#FASuccess Ep 417: Establishing Your Authority As An Expert By Following A Short Book Formula For Authorship, With Paul G. McManus

Resources Featured In This Episode:

• Paul G McManus: Website | LinkedIn
• The Art of Collaboration: When 2 Tribes Stop The War: How Advisors & Accountants Form Win-Win Partnerships and Accelerate Business Growth by Leveraging a Virtual Family Office by Anton J Anderson
• The Advisor’s Guide to Annuities by John Olsen and Michael Kitces
• IRA Help
• Otter AI
• SMART Retirement: Discover The Strategic Movement Around Retirement Taxation by Matt Zagula
• Scribe Media

Looking for sample client service calendars, marketing plans, and more? Check out our FAS resource page!

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Full Transcript:

Michael: Welcome, Paul G. McManus, to the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Paul: Hey, Michael. It's great to be here. I've been looking forward to this conversation all week.

Michael: I really appreciate you joining us today. I'm looking forward to it as well. And getting to talk and nerd out a little bit on the theme of writing a book as a financial advisor. Most people out there who have written a book, you write a book so you can sell books. That's kind of the model. And it's tough when you only earn a few dollars per book by the time all the people in the book publishing industry get their parts of the cut, which means you have to sell thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of books for it to really add up to big dollars. And if you go out there and look at industry statistics, the average book sells a few hundred copies or maybe a thousand copies over its lifetime. And it's always fascinating to me that it's kind of a unique angle for financial advisors because 1 client may pay us thousands of dollars, which means we can get more revenue by getting half a dozen clients from a book than most authors will ever get from selling their books. And at the same time, most of us got into this to be advisors, not necessarily authors, so writing doesn't necessarily come naturally. And just because you write a book and publish, it doesn't mean it jumps off the shelves in the hands of ideal prospects. They call you and you get your dozen clients or even just 1 client. So, I'm excited to talk about these dynamics of trying to write and publish a book as an advisor, how you market or use a book for marketing as an advisor, and just what really works or not when you're not just doing it to sell books, you're doing it to grow an advisory business and try to attract clients.

Paul: Yeah, I love the framing that you just shared. And this might sound counterintuitive, but what I tell people is that you absolutely want to become an author as an advisor. And we'll talk about the reasons that I would state for that during the course of this conversation. But the counterintuitive point is that it's not about selling books. To what you said, just to expand upon that, the average business book might sell 200 copies and whether you...and most people don't do it through the traditional publishing, meaning that most people don't get paid to do this instead. They write the book. They publish it to Amazon. And depending on how they decide to price it, they might make, I don't know, $500 in commission or, I'm sorry, in royalties.

I was just checking in on one of the clients who I've recently worked with. His name is Anton Anderson, and he's written a book we helped him write and publish called "The Art of Collaboration." And for an advisor, it's a really cool book. It's a book about how advisors and CPAs can collaborate. Imagine that. So, you effectively serve their clients. And he's been doing great. He has a big clientele. And I was just curious. And so just really the other day, I looked at the royalties on Amazon, and he has made a whopping $1,000. And that's absolutely not the motivation, as an advisor, that you would want to have going into writing a book. I had a chance to have him on my podcast recently, and I asked him about his experience and everything. And I said, "So, how do you plan to monetize this book, etc.?" He's like, "I plan to make millions from this." And he's a guy that already has a successful business and practice, and he already makes multi-million-dollar revenue.

But that's really the mindset that I want to bring to this conversation is that aspirationally, a book should help you make, I'd say, at least a million dollars. Even a huge advisor can make that much more. But for any advisor, including a sole advisor, that's aspirationally the mindset I want someone to have. And to your earlier point, it's 100% it's not about royalties at all. It's about creating a book that you can effectively integrate into your practice to help you create an authoritative position in the marketplace, to differentiate yourself from competitors, to create awareness for what you do, and ultimately... And this is what I talk about a lot in my book, "The Short Book Formula." Ultimately, the goal of the book is to accelerate the speed of trust. And if you get nothing else in this conversation, at least from what I share, to me, this is a writer-downer is that authorship fundamentally helps you accelerate the speed of trust. And as you know and I can imagine that your listeners can, as a financial advisor, I think that's the biggest constraint that anyone faces. Assuming that you do good work and your existing clients love you, it's how do you create that awareness with more people. And the biggest constraint, the biggest barrier that we face is creating trust and getting to that place of trusted advisor.

The Benefits Of Publishing A Book Using Amazon [08:13]

Michael: So, I want to go further down this realm of how a book starts doing some of those things, right? Authoritative position, differentiation, awareness. But I am curious, and I guess on behalf of folks who are listening from the advisor industry where we really don't know how the book world works, can you take a moment to explain how do book royalties work? If I make my book and I sell it on Amazon for $19.99, who actually gets what? How does that work?

Paul: Yeah, great question. Yeah, and I'd say 95% of the case, we help our clients go from blank sheet of paper to publishing the book. And in 95% of the case, we simply help them publish it to Amazon for the reasons that you can imagine, right? I mean, Amazon is everywhere. It feels like it's Christmas almost every day with the Amazon driver showing up and delivering packages.

Michael: So true. There are a lot of Amazon visits to our house every week.

Paul: And so for that reason, Amazon just really has 2 things that make it such an attractive platform when you publish your book. Number 1, it's very simple. You can upload it there. You have control over it. No one other than Amazon is taking any share of the cut. And literally, once it's up there, you can print the book on demand.

But to your question about royalties, so Amazon's very flexible. And in the types of books that we primarily recommend advisors write and publish, following our short book formula approach, typically they're books that are about 12,000 to 25,000 words. The interior is black and white. And when you publish to Amazon, the minimum price that they'll allow you to do at the retail side, it varies a little bit but generally it's around 4 bucks. Now you have the ability to say, "Okay..." If you were chasing royalties, you would say, "Okay, well, I'm going to mark it up to $9.95 or $14.95," or whatever that is. And effectively what they do is if you decide to mark it up and let's say it's 10 bucks, they're going to take the first 4 just for their cost of printing the book, the delta there of the $6, they're going to more or less split that with you. And so if you price the book at 10 bucks, you might get a $3 royalty. But back to the conversation before is that, if the average business book sells 200 bucks and you multiply that, that's like, what is that? 600 bucks. It's like, yeah, I'm not in it for that. I'm not in it for that at all. And so my recommendation to people generally is just price it at the bottom price. It's not about people buying. It's not about royalties. It's about your ability to print it on demand and proactively send it to anyone in the United States at a remarkably inexpensive rate.

