the Blueprint has carried on for— what are we at— 2+ years now in the way that they have, you know, 2-day courses set up. There's a leadership summit series they're running. There's so many things that are just bringing attention back to the book as the core, but just the overall platform, the messaging, everything is Blueprint branded now. And it just shows how that's carrying the book well beyond publication date, which I know was a big part of our kind of pre-conversation yesterday was, you know, kind of forget publication date. Sorry for any publishers that may be on the call today, but forget about publication date. You know, don't put all your eggs in that basket. And I think, again, that's just been really exciting to see what has come from over these 2 years since the launch of the Blueprint and how Doug and his team have continued to build on that. Sandy, any other ideas you can think of? Peter, of course, want to hear from you too. Yes.

And since Peter mentioned it earlier, I will do a little name-dropping. One of our recent clients was the Pope. We promoted the Pope's book, but not many people come—

You just name-dropped the Pope?

And you didn't end with that? Yeah, you know, because people say, well, have you ever promoted a book I've heard of? Well, have you heard of the Pope? So there you go. But—

Well, and I would say, listen, if you can't get the Pope some publicity, That's right.

I know that comes with the other challenge of like, okay, why wasn't he on the COVID of every magazine? But from the more, you know, kind of thought leader, true expert, as you said, Peter, people who are just world-renowned in their industries. One example is Bob Glaser. He's been a longtime Smith client.

Yes.

Peter, yes, I know Bob because you know everybody in this industry. Bob's an example of someone who wrote a book on affiliate marketing many years ago now, and he transformed his brand into more of a personal brand of the Friday Forward, where he, he shared these true heartfelt leadership, true, you know, human, you know, types of people that you want to be and want to work with. So his, his, his brand kept evolving, and then he did Another, you know, perfect timing again for remote working. And now he's back to, you know, affiliate marketing where his kind of true core is.

Yeah.

But he's an example of someone who took his first book and just soared with his personal brand and just went off in different directions. One other quick example, we had a meeting about him today, is an author we've been working with now, I think, for a year and a half straight plus, and he just signed on for another several months, is Michael Rubino. The mold medic. I love Michael because he— his expertise, Peter, was mold. Mold in your home. The things that— and he's a hustler. He's working hard. And our publicist, they're just a match made in heaven.

Mm-hmm.

She's got connections. We're getting coverage for him. He— and there's so much here, but I believe he's doing mold remediation with Gwyneth Paltrow. He's now up for like a Netflix show. He's doing new products and mold testing for your home to keep you safe. He's working with Olympic athletes because their breathing is so important and their homes can be toxic. And he went from just, you know, a regular guy who works in mold remediation to now a household name in the mold world. And his products, his services, what he's offering back is just jaw-dropping. So that's You know, that's not kind of the more common, like, leadership or business consultant, but he's a serious business guy with a very cool topic. So, Peter, I'd love to hear some of your examples of authors who have been, or experts who have been able to really shine using some of your techniques.

Yeah, so we haven't done anything in the mold world or the pottery. Yeah, so I, you know, it's not about the name brand. So I always look at our clients and say, how do we leave them better than we found them? Right? So oftentimes it could be somewhat like— I have a client without revealing names who's pretty much a solo practitioner, really, really smart PhD, put out a book years ago that was really, really, really solid, but more wired as an academic and a researcher, which is a polite way of saying not so good on the sales and marketing side of the house, which is pretty common. but has always done well, done great work, but has not unleashed the power of the ideas in a way that they have the ability to do, nor gotten the income, the revenue that is clearly worth it. Right? So, we just came up with the strategies, realized sort of where the choke points were, where it was too centered on her. She was a little uncomfortable or a lot uncomfortable negotiating on her own behalf. Anytime you're doing that, the other party's going to win. And the offerings and solutions were always some form of so-and-so can come in and do X. And what happens is, and I think this is an interesting aha for some, is a lot of our clients have access, as do yours, Sandy, to some amazing folks. They can walk in at the C-suite or at the board or at the whatever. Even if you are amazingly credentialed, Nobel Prize-winning, whatever, that group is looking at you and they're categorizing you and they're saying, Number one, brain on a stick. Sandy is the smartest person in the world on PR. Ha! Great. We could use Sandy in these high-touch, high positions, bring her in for the board, da da da da da, versus scalable solution. Oh wait, Sandy is actually Smith Publicity. This is a full-service agency with dozens of dozens of people. And while her brilliance is important, you know, if she didn't get out of bed tomorrow, the wheels are still going to turn, right? And I think for thought leaders, that scalable piece. Because if I'm a leader of an organization, if I'm, you know, at GE with 300,000 people, I'm not looking for one-off brilliant people that don't scale. I have to take ideas and put them in scalable formats, in different modalities, in different cultures, in different languages to get the outcomes that I'm looking for. And I think that's part of the way you have to shuffle the deck. Is it, is it a marketing problem? Is it a positioning problem? A lot of times it's a productization problem coupled with a lack of a strategy. Where people are bouncing around like ping pong balls, serendipitously, opportunistically, which is great. But do that for 10 or 15 years and it's a big hamster wheel. And then we get a shock to the system and you both know this. 15 years ago, there was a fairly easy model for a certain type of author. Write a book every 18, 24 months, get on the speaking circuit, make the book a success, charge more for your speaking, rinse, lather, repeat. I don't know, what if something crazy happened like a pandemic and there was no such thing as professional speaking for like a year or two? What does that look like? I look at it and say, what's the portfolio diversification here?

