Ep. 36: How to Turn Your TED Talk into a Book

Welcome to the Pub Date Podcast, the show where two book broads discuss what should happen before, during, and after your book publication date. Brought to you by Broad Book Group with your host Vanessa Campos and Jen Dorsey.

Hello, friends. How are we?

We are well. How are you? That was a very spooky fall voice.

I loved it.

Well, it is coming into a spooky season, so I'm really excited, especially just because— I mean, honestly, it's really because it's the weather's turning. And in Southern California, any kind of weather turning is amazing, right?

It's very rare. What is it, like down to 75 now?

Is your weather turning? It is. There's wind.

I love it. I was actually just up in very spooky Connecticut and New York City this week, and the leaves are already turning, and it was cold and rainy, and it was perfect. It was peak fall spooky weather. It was great.

I miss me some weather.

Definitely.

So you were in town for business. For book business.

I was indeed.

If you've been following us for a while now, you probably have heard me stumble on the fact that I keep saying the Big Four, the Big Five, and that's usually in reference to, you know, Penguin Random House, Simon Schuster. Thank you. All the big people who are basically creating all of the books, and really they are acquiring smaller imprints, which I think is is good and bad. It has its limitations. But if you are a book nerd like we are, you've probably noticed that there was a trial. The Department of Justice had a lawsuit to try to block Penguin Random House's acquisition of Simon Schuster.

Yes.

Did they ever come to a decision there?

I believe it is still in progress.

That's what I'm thinking.

I haven't heard much about it lately. But it's hard with the way the news cycle is these days with so much going on to— Right. To keep up with that. But yes, it's, um, it was a very big deal and is a big deal because they are worried that that will create a monopoly because those two companies are already enormous. And they also, in addition to being publishers, they also distribute for other smaller imprints. So they kind of corner a big chunk of the market. So a lot of interesting things have come out in the trial and the testimony about just how the book business works and how, quite frankly, weird our business is and sometimes very hard to quantify, you know, in terms of book sales and just all that stuff. So it's kind of been lifting the veil for a lot of people on how our wacky weird business works.

Right. And if you are very much interested in how the trial went, Publishers Lunch, which is like an industry media outlet for, you know, people who are in the industry, book publishing industry, they released an ebook and a paperback edition of The Trial. It is literally called The Trial. It's the nearly complete transcripts and comprehensive coverage of this suit. And I kid you not, I'm looking at it right now and it's 1,048 pages in my PDF.

That needs an editor.

Yes, it's big.

I'm kidding, we can't cut it. It's testimony.

It is.

There's a lot there, a lot to unpack.

It is. So, you know, I got the idea that, okay, I, of course, I purchased it because—

of course you did. You should.

Yeah. You put a book in front of me, I'm going to buy it, right? Especially with this one. This one is good. It's going to be like my, you know, thing that I read before going to bed now. But one thing I noticed when I downloaded it and I purchased it and then downloaded it was how bad this was going to be for my eyesight. And I think it was really because there's no I mean, with 1,048 pages, there's really no typography, no font, no settings. Really do think that they went from Word doc to PDF.

Yeah, I'm sure they did.

And that's not a knock on anything. I mean, it serves its purpose, but it got me thinking, can you turn anything into a book?

Oh, that's a great question because we are living in this content-driven world where content remains King, and everyone's making all the things and doing all the speeches and giving all the talks and teaching all the courses, but they still love the idea of it being a book because that provides some ethos building and some validity because I have a book. So yeah, that's a great question. We should answer it.

We should. Outside of this whole trial thing and the fact that I think that it needed a little bit of, you know, elbow grease just to make it so that my eyes don't hurt at the end of it. Yeah, let's do a little bit of pros and cons. Okay, so what can we create? What can we as business owners— because we all have a little bit of business hours, we're all influencers in one way or another, we all have an opinion of something, and you know, that's the one thing that we use to monetize is ourselves. We're doing a speech, we're doing a talk, we're doing, uh, in-person or an online class. Et cetera, something for the community. OK, let's do the pros and cons before I get into it too much and then my head explodes. OK, pros and cons of turning a speech into a book.

Well, obviously, that opens up another revenue stream for you because you can sell your book. You can sell it, obviously, all the places you normally buy books. But you can also do special orders for the book when you're going to give that speech at a company or to a large association or group. If you're a smart negotiator, you're going to bake in book sales to your agreement with the speaking venue. So in other words, requiring a certain amount of books to be purchased either to be given to the attendees or— it's a revenue stream. So I think that's a pro for sure.