Michael: So, I should think about this to the extent I'm doing any of "what's my actual money on selling the book" math. Amazon's got some hard cost of $4 or so that they've got to recover, and then they're basically splitting the price with me above that threshold. They keep half, I keep half, but I get to decide how much above that I'm going to price it and, to use the economic term, explore the elasticity of demand and figure out how much can I mark it up and still get X book sales and try to figure out that formula for my book in the marketplace, or as you've noted, if I really don't care about that, I can keep the price at the floor of $4, in which case Amazon recovers its hard cost, and I make basically nothing. But if my goal was to get it out there for clients and other opportunities, do I really care if I'm not making the 200 bucks or 600 bucks that I was going to make by selling a couple hundred copies of the book? Probably not. Because if I get 1 client ever, it's going to obliterate all that book of revenue anyways.

Paul: That's exactly right. And then just one other thing I'll add to that is that Amazon, as many people probably know, is that they also have...their publishing site is called Kindle Direct Publishing. And so you can set it up that way so it's available on the retail side of Amazon. But you can also buy what's called author copies through their Kindle Direct Publishing side. And in that case, they'll charge you even less. And so I think for the kinds of books that I said that'd be about 4 bucks, they'll get it down to about $2.50 or so. And so I tell people that if you're doing seminars or if you do in-person stuff and you want to have 50, 100 books, 200 books, whatever it is, that that's probably the way to go. But again, either way, what I always tell people is don't get more copies than you can use, say, in the next month or two, because there's no need to do that. And then I guess the final thing that I'll just add about the benefits of Amazon is that you inherently have the ability to update a book. In other words, right now it's 2024 and tax laws, whatever is the way they are today and let's imagine a year from now something changes, you have the ability to go back in there, make an update to the book, re-upload the manuscript, and all books going forward will have the updates. And so it's a very seamless process.

Michael: Does it matter about where you're trying to put the book, sell the book? I can buy it on Amazon, but do I need a publisher if I want it to show up in bookstores and I'm aspiring to do that version of it? I want to get to walk into my local Barnes & Noble and actually see it there on the shelf.

Paul: My perspective on that is that if we step back for a second and we look at what is appropriate for 99.9% of the people as advisors, why do you want to write a book, my answer would be, as we talked about earlier, it's not about book sales but it's about what the book can do to you in terms of creating awareness, and accelerating the speed of trust, and bringing on clients. And so for Dave Ramsey, Suze Orman, Tony Robbins, Robert Kiyosaki, then that's a whole other conversation that they should be having in terms of that question. But for, I would imagine, most listeners, I would not be thinking in those terms.

Michael: Because publishers don't get clients from the books. They are literally in it for volume of book sales. So, if you're a celebrity in it for volume of book sales and you've got an alignment here, it's different when I'm an advisor and that's not actually why I'm doing it.

Paul: Yeah, if you're a celebrity, if you're someone that is routinely, say, on Fox Business or something of that nature, then that's, I think, a whole other conversation. And there's things that may be outside of my knowledge that could be appropriate. But again, I think for 99.9% of people, it's the wrong track to think about.

Using An “Inner Circle Soft Launch” To Build Social Proof For The Book [15:13]

Michael: So then share with us a little bit more how this works in terms of integrating into an advisor's marketing practice. You've talked about this as differentiating from competitors' awareness in the marketplace. So, can you speak to a little more just how does that actually work? What am I doing...

Paul: With a book?

Michael: ...as an advisor where these magical things happen?

Paul: Yeah, yeah. No. Exactly. Great question. And I'll just say that there's... In all the conversations I have with people, whether it's one-on-one or in podcasts like this, there's always 2 questions that people have. And the first one is, is it really possible to do it in just 6 weeks? And I hope we have a chance to talk about that at some point. But then the other question is, okay, so assuming that I go through this process and I spend the time, energy, and resources to do this, I want someone other than just my mother to read the book. And I'll tell you, my mother lives down the street and I have given her a copy of my book. It's on her nightstand. So, I hope that she's read it. I don't know. But that's not the aim of the book, right?

And so there's a variety of ways to do it. And once we help... So, in our process, once someone gets to the point of publishing, we typically have 6 different key strategies that we help them implement. And I'm happy to share those as appropriate. One of them is what I call the “inner circle soft launch.” Say your average successful advisor, maybe they serve, we'll say, 500 families. And if you just apply the 80-20 rule to that, they're going to have, we'll say, 125 families that I would call them passive advocates, meaning that these are the people that really like the service they get. These are people that would be happy to make referrals, introductions. They'd be happy to support the advisor. Just 20% of the client base is generally really happy with the service and all those good things.

What most people or most resources would tell you when you publish a book is, "Okay, once you publish it, let's do the book launch, and let's go and blast emails out, and let's do pretty social media graphics and do all those things." And again, for your typical advisor that's successful and maybe serves 500 families, a lot of that is geared towards ultimately book sales, i.e. royalties. And you're just not going to have a lot of success. Maybe you sell 10, 20, 30 books. But, again, that's not the purpose of this. And so the inner circle soft launch, as I call it, it's about recognizing that you really have this base of people that I would describe as passive advocates, again meaning that they would like to support you. They just need a vehicle to do so.

And so, at the point that you publish the book, instead of making that big announcement to the world and saying, "Hey, I'm an author now," instead you reach out to those 20%, so to those 125 people, and you don't do this in a one-to-many way. In other words, you don't just email blast them but instead, you reach out one to one, whether it's by phone call, text, one-to-one email, and you let them know. You're like, “Hey, you're one of my best clients. I've got something to share with you. I'm in the process of publishing a book. And I'm putting together a book launch team, and I'm asking my best clients, which you're one of them, and I'd love to make an... or I'd like to make an ask of you, which is, can I send you an advanced reader copy of my book? And the book is designed to be read in just 1 to 2 hours, and so it's a relatively quick read. And I know you're busy, so if you can only read a couple chapters, that's great. But what I'd like to do is to have you read it and then schedule a Zoom call with you, just for 15 minutes, and have you tell me what you think. Was it a valuable read? What insights did you get from it? And probably most importantly would you recommend this book to others? And if so, why?”