Absolutely. I want to circle back quickly. We have a question that just is really timely to what we're discussing here. And it's going to just come back to Sandy in particular about the mold medic. We have a question about mold. But no, it's— Gilda was asking, what would you say was kind of the breakthrough strategy or opportunity for for the Mold Medic campaign?

Sure. It's really, and it kind of goes back to what Peter was saying earlier, finding solutions for that right target audience. So with the Mold Medic, it was writing byline articles. And these are articles that are about 700 to 800 words that talk to one specific aha moment. Or it could be like the 5 biggest mistakes in your home, or when you're buying a home, here are 5, you know, 3 things that you make sure a house inspector looks for.

Yeah.

And so now it's like, oh, here's a target audience. Here's a headache that I have. I'm overwhelmed. And here are some steps I can go to. And then when you go to, you know, his website, he started having, you know, to quote Peter, kind of pulling his intellectual property in different ways, whether it's with some videos, It has some— he has, you know, some tip sheets, some downloadable information. And that just kept building his credibility and building that next opportunity, the next opportunity. So now we can affiliate him with some pretty big names in the world of not just the household name people, but in his world, because his down point— sorry, Michael— is that he's not a medical doctor. He's a mold expert. So we've had to, you know, do some creative pairing with that kind of people looking for kind of a medical expertise.

Sure.

But it really was those byline articles where we can showcase a headache and a solution. That's it. And whether you work with a publicist and get them out to different print and digital media outlets or you publish them yourself, whether it's on LinkedIn or through your website, blog, and that kind of vehicle, Showcasing that you understand people's headaches and how you can help them. That's really how that—

I'll put another twist on that because we've seen similar pieces is, listen, we are all being commoditized, right? Every one of us. I don't care if you're in services, products, offerings, or whatever. Mold remediation, I would argue, is a commodity, right? So if I was an ops person at a hospital system that was struggling with a mold problem, what am I going to do? This typical thing. call in 3 mold people, get 3 RFPs, fight over price, fight over price. Now, this guy can come in and say, listen, we're as good as or better, our prices are good as or better. I literally wrote the book. Here's the book. Here's the links. I've been studying this. I am the most published guy in the world on mold remediation. Hands down, that's a winner.

Yeah.

Hands down. Because why would— I mean, it minimizes the risk. It's so easy to convince the others in the buying decision, like, wow, look what this guy's about. Look what he's said. Look what he's done. And I think everybody can think about that. We've had— I remember years ago, I worked with a client when Massachusetts first changed the laws to allow gay marriage. So this guy was pretty smart. He was a divorce attorney and said, aha, I'm going to put a stake in the ground because guess what's going to happen in 18 months, right? And be the leader in Massachusetts in gay divorce and got a book out on it, whatever, and kind of owned that market for a while. Because when there was no market for the first year or 18 months, right, start to write about all the things that you have to think about differently in these circumstances, that whatever, you know, and write some articles, get a book out. It's like, whoa, like winner.