What about a con for turning your speech into a book?

I think the con would be being— well, it's more of a caveat. I would say you have to be really careful with the content that it's not just word for word like what you're reading right now. And it's not just a transcription. It needs to be a book. It needs to really be more of an inspirational— it needs to be inspired by your speech, not word for word your speech, because people will feel cheated if they come to your speech, you give your speech, then they buy the book. That's exactly like the speech, right? So I always like to tell business owners who want to go out and do this, okay, think really hard about the content and how it can enhance— one can enhance the other. So let's take an example. Let's say that, you know, you're, you're giving a speech about how to have better, I don't know, better habits. Like, right, habits books are huge. How to have better habits, how to be more productive. That's a great speech. People will get really pumped up. They'll be inspired by that. You're going to go out there and do some rah-rah stuff and probably give them maybe between 3 and 5 major takeaways from it. Wonderful. OK. Your book should be associated with that, but not the exact same thing. So maybe then you take those 3 to 5 main points and you build those out and you expand on them. Because a speech is really finite, right? It's a limited amount of time that you have with people in a room. So you can't say, all the things that you want to say. So if you take those 3 to 5 things and really build them out into maybe there's 2 or 3 chapters for each of those 3 to 5 things and you really get in the weeds and give them exercises, and then you're giving them an added value to that speech that you wouldn't have if you were just giving them a transcription of the speech.

That leads me to my next question is, okay, so your speech is maybe an hour long. I don't know how many people are going to sit around for an hour-long speech, but some people do. An hour long, how many words is that? To your point, you have to add to it. What's a really solid word count for something that you— or maybe start out for, I don't know, 15,000 words? Can that— does that limit us from actually creating a book? Could it still be a book?

I think it can still be a book. So back in my former life as an academic, because as we know I'm a recovering academic, I go to therapy about it and take medication— or am I? I used to give academic speeches all Now those are really different than the kinds that we're talking about here, but usually if you had about 20 to 30 minutes to give your presentation, that equated to maybe between 8 to 10 printed pages of just, you know, regular old double-spaced 8 by 10. So what's that, 250 words a page? So yeah, I mean, I think that it's just, it's hard to put a word count to it, but the cadence of how you're speaking really matters too, because maybe you're a super fast talker and you get up there and you kind of riff on things and you don't use note cards. That person might cram a whole lot more content into that hour-long speech than someone who's getting up there and giving a much drier presentation, as academics are known to do. They are not, uh, those aren't jazz hand speeches by any stretch of the imagination.

I don't know, I bet some of them could be with enough cocktails. Yes, which most industries are, as we were talking earlier, we, we like our cocktails. Okay, so we have a good idea. It's a speech, people are in love with it, and people come up to you at the end of it. It's like, hey, do you have that in a book? And I'm sure that's, that's usually what we— what you and I come across. It's like, hey, that course was great, where's the book? I'd like to buy the book. So if it's a course, how do you differentiate between— does it become a, you know, a chapter book not a chapter book, but a book with chapters, or does it become a workbook? Because I think there's two ways of going about that.

I would agree with that. I say both. Um, again, because you're trying, trying to maximize your content, and we always want to make more books. Um, you know, for the, for the workbook, I would definitely say that that should obviously tie very directly to the modules in your course, whether it's an online course or whether it's something that maybe you do teach at a university or continuing ed or wherever you teach it. Workbook should really clearly align itself with the goals of the course and, and the outcomes, the learning outcomes of the course. But the book, again, I think can then be more of a jumping-off point to expand on all the things that you do in the course and talk about. So, you know, if you have 8 modules in your course, then, you know, maybe you— that's a 16-chapter book. It could be.

Oh, oh, I love that.

Or you're giving people, yes, some of the basis of it, you're giving them the, the meat and potatoes, but then you're going to add all the extra sides. Sorry, I'm hungry. I'm thinking of food.

I am too. So really what we're talking about here is ancillary materials and, you know, whether or not your speech becomes a book, a workbook, your course becomes a workbook or a book, you're always looking to kind of enhance the one core thing that has brought you to this bigger audience, right?

Right.

So I love ancillary materials, but let's say that, you know, you've already— you already have a book and that's all you're thinking about doing. Can that book then be turned into a course? Does it go both ways?