Now, this takes a bit of time and effort, right? So, this is something that I tell people. You want to plan on doing this maybe over 1 to 3 months especially if you have 125 clients, but what you're going to find invariably I'd say 80% of those people are going to say yes and they're going to say yes because they already support you. So, these are already people that know, like, and trust you, value your service, and there's something about authorship, which is unique. Unlike anything else, there's a status to authorship, that if you ask someone to be part of something exclusive and it's tied to something that's important, people get excited for that because it's not every day someone asks them to be part of this book journey along with them.

And so, through that process, what happens is that you send them the copy, they read the book, you set a deadline, you schedule the Zoom call, and now you spend that 15 minutes to ask them the questions, you record it. It's all private. You're not going to share this with anyone, but you ask them a couple things as part of the process. Number one is that we're also looking to make marketing collateral, and we might take some testimonials and put it in the front of the book for when we actually do do the public launch. B, we're also creating a book website, all these different things, and we're looking to turn this into testimonials. Is that something that you're comfortable with? And of course, you want to make it easy for them, right? Have you ever been asked to write a letter of reference? And typically you're like, "Sure, I'll be glad to help you," but then it's like, "I don't know what to write."

Michael: Yeah, yeah. Then I'm sitting down staring at a blank page, and maybe ChatGPT will make that a little bit easier now.

Paul: Yeah. No, exactly. It's changed because of that. But the fact is that most people... Again, they'll say yes. They're willing to spend an hour. They're willing to do the call. And people love to give their opinions. So, part of this is the psychology. People love to give their opinions, if asked to do so, and they'll come and they'll give their opinion, but you just want to make it super easy for them, super fun, and they'll give you such valuable insights. I mean, they'll share things with you that you wouldn't expect. I literally did one of these calls yesterday, and I just asked 2 questions and the whole 10 minutes was just praise and praise and praise. And I asked the question...ultimately the question and the key question is I'm trying to get this book out to the world, and I just love your advice. I'm looking to speak at organizations, churches, schools, whatever it is, what do you recommend that I do? And just like a good salesperson, you just let that sit and you're just quiet.

But what's happening in this process is that you're taking someone from what I would describe, again, as that passive advocate, someone that would generally like to help you, but they don't know how. Suddenly they become active, and now you've given them a vehicle, your book, and now they're excited to be associated with it, they're excited for you, they're excited to be part of this, and they're telling you what they're going to do for you, “I'm going to talk to this person. I'm going to talk to that person. I'm going to introduce you to that person.” Now, multiply that, in this example, by 125 people. What is the ripple effect of that?

Michael: Right. I think it's interesting how you frame it, that we've got a segment of clients that like what we do, would be supporters of us to grow, i.e. referrals and the like, but just really may not know how to do that, how to say it, they're afraid to introduce people for referrals, something's blocking them, and, "Hey, I published a book and I've asked for their advice about how to get the book out there, and they're giving me advice and now excited to be a part of it," and that we're giving them an easy way to help share us around if they may not have been comfortable to say, "Well, I've got a million dollars with Smith Financial Planning. So, you should talk to them too, Mr. Neighbor." That gets hard but, "My financial advisor published a book. It's pretty cool. You should check it out. Here's a copy," is a lot easier and lower stakes for people.

Paul: It's a lot lower threshold, and it's just the magic of it, again, just using the...because I literally experienced this yesterday, and it's the sequence in here, right? So, you don't just start there, "Hey, can you tell me 3 people that you'd like to send the book to?" Instead, you ask for that feedback, and this is what I literally did yesterday, and the person's like, "Yeah, this is great, this is great, this is great," and then you ask the question, and invariably, and not every case but I would say in 80% of cases, they're going to start listing out all the people that they're going to start telling about this and introducing you to. So, it's no longer this... It's not even limited to 1 or 2 people that you might think to ask for, which can still be uncomfortable, but you're just asking them for advice and support, and that's where just that power of becoming an active advocate is like none other.

And so now you've done that. There's a whole flurry of activity that's going to happen. And at the same time, the other benefit of this, as I alluded to before, was that you've recorded this conversation, and with their permission, you're like, "I would like to make this easy. Can I write a testimonial for you, send it to you? You can approve it, you can modify it." And let's face it, in most cases, people just approve it, because if you do a good job and it reflects what they said, then they're not going to do anything else, so you're making it easy for them. Of course, in most cases, you're going to run into compliance. But now, again, as I mentioned earlier, because of Amazon's print-on-demand, even though you printed out, let's say, these 125 books, you've shared them with people for the part of this advanced reader copy, now you have 125 testimonials, for example, and social proof is massive. And so you take maybe the best 5, 10, 15, 20, whatever it is, and you now reformat the book, you put this in the beginning of the book for when you're ready to do your public launch, and at the same time, the remaining 80-plus testimonials, I mean there are other marketing collateral book websites, email blasts, case studies, etc., now you're set to really do an impactful public launch that it's not just you excited about, you have this army of supporters that are gung-ho to support you.

Achieving Amazon Bestseller Status [25:20]

Michael: Interesting. So, help me understand then some of the other strategies.

Paul: Yeah, so let's take the very next one. So, now that you have this, and I'll just use the word loosely, army of people that are supporters and that are actively engaged in wanting to see this successful, now we do the public launch, and another thing at this point, which I would recommend, is to go after becoming an Amazon bestselling author. And I can break down what that means and some of the nuances of what that means.

Michael: Sure.

Paul: Yeah, and so again, counter-intuitively, it's not about book sales, and so this isn't number one on Amazon for 5 years or some famous books. So, the way that probably I would say 99% of people that are Amazon bestselling authors, what that really means is that, in Amazon, you have the ability to choose up to 3 categories. So, let's say there's wealth management, there's retirement planning, maybe there's taxation or things of that nature, things that are relevant, and you can choose 3 categories.

And ultimately, the way that it's done, in order to legitimately become and then claim that you're Amazon bestselling author, is that you have to be able to reach the top of that category for a minimum of a point in time. And of course you can sustain that over time and that's great, but at a minimum, you need to reach that number one spot for bestselling, which Amazon tracks for a point in time. And there's different numbers that go into it.

And so, first and foremost, what you can't do is you can't just go buy all your books. I've tried to do it. It doesn't work. And so each category is ranked differently, and so some categories are more competitive. So, it's really based on a single day, right? So, to reach number one, for example, in wealth management, and I'm just going to make up a number, but let's say you have to sell 500 books in a single day, and that has to come through 500 separate Amazon accounts.

Michael: Okay, that's how they keep you from like, "I'm going to juice my number. I'm going to just buy..."