And, and, and exactly. And, and Michael, that's his— is that Rubino, the dust, the mold guy? He just emailed me yesterday saying July 1st he's coming out with something called The Dust Test. And he's saying that dust— that because our dust is more than just dead hair and skin cells, it's mold, bacteria, virus, allergens. And he's going to help people who are in environmental contaminants. And he's creating—

Anybody eating lunch on the West Coast? Sorry about that.

But he's monetizing. He's monetizing a new product. Right.

Exactly.

And he has now a platform to open this up to new people. So that's just You know, one example of someone who was— hate to say it, Michael— nobody knew him, you know, 2 years ago. And he's invested not just with us, but all kinds of initiatives to be able to launch these products.

So we've got all of these products in place. We figured out who the target market is. We figured out, you know, what we want them to look like and how we're going to build them out and everything. How do you, how do you get people to them now? I think that's a big piece of it is we've got it all there. Like, what are those key drivers in making sure that people know that they exist and, you know, and are— and stay engaged with them as well? So, you know, kind of getting into like the sales piece of it, you know, it's not just about the book, but how do we get people to buy the monetized content? I think Sandy would like to answer this first, so I'm going to go over to her.

No, no, that's really— but for Peter, in terms of Okay, we've got our brand, we've got our target market, we've got our book launch somewhere in there. We're doing all kinds of things to drive awareness to our website. Now they see some of our products. And I know Peter is a genius at how do we get people to pick me from all their options out there. So if you want to talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, so I think there's a, you know, there's several elements to this. So One is having clarity, you know, like Marissa said, over who I'm serving, how I'm serving them, et cetera, having that product suite. And then you have to break your product suite down and say, okay, which of these products need to be marketed and which need to be sold? And oftentimes I find people taking amazing marketing tactics and applying them to something to be sold. Guess what? People don't buy a $50,000 keynote the same way they buy a $1,299 something that you take your American Express out. So all those tactics might be lovely, but are they lovely for what you're trying to do? So what gets marketed, what gets sold. And then you have to answer some sort of foundational questions of what type of an organization am I building? So if you look at that on a continuum, I have clients that say, listen, I get sales and marketing distribution's important. It's not me. It'll never be me. Build a moat around me. I want to do my research. I want to work with my clients. I want to do my thing. It's not that I don't think that's important, but that's not going to be me or my organization. So the answer in that case is, okay, how do we do this through partnerships? How do we get strategic partners, distribution partners, licensing, et cetera? So you can have a high-volume, sort of low-touch business doing it that way. Then we have others that say, listen, you know, we've got some pretty good marketing folks here, some pretty good sales folks. We can do some of that internally coupled with some distribution and partnering. If you're allergic to the marketing and sales, you don't have a business. There isn't any business out there. And I don't care. Think about some of the worst business people, a dentist, sorry dentist, or a lawyer. There is still a marketing and sales function to those positions.

Right.

Right? And if you don't, if you're ignoring that, you know, I've seen so many things that are so brilliant that never see the light of day because they're either too academic or they don't have that piece. So you've got to have that engine and you don't have to do it all on your own. It could be through, like I said, through partnerships, through pilots, through distribution, through licensing. The good news right now is because we've all been staring at a screen for 2 and a half years, geography doesn't matter at all. Like, everything's become global. So most of us are now following the sun where my calls early in the day are in Europe and then it doesn't really matter. You can speak to more people in more time zones this way. How do you think about sales and marketing this way? You might have a different pricing structure in Europe than Asia-Pac or whatever the case may be, but you got to crack that code and spend as much time, if not more, on that than on the content development. And I mean, PR is a function of marketing.

Right.

So people always say, oh, I wrote a book, it was really hard. I'm like, which part, writing it or getting it out into the marketplace? They're like, well, I thought the writing it was hard.

But then, you know, we hear that all the time, that writing the book was actually the easy part. It's that business plan and trying to figure out how they want to use this book to further their business goals. So Peter, you're saying when you talk to, you know, potential clients, It sounds like you're part psychiatrist, right?

No, if I'm your psychiatrist, you're in trouble. I can tell you that. But it's not about— it's about being honest. You know?

Right.