Oh, oh, that's a fun question. Sure, I think it can be. Absolutely. Um, and in fact, it could be more than one course. I would definitely argue for that. So, you know, just like you can take that course and blow it up bigger and make it into a book, maybe you reverse engineer that a little bit and say, okay, you know, I've got— let's use our productivity book again. I've got 4 main, or I've got, you know, 10 chapters on productivity and different hacks and tricks and what have you. You know, maybe you kind of look at that content and divide it up thematically. So maybe one is about, you know, morning habits, and one is about habits at work, and maybe habits to make your life more streamlined, you know, at home. You could really kind of group things in that thematic way to then reverse engineer it and make it into a course and do a course for each if you even wanted to, like mini courses. There's so many options.

Yeah. And you could, you know, because we're on this format, you can even turn a specific topic in each chapter, in each chapter of your book into a podcast conversation where you bring in a guest to really dissect the topic of that chapter. Or, you know, you, you bring someone in to talk about like, well, this is how it worked for me and, you know, bring in a case study. When we call them case studies, but really it's just real life experience.

Mhm.

I like all of these things. Question to you is, you know, as, as you're starting off thinking about writing a book and you're just like, oh, this could be— what needs to come first? What's the chicken and the egg here? Does the book come first? Does the workbook come first? Does the podcast come first? Do they all come out at the same time?

That's a good question. I think from a content perspective, it could not to be wishy-washy, but I think you could do it either way. Like, one could come before the other. To me though, I'm gonna put it back in your lap because I think that's more of a marketing question than an editorial question. Because really, a lot— so much depends on how you promote yourself, right? Right. So how you promote the book. And, you know, most editors, myself included, when we're looking at acquiring new books, the first thing I'm going to look at is, do you have a platform? Because I want to know if you can go out and sell a book. So if you've got this fantabulous book idea but nothing else that you're doing in that space, my inclination, at least as, as an acquiring editor, would be to have you pump the brakes and go out and do some of those things and give some speeches and have a couple courses. But I don't know, you tell me from a marketing standpoint, what do you think?

See, I'm a glutton for punishment and I love content, so I'd say do all the things all the time. But you know, you have to think about all these things cost money, and you need to make sure that when you're creating these things that there's an audience for it. To your point, you know, like, who are you talking to? Are they even interested in this? And sometimes it's like, I have a really big book idea, but— and that's great, and it may be like the book of the year, it may be the book of the decade, but if you as a, as an author don't have some— an audience that you're already talking to about this who can then talk to other people about it. As a traditional publisher, it gets pretty hard to buy into that idea and spend the money on it. And I think what you and I really like to do is, you know, even if you're self-publishing, we like to put you in the mindset of a traditional publisher, right? And say like, is this a valid—

is this something that's going to be sellable?

Are you going to break even? I love making sure that our authors break even. That's number one. And I know that you're probably listening to this and think like, oh, I just want to write my book. It doesn't have to sell anything. It's just my legacy. Well, that's absolute BS because the second we put that out there, you're going to start asking me, how are sales? And then it's just like, wait, you said the sales didn't matter. So I think that that's something that, you know, you need to start thinking about at the beginning. And if you are going into, like, say you are going into the traditional publishing method, I would guarantee you that a marketing person or like the editorial is probably going through the book as you know you're writing it, you're editing it, and saying like, oh, that's a good one, that's a good bit, let's pull this out for this, let's pull this out for that. And so I think a lot of these things will come out And you'll see this as a consumer. You'll see the hardcover come out first, and then a year later, or maybe even longer, the paperback comes out. And then another year later, or maybe even longer, the flashcards come out. And I find that to be so annoying because it's just like, you have my attention for this amount of time before the next best author comes out. So I feel like— and this is just me talking— release the paperback and the, and the hardcover at the same time. I'm not going to buy your hardcover. And if you're already doing a group setting and you already are doing things that are maybe a little bit more intimate, like a masterclass, and you want to coach and teach people how to do those things, and that's already part of your bread and butter, maybe the interactive cards like Barrett Kohler does— they do a lot of this stuff.

They do.

Maybe that's appropriate for the official release and maybe you bundle it all together. I think that it expands what you're doing into, I am a business owner and I have all of these products. Because if you think about it, you're a speaker, you're an author, you're, you're a business owner, you're doing finance, you're doing all of these things. You're not one-sided. So I think that that's also important when you're looking at your, at your product. But make sure that you have the audience for it. Think like a publisher.