Paul: That's exactly right.

Michael: "...500 copies of my book," because if I dial it down to 4 bucks a copy, I'm like, "For 2 grand, I'll take Amazon bestseller."

Paul: Exactly. And so there's some safeguards there. So, you have to put some legwork in. And ultimately different categories have different performance metrics, and so maybe one's 500, maybe one's 100, and what have you, but we have the ability to...there's some software we have. We have the ability to know in advance. So, for a given category, how many books need to be sold in a day? And so we have that information upfront. And so depending on the person, if they've done the legwork and they have this group of 125 people as an example I shared, many of those people, if not the majority, and you're like, sure, once you do the official launch, and you ask me like, "Hey, I'm doing this to Amazon, and I'd love to have you get a copy. I've marked it down to this. And to give me...not just buy the copy but then give me a review on Amazon." And of course, if you've done your work correctly, you've already helped create a testimonial, so it's easier for them to take that testimonial and put it there, they can modify it, whatever it is.

But now suddenly you have the people that can help achieve that bestseller status for you, and at the same time, you start seeing these synergies happen, is that now it's like...and while you're at it, if you could put the review there, a 5-star review, and suddenly you have even more social proof. So, for the people down the road that actually do hear about you, discover you, go to Amazon, and check them out, now you have 100 5-star reviews and that's powerful.

Michael: And so the essence of this is “I just have to get to Amazon bestseller in my category for a day to officially claim my Amazon bestseller status in my category, so I'm doing everything I can to have a big launch day on launch day so that I can get everybody to turn out at once to do the amount of activity it takes to push me over the line.”

Paul: That's exactly right. And if you look at other lists, there's the New York Times bestsellers list, and there's different numbers that go along with that. I think, in that case, there's a few more things that you need to do. But ultimately, in that case, you have to sell roughly 5,000 copies of your book in the course of a week. And so Amazon's just a little bit more achievable for a lot of people.

Michael: Okay. Okay. And so is that the essence of the kind of stage 2 is it's public launch time, go out to your pre-listed group, and I'm assuming pretty much everybody else you know, and you can email at this point, but you're trying to do all of it on a single coordinated day because you really want to hit top the list for the day.

Paul: Yes. The short answer is yes. I'll just expand a little bit. So, you want to coordinate that one day because that's really where the rubber meets the road in terms of hitting number one. But then to your point, if you have an email list, if you have a broader client base, if you have the ability to post on social media, now is the time to start sending out those more one-to-many communications. Now is the time to get the pretty social media graphics and really announce it. And over that course, you might do a week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, and just make a big deal about it.

But the behind the scenes, what you really want to be focused on and where the real value is, is in that one day you want to be able to achieve bestseller. And then of course, once you do that, then as part of your launch and all the other stuff, you can now make a big deal about that. You can take all the testimonials that you've done. You can say, "So and so said about the book," and do all those things. And so now you're creating this massive wave of social proof.

The person I mentioned earlier whose book we helped recently, Anton, who wrote "The Art of Collaboration," so his book was geared towards financial advisors and to CPAs. And one of the categories that we picked was accounting. And so because we helped him get to number one in accounting, some of the feedback that he gave me was that, as a result, he got inquiries from a number of media organizations, including the AICPA, and so there's a variety of benefits, right? There's being able to legitimately claim bestselling author status, which then again, you can go back to your book and you can splash that right on the title, or I'm sorry, on the book cover, so now all the books going forward now say bestselling author. There's opportunity to create awareness in your industry, which can lead to more opportunities. And so there's a lot of synergistic effects just from that one strategy.

Michael: Interesting. But I guess per that point, it's not just, hey, we're selling it now and we're going to spend the next month trying to promote it and get the word out. The whole pressure/opportunity is you're really trying to make splash day.

Paul: Yes. Yeah.

Michael: Because you're trying to hit the pop. Not that you can't make the list for many days in a row, but if I spread out 300 transactions over the first 3 weeks, I'm not going to get to the list. If I get 300 of those on day 1, I might actually be able to pop to the top.

Paul: That's exactly right. And I've done this enough now that I learned the trial and error there. And so when we started, we thought, okay, well, we're going to do 2 weeks. And then we realized, yeah, it's really just a day that really makes the most difference in terms of that list. And then I have more strategies that I can share in terms of how to really create that awareness. Is now a good time to get into this?

Leveraging Centers Of Influence To Promote The Book [32:51]

Michael: Yeah, yeah. What else is on our ongoing list of 6 here?

Paul: Yeah. So, we've talked about the inner circle soft launch. We talked about the Amazon bestseller status. The next one, and this is really a high leverage one, is I call this the COI [Centers Of Influence] strategy. And so you can imagine most financial advisors, they would love to create meaningful relationships with CPAs and accountants for the reasons that we both know, which is that accountants typically have a lot of clients. And the advisor typically would like to partner with them in order to get those referrals to them.

And as we also likely know is that, in many cases, it's difficult for many advisors to create those relationships for a variety of factors. But primarily I'd say it's motivation. The advisor's really gung-ho and it's like, "Yeah, let's do this because this will be great for me." And the CPA is thinking like, "I don't really need more clients. I'm already too busy, and there's a lot of referral risk here." So, the book becomes a tremendous asset if you're looking to do one of two things, either create more of those COI relationships or, if you already have them, to really start to leverage them. And I'll give an example of both.

And so one of the approaches, imagine an advisor, he has a few CPA relationships. Maybe they haven't really generated results, maybe 1 or 2 has. One of the things that I love to do at this point is to, A, include those COIs as part of the inner circle soft launch. And so you can imagine, if that person's already in the orbit, they participate in that and now you're strategizing essentially to the CPA together and asking for their advice, one of the things that you might want to offer them is the ability to create a custom version of the book with a foreword by the CPA. And what happens is that when...you don't even need to be a co-author per se, but when you are able to say, "Foreword by John Smith," maybe even put that on the cover of the book, the CPA or that person suddenly takes a level of ownership of this. You know, one, they have to agree to it, right? And they have to feel comfortable doing that. But once they do, it's like, "Hey, this is my book now," right?

And so, it helps to solidify those relationships. And just from a logistical standpoint, in that case, you don't want...because you might do this with a variety of COIs or CPAs, and you don't want to publish this on Amazon for just the reason that you don't want to have 10 different versions of your book on Amazon.