So, you know, we see a lot of stuff and there's— we have a continuum that we evaluate stuff on. It's okay, what's the quality of the IP? If the stuff is crappy, I can't help you. Right? Like, and that's very, very rare where someone comes to stuff.

Can you give some examples of what the IP—

By names?

Yeah. No, no.

But somebody comes to us with something, I'm like, okay, you realize this is not, you know, this is a fortune cookie, or that's really, you just restated what Tony Robbins said, or actually, this is actually not true, right? There's research that says the opposite of what you're saying. Or, you know, this is like a children's book, or, you know, there's no insight in here. This has been done before. It's not insightful. There's no research or anything to validate it. Why, you know, why would anyone listen to you? You were a master plumber and now you're a leadership expert because you said so. So there's certain things that you might get disqualified in the efficacy or the quality of intellectual property. That's really, really small, quite frankly, because most people take pride in what they do. They're really good at it. There are some hucksters out there. That's not the business that we're in. That's more on the—

Sure.

Business-to-consumer side. But, you know, folks working with us, they tend to have the goods on the IP side. The missing pieces are usually more often than not in the sales, marketing, and business development side. the productization side, the branding side, the marketing side, all that stuff. And it's like, a book is basically, if not done well, is just a sugar high. So eat 5 donuts, you're going to be wired and dance around the house, and then you crash and you crash hard. You want it to be a sustainable change. So the book is a step in a process. And you and I had talked about this, Sandy, is that, yeah, you need a pub date because publishers said you need a pub date, I would be looking at my book as an investment of 5 to 7 years, amortizing that investment over 5 to 7 years and saying, just because the book came out 8 months ago doesn't mean if I'm really clear on who I'm helping, if I got it in their hands today, a year from now or 3 years from now, they're going to get the same ahas. And getting really focused on, you know, people that are poor practitioners of publicity, as you've seen, right? they treat everything the same. It's a mass market tool. A lot of times, good publicity for books is hand-to-hand combat, thinking about who are the 100 people, if you literally got this book in their hands, could change the world for you? And if you can't get it down to names, and maybe not 100, maybe 50, whatever, then you haven't done the reps.

Right. No, that's a great point. And it's looking at your book with that long-term perspective. And as we talked about earlier, if your book is already out there, it's not too late to still, you know, use some of Peter's principles to get that, you know, monetization opportunities out there. I know I'm looking at time here, but Peter, could you—

Yes.

Could you give us some specific learning, which I'm trying to use you know, right here, the learning programs or the productizations, you know, tell us something.

So, I'll give you, yeah, I mean, I'll give you a couple examples of modalities that you can put. So, basically, you've got thought leadership that lives in a book. That's one place it lives. So, now we're taking the same ingredients, the same stuff that's in the book, doing some things to it and putting it into other modalities. So, it might be something like an assessment tool. I love assessment tools because they tell me about my favorite topic, me, or it could be a team assessment tool, some sort of a tool that measures something based on your view of the world. It could be video-based learning, which there are different versions of that. There's push learning, which is what we all suffered through in school, where on Monday you learn the capital of, you know, Alaska is Anchorage, and on Friday you regurgitate that back. And then a week later, you have no idea where Alaska is, right? So There's still push, which is good for language and definitions and frameworks. More and more adult learning theory is going to pull. When do you really, really care a lot about how to repair a tire? When you're on the side of the road and it's raining and you've never done it before. You're really interested in this outcome now, which is why you go to YouTube, right? Richard said the Capitol might be— it could be. I was out of school that day.

It is. Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you for that. But when, when people care most about something, if I'm a leader and I have to have a difficult conversation with an employee, and that's rattling around in my head because I know it's on my calendar in 2 days, and there's a pull-down video I can do that's scenario-based training, it said, here's the framework that you learned that maybe forgot, here's some tips, here are some pointers. Now I'm really invested, right? Because it's something that I have to do in real time. So video-based are great, assessment tools are great. People talk about an app, but an app can mean lots and lots of things. Is it an app to track behaviors? Is it an app to support the behavior change that is the promise of the book? There's so many cool things that you can do with your IP. You can have masterminds with your IP. You could certify others to deliver it externally or internally in their companies. And each of these has business models that have pluses and minuses underneath it.

Wow.