Yes, always be thinking like a publisher, always. And, and keep in mind that no one's going to do this for you. No one's going to tell you exactly how to do it. I mean, we're trying our best to today, but it, it's truly, it's so dependent on your goals, your goals as a business person, as an author, who you want to reach, you know, what's your priority. Is your priority to sell so many courses that you've got that passive stream of income Great, then you should probably focus in and make sure that course is exceptional and amazing and being sold the right way before you do all the other things. Then all the other things are gravy, or they also kind of help provide a halo effect to the course. And I think that's the other thing to keep in mind too. Back to what we were talking about earlier, you don't want it to be a carbon copy of your speech. The reason for that is twofold. A, it's because you don't want people to feel cheated and you want to be sure that they feel like they're getting a good value. But it's also because you want to be able to market each of these things differently. Make sure that people know that, you know, you are offering this whole complete package of products that are slightly different but yet, you know, play off of each other. So that's— I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.

I have a question for you.

Yes.

How would you respond to an author who is just against ancillary materials because they feel it's going to cannibalize the book or cannibalize the talk?

My response to them would be to create a product map. Some authors will be like, what is that?

I'm about to say, what is that? I'm like, wait, go back to school.

No, we're clear. Seriously, it's— I mean, I don't know if it's a business school thing or not, but, um, create a product roadmap, you know, kind of just— and it's just basically a mind map of where you want all of this to go and how you want all of these things to work together. You need to make the argument to yourself that these things will not cannibalize each other, and that's how you do it. If you visualize it, if you see, okay, my book is going to be for this purpose and this audience. My note cards are going to be for this, you know, my, my course is going to be for that. If you kind of just see it all together, it really helps you visualize how you can in fact differentiate all the products and how you can tie them together when it's appropriate. Jump online, you can use, you can use a mind mapping tool, or you can just draw bubbles and, or you can use sticky notes on your wall, however you want to do it. But just create a visual for yourself of where all this goes. And I would include timelines too, like, okay, I'm going to write the book first. That's going to be this year. Next year I'm going to start a course. You know, the following year I'm going to do a notebook to go with it or whatever. So if you do that timeline, it's almost like you're making a business plan for yourself with the book and all of its ancillary products.

Yes, I love that. And you know, for most people, when they come into book publishing, they think it's pretty rigid. I have to do this first, I have to do this next. That's the beauty about book publishing and anything else. It's, you know, we forget that as we're growing up and we're all adults, it's like, I can do whatever I want, right? Because you're, you're publishing your own book and you can figure it out, you know, within, you know, reasons of, you know, make sure you have an audience, make sure that it's going to be sellable, make sure, you know, that you're not just throwing money at it. But I think it's also really important, you know, when you're diversifying and you're creating these ancillary content, you remember that not everyone thinks the same way or learns the same way. So creating these things and not just in the book format is really important for accessibility too.

Yeah, absolutely. And we didn't even talk about the audiobook, but— oh yeah, but that's another piece of the puzzle too, right? I mean, you know, the question might be, well, if I give a speech, why should it also be an audiobook? Well, again, it's different, it's different content. And so if you're trying to reach as many people as you can, yes, keep that accessibility in mind because not everybody's gonna be able to read. Maybe not everybody can hear, and maybe not everybody can see. So if you offer products that really answer the need for, for lots of different kinds of people, then you're on the right track.

Yeah, I agree. And if your book does really well— and this is a conversation for another podcast— then we could start talking about licensing and foreign rights and translations.

Oh, because I—

and I, I'm going to say this not knowing the answer to this. I'm sure there's, uh, our friend, uh, Biagi will probably cringe, but maybe you don't need to be traditionally published to get a licensing agreement.

Maybe you don't. I think that's a show. I think we should talk about it.

Well, let's make that a plan.

Okay, I'm in.

All right, so please tune in next time as we talk a little bit more about nerding out in book publishing, what should and shouldn't be a book, and when you should and shouldn't actually make a book. Thank you again so much for joining me, Jen. I appreciate it.

Oh, always great to see you. I missed you too. I'm so glad we're back.

I know, it's been a minute. And thank you so much to Paul Roberts for, uh, being our executive producer, and to Emily Carpenter Polskamp of Little Red Communications. Little Red Communications. I'm hungry. Thank you everyone for listening. Let's eat. Let's eat.

See ya.

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