Michael: That's why I was kind of wondering about how does this work, right? At some point, John writes a foreword and Sheila writes a foreword. And then Sheila's like, "I was on the Amazon, and there's a version of the book and it's not my foreword. What happened here?"

Paul: So, in this case, what we recommend is private printing. And so you take the same book. You can have multiple customized versions of the book. You're not putting it out there in the public. Instead, you're making a version that literally you just give to the CPA. And so, when he's talking to his clients one-to-one, he has a copy of it. And as appropriate, he can say, "Hey, so and so, this is the financial advisory firm that we recommend. I happened to write the foreword on this book. You should check it out." And so, at that point, you not only have the trust of the CPA to the person in place, which is powerful, but now you have the book that can help further create trust and interest in terms of reaching out to the advisor.

Michael: I can certainly envision the power when the CPA is saying, "Oh, yeah, we work with Smith Financial Planning. They're great. Here's a copy of their book. I actually wrote the foreword to the book." It's just a whole other level of endorsement and transfer of trust if that CPA or I guess an attorney or whoever it is has a good relationship with their clients in the first place.

Paul: That's exactly right. And that's powerful for those reasons. Especially for someone who's really trying to solidify that relationship with the CPA and maybe they have it, but I think even once you have that basic relationship, one of the challenges... Again, CPAs are busy people and it's like, okay, they're willing to do it. They said they would do it, but now how do I get them to go and actually introduce…

Michael: Do do it.

Paul: Do do it. And so assuming... So, for the advisor that already has the existing relationship and the trust already there, there's like a scaled way to do this. And I just had this happen with a client the other day, and we've been doing this now with multiple CPAs is that we do the same thing in the sense that we'll get the CPA to write the foreword. We'll do a private print of it. But now if there's really that trust and synergy and the CPA's bought in to, "Yeah, I want to promote this. And if you give me a way to do this, I'll be happy to do it." And so in this case...this is with a client of mine named John. He has multiple CPA relationships, and now the CPA is providing us with their entire client base or at least the segmented part that they feel would be a good fit. They're taking the next step of writing a letter on their letterhead from them, essentially saying, "I had an opportunity to write the foreword for this book, and I more or less endorse this wealth management firm. And these are the reasons why and you should reach out to so and so."

And now we're packaging this up through this third-party private printing company we use. And so now the whole list of, say, 500 or 1,000 clients are all receiving a personal package from the CPA, paid for by the advisor, but from the CPA that has the book with the CPA's foreword, it has the letter, and that is like a scaled approach to immediately get a wave of new business. And if you have multiple relationships like this, you simply rinse and repeat across the relationships, and it drives massive immediate opportunities.

Michael: I guess I'm just trying to visualize the private printing dynamic. So, I'm not doing this through Amazon. I'm also sending a copy of the manuscript to some other provider that does private printing things where I can send them 5 copies of the manuscript with 5 different forewords and then they give me 5 different editions of the book privately printed that I send to each person that did that foreword for that segment of the books.

Paul: That's exactly right. And so just by the private printing, it's essentially a printing company, but now these printing companies or at least some of them create these services where it's just turnkey. In other words, they'll print the book, they'll keep it on file. It's not publicly accessible. You can have the letter. They'll even dynamically put in the names. And so you can send them a big list with 500 people, or you could even do it print-on-demand. And so you can say, "Hey, as I get these things in, I want you to send the book." And so the whole thing is just packaged up really nicely so that there's not a lot of things that the advisor or the CPA needs to do.

Michael: And is this like a whole other cost? Do I have to pay a whole other thing for this or am I still just printing my books at a couple bucks a book and they're happy because I'm going to order 50 here and 100 there? And that still adds up when they're doing their paper book process.

Paul: Yeah. So, in the case of the private printer, the cost dynamics are not quite as favorable as Amazon because Amazon has Prime, right?

Michael: Yeah. Well, I guess after whatever is the first couple trillion dollars of scale, it gets easier.

Paul: Yes. So, with the private printing, it's more or less the same thing. You can print a book for roughly $4. You can print more in bulk for $2.50 or so. But really the 2 additional charges is they'll print out the letter, they'll put the package together with the letter, and then they'll put it out to the mail. And so now you're paying a small fee for the letter, the handling, and then you're ultimately paying a third-party carrier to ship it. And so this goes from, say, 4 bucks through Amazon, no letter, delivered through Prime to I want to say maybe 10 bucks or so, private-printed, print-on-demand with letter, delivers to a third party.

Michael: You're higher, but you're doing 50 or 100 copies of the book for a CPA to send out to their base of clients. You're going to be out $500 to $1,000. And you're probably getting more than one client from this. Even one client is still going to more than pay for itself. The incremental costs, to me, that's a small number once you've got the book and a relationship with the CPA and buy-in from the CPA who's excited to do the foreword for a book. This is going to go well. We're just kind of in speed bump costs.

Paul: Yeah, exactly right. And it's a tiny fraction. And you can do this all at once. You can do it 100 at a time, whatever makes sense, because then I would just add to it is that that in itself creates response, right? That creates response from people that are genuinely...you have trust in advance because of the CPA, because of the book, and generally the people that respond are genuinely going to...are interested in becoming your client. And again, depending on your relationship with the CPA, if you're really collaborative, they're providing you with the list of contacts, right? And so you know when the book's gone out, and if you're proactive, you're going to be following up. A lot of people are just going to reach out to you automatically. But if you're also proactive and you follow up and say, "Hey I just wanted to reach out and introduce myself. Hopefully, you got to copy the book. Love to schedule time with you," you're going to double or triple your response, right?

Michael: And then I guess, on Amazon, you leave the neutral, no foreword version. So, if someone manages to go look it up there, they just like, "Oh, I guess I got a special copy with my CPA's foreword." You don't have someone else's foreword where it gets weird.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. I think the main thing... Even if you do have another foreword, I think the main thing for me... And that's a good point, but the main thing for me is that you just want to have one copy on Amazon. You don't want to have multiple copies.

Promoting The Book Through A Virtual Speaking Tour [43:14]

Michael: So then what's next on the list? We've got inner circle launch. We've got public launch for Amazon bestseller boost. We've got COI strategy.

Paul: Yeah.

Michael: What else?

Paul: Yeah. So, the next one that I love and I do myself, I call it the virtual speaking tour. And back in the day, when people published a book, the place to go would be to be on Oprah. And don't get me wrong. If Oprah's calling, go on the show. I mean, great opportunity. But in today's world, 2024, one of the best ways to create awareness, especially with the specific audience that you serve is guest podcasting. I mean, I call it the virtual speaking tour because I tie it, okay, I published my book. Now I want to go and talk about the content of my book on targeted podcasts that my ideal clients hang out on.