And this is where we get into sort of confusing foreign terrain for a lot of our clients because they haven't been there before. And again, writing the book is great, but how do you take those same ideas and unleash the power that they have in different formats that you can sell for a heck of a lot more than $24.95 and make a whatever 10%, 15% royalty is on all of it?

Absolutely. And do you help people, Peter, really think through what do you give away for free and what do you charge for? Because that's going to be a little bit tricky, right? Or because you kind of want to have— we tell our authors, you want to be able to give some things away for free before they trust you and like you. But you— but alongside that, you want your monetized products available.

Yeah. And I think there's some important guidelines there. One school of thought, which I think is wrong, is hold back. Well, here are my, you know, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. There were 7 habits. It wasn't like you got 5 of them in the book and had to buy book 2. So if you have a model, if you have a method, if you have a framework, put it out in as many formats as you can. Now you might say, oh my God, but then why would they pay me? The groups that are going to use that and self-serve never would have been your clients anyway.

Right.

And let them. And maybe at one point in time they will be. Maybe they're early in their career or right now they won't or whatever. unleash the power of your ideas. To your point, knowing what's sort of behind a paywall and what's free, that's really a marketing function. How do I get enough of the thought leadership out as a marketing function consistently, consistently, and topically to get out there to go, geez, when there's this type of problem, this is the person to solve? Because let me go back to your mold person. He could be drowning me, no pun intended, in mold information. I couldn't care less until the first time I'm like, You know, whatever, I change my air filter or I read an article and go, oh, I've never tested my house. Now I'm really interested. But he's had to send stuff to me to stay top of mind because he doesn't know— he's always got the supply. The demand that I have is personal, right? So there's a level of awareness that he's got to keep people away. Hey, there's a mold thing, there's a mold thing. And you're sort of vaguely aware of it until it's a topic at the dinner table. And then you're like, and then you're like, very interested. Yeah, that's the guy. I've been following this stuff for a long time.

That's the guy.

Yeah, exactly.

Great.

So we learned that Juneau is the capital of Alaska. If you take away—

Juneau is the capital of Alaska. Thank you. Capital of Vermont, how about that one?

Montpelier.

Yes, you are correct. Really? Um, you know, it is. Yes, I thought it was like a liberal arts degree going, going, uh, you know, I'm curious that we're, again, we're talking about all the buildup and we've got everything in place Are there any signs or, or like points in the timeline where you find that it's, you know, it's time for the next program or the next kind of Montez Condit to be developed? Just really curious of your thoughts there, Peter. So, okay, you've got, you've got this really great program in place. It's, it's, it's yielding a lot of interest. It's getting a lot of people into it. When's the time to build the next, the next piece?

So there's a couple pieces of that. I always look and say, okay, from this work, what can we do that is evergreen? Right? So that, you know, newly minted first-line managers, there's always going to be a supply of that. Right? But then there's other things that are topical or coming up based on what's going on in the world today. The Great Resignation is a big deal today. Hybrid workplace is a big deal today. DE&I is a much bigger conversation today than it was 3 years ago. So you've got to lock down your evergreen.

Right.

And then constantly be scanning the radar to say, ooh, you know, like you mentioned the client before that was talking about remote work. Well, we were interested in remote work 3 years ago, lowercase r, and then became really interested really fast. Right? So that's beyond your control. So one is to look at sort of what's evergreen and what's topical. And the other is, where are you in the organization? Have you always only dealt with leaders? Can you go a notch down, a notch down, a notch down? Or at the bottom going a notch up, you know, or what types of companies, you know, stagnant companies, high-growth companies. So I think there's always a way to be looking at it and go, ooh, if I move this lever and twisted this dial, I could reposition this as an ideal tool for maintaining your culture in a unicorn company that's growing really quickly and onboarding, you know, we're going to double our staff this year. Well, that's going to impact your culture. Have you thought of that?

Right. That makes sense. It's like, because the core of your advice, knowledge, passion, isn't really changing. You're just tweaking it to match the headaches and the needs of a different market, a different audience.

And sometimes it might need to, you know, a little update or—

Updating, refreshing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But the core, you know, if you have a solid model, method, and framework, that's your skeleton. That's not going anywhere right now. It's a matter of, ooh, you know, you look at mental health, right? It is a far more topical conversation today than it was 3 or 4 years ago. I think there is a huge opportunity for someone in the mental health space to say, hey, yes, we're changing the rules here. Because 20 years ago, the mantra was check your baggage at the door. Unless, you know, someone was, God forbid, suicidal or had arrested themselves or something, the corporate answer was, okay, kind of not our problem.