And so, as an example, I have a client. His name is Michael, and he's written actually, at this point, several books all geared towards nurses and more broadly, healthcare professionals. And so one of the things we helped him do was once he published the book is that we helped book for him speaking opportunities on this podcast, and we try to get on the most popular ones. People that have relationship with the audience, been doing it for years, as big size audience as possible. But this is one of the most enjoyable things about...a lot of people don't look at marketing as enjoyable, but I can tell you that this is one of the most enjoyable ways to market is the virtual speaking tour because now he's essentially...we do this twice a month for him, but he's going and he's getting booked to speak on these podcasts that are geared towards nurses and healthcare professionals and usually about 30 minutes or so. But they bring him on because of the book and the message, and they just ask him thoughtful questions, and he's able to share the message. And just, again, it acts almost as a one-to-many referral. And it's not because the host is explicitly endorsing him, but because the host is bringing on people that can add value, and they want it to be educational and beneficial for the audience, there's a huge transfer of trust.

And then there's a very clear bridge backwards, meaning that once they've done that, a segment of the audience is going to go and look at his book and want to take next steps. And so I find speaking in general is powerful. And whether it's in person or whether it's online, either way is great.

Michael: So, what do I do when I get...is the idea I'm getting on the guest podcast and I can get on to it because I'm an author, and that's the credibility, and I'm just literally talking about myself, what I do, the ideas in my book, or am I still trying to get the book out there? So, I go on a podcast because I want to do a giveaway for all your podcast listeners, or I'm trying to sell them a copy of the book, like I'm raffling a copy of the book. How do I think about what is my actual goal when I'm trying to go on to these podcasts?

Paul: Yeah, great question. So, I'll answer, but I'm just going to segue to one of the other strategies that we typically do in advance of that. And this is where, even though we recommend putting the book on Amazon for the reasons we've talked about, which is the print-on-demand, the Prime delivery, etc., one of the things we recommend people do once they have the book is to create a book website. And so when you go on a podcast like that, or whether you're speaking in person, or even just talking one-to-one to people as you're talking about the message of the book, because fundamentally what I'm really describing here is that the book is the message. The book is a well thought out, well-documented core message that you want to communicate to the public. And you want to get that in book form because there's just a lot of credibility and status and all those things that accrue to being an author.

But once you have the book, what you really want to view it as is not just ink on paper, but you actually want to say, "Okay, that's the message. Now how can I communicate this to the world more broadly?" Because you've spent this time to really come up with this messaging. And so part of that...and this is another one of the strategies, but you want to get it on audio. There's a certain segment of the population that will read a book, and there's a certain segment like myself that's just busy and I'd love to hear…but I listen to most of the books that I do on Audible by listening. I don't read as much, and I'm sure some people do, but I tend to listen more than I read. And so you want to make the book available in all the forms that make sense. The goal of it is that your ideal reader consumes it. Whether it's listening, whether it's reading, it doesn't really matter. It's consumption of the book.

So, to that end, another thing that we recommend as part of the 6 is to go out and actually build a book website and be fairly simple and straightforward. But the thing about that is that you don't just want to have it there and free, and people come there and you don't track who they are. Instead, you want to have it gated, meaning that you can tell people, "Okay, go to my website. Get a complimentary copy of my book." And if you've done the audiobook, you can say, "Get a complimentary copy of my audiobook." But in exchange, what you're getting is their name and email address. And that allows for the follow-up, right? Systematic drip campaign follow-up that then helps them to not just go there and forget about it but reminds them, "Hey, you got this book. You should listen. These are the reasons why, etc., etc." That's a lot different from getting it...

So, back to the podcast now, it's a lot different from saying, hey, go buy my book on Amazon because maybe you get 5, 10, 15, 20 people buying the book but you have no idea who they are. And so again, royalties don't matter. So, if you got 5 bucks in royalties or 10 bucks in royalties, who cares? And now I don't know who's doing it. So, really, if you want to tie all those things together, the strategy is that the book in many ways is the passport because, as I would imagine you would agree with, given that you have a very popular podcast is that you're looking for quality vetted guests. And one of the ways...and you tell me, but one of the ways I imagine it, because I do this myself, is that you're looking for markers that they have something meaningful to share. And a book is one of those ways that people demonstrate that expertise.

Michael: Yeah, they've demonstrated they have something to share. They've demonstrated a certain level of thoughtfulness about it. They tend to be pretty organized in what they're going to communicate. So, if you had to organize your thoughts at some point to get the book out, you've organized your thoughts. So, we're not just going to be in free flowing conversation that bounces all over the place, particularly if they're someone that's done the book and we're not the first on the list of their podcasts in their virtual speaking tour. By the time they get to us, they've done this conversation a couple of times in figuring out how to formulate the ideas from their book into a conversation. So, just, yeah, it tends to go well from a hosting content, hosting guests perspective.

Paul: Yeah. And so you tie all those things together, in this case, Michael. So, he's on the podcast and it's not just one and done, but it's multiple and it's as long as it makes sense. And so it could be 6 months. It could be a year. If the results are there, he could go on and on and on. But ultimately what he's looking for is creating that awareness in the marketplace. But ultimately, as I said, really what I recommend for people to do is to not say, "Go to Amazon and buy my copy." It's like, no, get the book website done in advance. And that's the place that you want to invite people to come to. That's the most powerful way to do it.

Michael: And I'm going to drop ship, order a copy of the book to them, or is the idea... They're going to sign up with an email list. I'm going to send them an electronic copy of it.

Paul: Yeah. I have a few clients that will actually send a copy to the person. They work with ultra-high-net-worth business owners, so they see the value. If someone's going to not just give their name and address but their... I'm sorry, their name and email, but their whole address in exchange for it, they see the value of doing it. It's worked very well for them. In my case and probably in most cases, what I'm offering to deliver for free in exchange for the opt-in is essentially an electronic version of my book plus the audiobook. And so when someone goes to my website or most people's websites I'm talking about, they'll get a free eBook version of it as well as a free audiobook version of it, so you can deliver on that promise of free.

Now a handful of people are going to be like, "Okay, that's great. I'm going to still go to Amazon," and they can but I would always recommend directing people to your website and giving them that free option because really what you want is for them to, A, take action and, B, you want to know who's coming to you.

Michael: Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess the irony from that end, right, if they go to Amazon and buy it, I make a few dollars and I don't know who they are, for a lot of folks that actually try to do email list building, you can spend many dollars per email address just literally trying to build your email list. So, I'm forgoing $4 of book sales to get your email address of a book you actually want to get from me is a really good marketing.

Paul: Well, and assuming $4, because as we established, the first $4...

Michael: Oh, yeah, let's go to Amazon. I'm not getting that anyway.

Paul: I'm going to make nothing.

Michael: And I already did my book sales from my Amazon bestseller list. I don't need the book volume going through Amazon at this point. Getting people I can talk to becomes the most meaningful.

Paul: I've been working with financial advisors in this kind of marketing capacity since 2016. And during the time, I've worked with close to 500 financial advisors. And one of the things I saw early on, because I used to focus on helping financial advisors use LinkedIn to generate leads and appointments. That was like one of the services that I did, and I still do to some degree, but I really moved away from it for the most part because what I discovered at that point is that I thought going into it that, hey, if we get an appointment for a financial advisor and we book it, it's on their calendar, we've done our job and this is going to be great. And what I discovered over time, with these online appointments, is that you might get...it's hard getting booked and you can do it, but then there's a drop-off and show-up. But then there's a huge drop-off in terms of actual conversion. And the reason for that, at least in my experience, what I observed is that there's no trust built, is that people can be curious. And if you have a good offer online and say, "We can do X, Y, Z," assuming it's compliance-approved and all that good stuff, people will schedule a call to some degree. But when you're dealing with a decision that's so important to people, their finances, there's a lot of trust that needs to be built in advance for that to be a profitable endeavor.

While online is great and it has its place, if you're just responding to an ad and now you're being sold to on a call, it just has an abysmal conversion rate. Whereas if you take the time to establish trust in advance and then have a call, it's the complete opposite. If someone's listened to you on a virtual speaking tour, listened to a podcast, they read your book and they show up, that's an 80% conversion. The other one is like a 5% to 10% conversion.

Michael: And why am I doing this with a book website as opposed to just putting the book on my website with some banner that says you can get a copy of my book if you give me your email address?

Paul: Yeah. I think it's the same idea behind a landing page. I mean, you can. And for some clients, they'll have their main website and they'll have the banner because so much traffic will go there naturally. But I think especially when you're doing more of speaking... especially when you're talking about the content of the book, you don't want to confuse people, right? A busy mind doesn't take action. And just like the logic behind a landing page, which is essentially there's one thing you want them to do, which is opt in. You just want to have a really clear path where it's like you talk about the book, go to my book website, get a free copy of my book, and just make that bridge and that path just super simple.

Michael: So, for folks that want to see what this looks like, I think you said like you literally do this with your book, your material. So, where can people go if they want to see what this looks like, what this experience is like?

Paul: Yes, I practice what I preach.

Michael: That's good, that's good.

Paul: Everything that I've described, I do myself. And so I'm able to validate these things through the experience of my clients, as well as my own experience. And I'm a constant learner, so I adjust and I make things better all the time. But everything that I've talked about, I practice, I preach. So, I appreciate the question. And where to go is my book is called "The Short Book Formula." And if you go to www.theshortbookformula.com, you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. You go there, you opt in, you get complimentary access to an eBook, to an audiobook. And that's the same type of site that we recommend clients do for themselves. And typically it's bookurl.com, right? And so it's just a very clean, it matches the book, very simple way to direct people to learn more about you.

Michael: So, for folks who are listening, this is Episode #417. So, if you are driving or running or in a place where you can't write that down is kitces.com/417 is this episode of the podcast. And we'll have a link out to Paul's website in the show notes if you want to click through and see more what that looks like.

Paul: And the reason I bring it up is that doing the audiobook is 1 of the 6 things that we recommend people look to do once they publish their book. And it's interesting in today's age, and I love to get your take on this, back in the day, there was 2 ways to do it. One is you narrate the book yourself, which it has its pros. I mean, people get to know you better, establish a relationship. And then some people, either because they're busy or don't feel comfortable doing it, they'd hire a voice actor to do it. And those are the 2 traditional ways. What's fascinating to me now is just the emergence of AI [Artificial Intelligence].

Michael: And I will say... I know a few folks who have done this actually in the audiobook context, because at the end of the day, some of us are comfortable to, kind of, voice narrate, do a longer thing because it's the length of a book, and you try to bring some dynamism and energy to our voice, and others just really not our gift on this Earth. And so they were using AI tools just to do that like clone my voice so it's in my style but do the book because I just really don't want to read through it and have to do that well. But they like the idea that people will hear their voice, so that when they meet someone as a prospect, the voice is familiar because they've heard it.

Paul: That's exactly right. And I've geeked out on this for a while now. And the cool thing is that the technology is consistently getting better and better and better.

Michael’s Experience With Writing A Book To Build Credibility [59:02]

Paul: One of the reasons I think authorship is so powerful, and I said it earlier, which is that fundamentally it helps to accelerate the speed of trust. And I've been excited to have this conversation with you this past week or so because you... Just from what I've observed and I don't think this is an exaggeration at all, but you have achieved what I would call authoritative positioning in the marketplace. For every person I ask, I tell them, it's like, "I'm going to be on Michael Kitces." "Oh, I know him." I've talked to multiple of your guests, and they're like, "Yeah, I was on his show." And suddenly that way more people heard it.

And so you've done it, as I'm sure that you know because this isn't meant to be outlandish confidence, it's true, is that you've done a phenomenal job of creating authoritative positioning. I think becoming an author is one avenue and I'd argue it's an easier avenue for many people, but if it's okay, before we get into our process, I'd love to, kind of, hear from you and I'm, kind of, flipping this on you, but what is your experience about authority marketing and potentially the benefits of it?

Michael: Yeah, I would agree this direction, because I've lived a little bit of the contrast. I did my annuity book earlier in my career far enough along. I'd gotten nerdy on annuities and had some things to say and write. And so I wanted to write a book. And at the time, I was still doing much more of a mix of client work and writing and just, kind of, trying to find the things I wanted to do in the world to get paid for being the nerd that I like to be.

And so the book for me, at the time, very rapidly turned into a bunch of expert witness work actually which, yeah, in that vein, if I'm trying to take myself back to the timing, I was, I don't know, 28 years old and doing expert witness work and charging expert witness fees, which was probably... I think I was doing $250 to $300 an hour work and this was 20 years ago.