Right.

Now, as a manager or leader, I haven't been, you know, skilled up in this. So if I say to Sandy, hey, Sandy, you know, we're coworkers. It seems to me as if you're depressed lately. Can we have a conversation? Is that appropriate? Like, you know, there are boundaries with sexual harassment, and I might be doing it totally because I care, because I'm noticing behaviors. But wait a minute, maybe that's a line I'm not allowed to cross. I need some training in that because I, you know, in the absence of boundaries, I'm just going to not say anything because there's a risk issue there.

Right, right. Yeah. So the updating and refreshing is a great way to look at it as well as As someone said, I did that in '97 and got fired. Oh, Peter, sorry to hear that. But today, hopefully you wouldn't, and that's progress in the mental health field. So it's always not— I think that the takeaway from that, Peter, is like not resting on today's laurels, but to be always looking for growth in your ideas and growth And reaching new audiences if you feel that stagnant.

But don't try to chase a wave. You know, so I see a lot of people now trying to chase things because, for example, going back a year, you know, hybrid work is a big, big deal. Realistically, it will be less of an issue in a year from now than it was a year ago. So by the time you try to catch a wave, there's a new one. So I think it has to be sort of organic to you, like it's a natural extension. not trying to be opportunistic or, you know, like folks out there that are like, you know, crypto expert. Well, how much of an expert could you have been compared to others, right? It's only been out there all day.

Such a good point. And, you know, of course, Sandy, I immediately think about our— actually, he's on the top of my bookshelf over here. I'll do a little shameless plug for Mr. Michael Port and the Referable Speech, because our friends at ProPublics Speaking You know, the whole focus of what he just talks about is, you know, having that core speech that you can continue to be referred for and that you can tweak a little bit and you can use it for 2, 3 years. And so I love that, that evergreen content piece that you're saying there. It's so important that you have that, that core skeleton, that framework, and build from there. And that's— and it applies over to publicity as well. It applies across all, all You know, all areas. We're always looking at what are the evergreen angles that we're trying to put out there to media, and then what are we trying to jump on in terms of timely news, breaking stories, you know, timely statistics, whatever might be kind of going on in the day-to-day conversations as well.

Yeah, exactly.

And of course, again, I mentioned at the beginning all the different types of individuals that you work with, Peter, and would be curious to hear if there are ever any different tactics or strategies that you recommend For those in different areas of expertise, like a business versus self-help, is there anything that—

We don't do self-help.

Core differentiators?

Yeah. There's a lot of differences, which is why our core focus is all B2B. So we don't do— I mean, now there's some things that we do that have a self-help piece, but they're clearly B2B applications. Because I would argue that over half of the bestselling business books in the last 15 years Could have been marketed as self-help, emotional intelligence, listening skills, et cetera. But straight up, you know, how to fix your romance, you know, Men Are from Mars. That's not our jam. We're hardcore business-to-business solutions.

Yeah.

What about difference between the business— we call it business light and then true business books. Are there anything that has that more humanistic approach, as you like, the emotional intelligence versus how to do your taxes?

No, no. Yeah. I would say a lot of ours is— I wouldn't call it business light, but more It's not process, right? It's not— I mean, Six Sigma, Lean, those are lovely things. And those are great things. But I think it's really, you know, like things like collaboration, things like resilience, things like grit. More of it has sort of been there. More soft skills, although not exclusively, than hard.

And I don't know if we can go back, Marissa, to William back at the beginning, who asked Some social media platform. He's interested in building his platform on social media. Peter, I don't know if you want to—

What was the question?

He just said he's interested in building his platform on social media, and I'm assuming, William, in order to, you know, look at opportunities outside of selling your book. So if you—

So the first thing I would say is, is why do you want to do that? And I'm not being— like, have a real— oh, and not because everybody else is. Like, okay. I think social media is a tool to increase my awareness, increase my brand, net new client acquisition. So you got to get really specific about what I'm using it for. Then if you've answered the other questions around your strategy, who you're trying to reach and what you're trying to do, those serve as filters. So it was interesting about, I guess, a year and change ago when Clubhouse first came on the scene.

Mm-hmm.

I'd never seen everybody jump on something so quickly. Some of it was the boredom of COVID Some of it was audio, everything. We're all zoomed out, whatever. We always look at it from the standpoint of it's got to align with your strategy as a marketing tool, right? So, you know, Twitter several years ago was a big, big play. It's less important today as a lead generation brand building piece. LinkedIn is really, really good, obviously. But then even just saying I'm on LinkedIn, what does that mean? How often do you post? What formats are you posting in? Are you interviewing people? How often do you comment? Who are you getting it to? And it doesn't make any sense to just go on LinkedIn and post with regularity. if on top of that, you don't have a strategy in place to increase the audience, because otherwise you're going to the same 3,000 people that already know you. So, you have to grow the audience strategically and deliberately and feed it with the content and then build. And you also don't want to be that guy, which is like, anytime they put something out there, it's sell, sell, sell. I always believe you got to give 10 times to 1 ask, at least. Give it away, solve problems, put it out there.

Right.

It does come back to you. You can't measure it You know, on a scale, but it will come back to you versus you're going to get unsubscribed. If every time I hear from you, you're selling me something, there's an unsubscribe button there. I don't have time for that.

No, no, that's a great point. Hi, I'm Peter, buy my book.

And yeah, it's like, would you do that in the real world? Like, it doesn't— like, I don't understand it, you know?

No, no.

Newsletters are great. I think one of the greatest, most effective and cost-effective ways to get your ideas out there Is being a guest on podcasts because somebody else has done the hard work of putting an audience together. All you have to do is be semi-smart for 20 minutes, which is easy for most of us. And it's a great way to test hypotheses of, I wonder if this would work in tech or this would work in HR or whatever. Because there's hundreds, if not thousands, of podcasts for everything.

And I'm going to give a shout out to a past client, Judy Robinette, who— one of Marissa's near and dear to her heart. What she does with her podcast, Peter, at the end of every podcast, she, she has 3 things she does, and I'll probably get them out of order here, but they're really important. And one is she will say, is there anything, anyone in my network that, that I can introduce you to?

Yep.

And facilitate that. And then, is there anything I can do for you? Any other advice kind of off, off air? And then, is there anyone in your network who could be— who would find my information valuable? And she basically— we had a lot of podcasts for her in our work, and she basically, what, quadrupled that with that strategy?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I would have to— I'd open the door to one, and then she'd come back and say, oh, here, I got 3 more for us to book now, Marisa, because she'd ask that question and they immediately come back and say, oh, my podcast friend here, my podcast I'll give you the other side of that because I've had Judy on.

She's awesome. And I think it's great. I think a lot of people think, and this is parallel to the book, that being a good podcast guest from an etiquette standpoint is showing up on time and giving a good podcast. That is only half of it. You know, we make sure, you know, we've done 400 episodes where we're hosting. We give the guests everything they need to do. All you got to do is post this, promote it, whatever. Why did you get on my podcast? To spend half an hour with me? No, you got on it to expose your work and expose your ideas. I'm handing you everything. And 40% of them don't do anything with it. I'm like, why did you even do this? Because you're not finishing the job until you're supporting it. Because there's only so many times you can say, look at me. But now you have an excuse to say, look at me, I was on Sandy's brilliant podcast. Right? So it is self-serving. It's not about promoting the podcast, but I think it's also just a— someone needs to write a book on podcast guest etiquette and protocol.

Wow. I think you could do that, Peter. You could do that and we could help You promote it, and I think it'd be an instant bestseller, right?

And we're going to do the book launch in Juneau, Alaska.

Absolutely.

Well, I mean—

Which is a mold-free city because of the climate.

It is mold-free.

It's too cold and nothing grows.

No humidity. It's all good. Well, I think this is a beautiful moment to wrap us up here, see if there's any other questions. From our wonderful, you know, attendees today. Thank you all so much for joining us. I will certainly look out if any last-minute questions pop in as we're wrapping up here today. But thank you so much to Sandy and to Peter for a lively and fun discussion that was so informative, and I hope everyone took some great nuggets away from this conversation. We'll be following up with an email with information about how to