Paul: Well, that's a lot of money 20 years ago.

Michael: Yeah, I know quite what that is. Inflation-adjusted, like $400 to $500 an hour as a 20, 27, 28-year-old.

Paul: Amazing.

Michael: And I'm like, "How am I getting this?" And attorneys were inbound to me from all over the country. It was like because they were finding the book. They were trying to look up people who could be credible experts on the stand and actually knew their stuff. And they're like, "You wrote the advisor's guide to annuities." So, if I'm the attorney representing my clients as the plaintiff against an advisor who did a bad thing, and I'm trying to figure out who can be an expert witness to explain that the advisor did a bad thing with this annuity, who better than literally the hired author of "The Advisors Guide to Annuities" to do that?

And ironically, for me, expert witness work was not actually stuff that I loved because it turns out it's really contentious. I don't really need to put myself into that level of contentiousness. It kind of rubs off on me in negative ways. So, I didn't stick with that work. But, yeah, we did the book and, I don't know, in 12 to 18 months, suddenly I'm doing this really high-level, very well-paid at the time expert witness work that just came off the sheer credibility of the book and having the book out there. So, it worked and it worked remarkably fast in driving some of those opportunities.

Then I went the idiotic, slavish way and spent 10 years writing 1,000 articles on the blog to replicate it a second time, which definitely was slower. It's had other benefits. There's other things that come from, kind of, building it from a platform perspective. But I lived firsthand getting a book out there where you can be authoritative in your little realm. That was a little pocket. I did just annuities just for advisors like 1 product of 1 thing for 1 segment, and all of a sudden that was enough to be taking off. Look at folks like Ed Slott, the IRA guy. He picked 1 type of account and made a career out of it. And I mean that in the most positive way. We overthink this sometimes about how complex it needs to be. So, yeah, I've lived that firsthand—I like how you frame it—the way that trust and perceived credibility accelerates as a book author.

The Ideal Length For A Financial Advisor’s Book [1:03:38]

Paul: Okay, I heard you say that it took 12 to 18 months. And a lot of people, they have this fear that, okay, it's like... I'd imagine if someone's listening at this point in the conversation like, okay, sounds good. But I'm busy. I don't have the time, etc.

Michael: Yeah, to be fair, I was in my 20s. I had more spare time than I do now.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. So, the book that I wrote, "The Short Book Formula," there's really 2 key ideas and I think I alluded to this before but it's 2 big ideas. One is that why write a book, and the book accelerates the speed of trust. And so in my mind, in my experience, it's going to save you a tremendous amount of time as you put that into action the ways that we've talked about. But the second is, is that the way that I construe a book is that a book ideally is not just to say I'm an author and to have this book and this tome that has this body of work. But for a successful advisor that's looking to put the book in action and actually use it to grow their practice is that it needs to be a book that actually gets read. It needs to be a book that your ideal reader/ideal client/ideal prospect are going to actually, as part of the process, whether they read it, before they engage with you or they read it as part of the engagement, but they're going to take the time to read it ideally cover to cover. And so to accomplish that, you can't give them a 10-hour, 5-hour book and say, "Read this."

Michael: Right. Yeah, bless Ray Dalio's “Principles,” but that is not a short fast read.

Paul: That would slow down sales, not increase them. And so the argument that I make in my book is that the ideal book that you should be thinking about writing is a book that's between 12,000 to 25,000 words. And what that really translates into is a book that can be read or listened to cover to cover in 1 to 2 hours. And so 1 to 2 hours. And on the 1-hour side, it's substantive enough where you can really get your message across, so it's not just an eBook per se. It's substantive. And on the far end of it, the 2-hour, 25,000 constraint really forces you to decide what's most important, because I think there's a lot of people... And I'll just use the example I used before with Anton Anderson and the book, "The Art of Collaboration." He's been doing this for 10 years. He's been teaching and training advisors and CPAs, had to do this for a long time. He had a co-author on it, Paul Latham, and he's been doing this for even longer. And so the constraint wasn't like, "Do you have enough to say?" It's, "What's the message and can we tell this in a compelling way to a person within that constraint of 25,000 words?"

And so all that to be said is that, in my mind, you don't have to go on sabbatical, rent the cabin in the woods, get the scarf, smoke the cigar, and a year later come back and say everyone, "Here it is." I've written the book. Our whole process, I call it the 6-week blueprint. And so in as little as 6 weeks, we help busy, successful advisors go from essentially blank sheet of paper to published author in as little as 6 weeks.

Michael: So, I want to come back in a moment to literally understand what is the 6-week process. How does that work? What does it look like? But just trying to visualize a little more for folks. When we live in a writing world, we're pretty familiar with what word counts mean and how to visualize word counts. For those of us that don't, how long is 12,000 to 25,000 words? How many pages is that book?

Paul: Yeah. Yeah.

Michael: What is that?

Paul: So, there's something called trim size, which is just a fancy way to say how many inches the book is. And so there's a couple standard ones. You have 5.5 by 8.5 or 6 by 9. And so the trim size that you pick will help determine the thickness of the book, so to speak. But in general, the actual printed book is generally about 100 pages up to maybe 160 pages, somewhere there. But the cool thing, and I literally have this experience myself, is that I'll go to trade shows and speak. And I'll give out a physical copy of my book. And when someone comes back to me and schedules a call, what they'll invariably tell me is that, "Yeah, I read it on the plane ride home." And that's precisely what we want.

Michael: That's your goal, that's your goal.

Paul: That's the goal because, at other times, I'll receive a really big thick book from someone. I'm like, "Wow, you're probably pretty smart." And then I'll immediately get intimidated. I'll put it aside, I'll put it on my book shelf, and I won't even read a page because I'm just too intimidated to open it. And so all that...

Michael: Uh-huh, not that any of us are channeling this discussion as we're hearing it. No. Mm-hmm.

Paul: And so all that wisdom, right, I mean, the person that writes a long book, we're going to assume that they have a lot of wisdom to share, which is fantastic. But that opens the opportunity to create multiple books, right? The beauty of what I call "The Short Book Formula" is that for anyone writing that first book typically it's a big deal, right? And it should be. But once you, kind of, get the book and you see how it works and the benefits that occurred to it, then it's like, okay, well, you want to... Each book should have an ideal reader in mind.

And I think when you said in your example was perfect because the book that you wrote a few decades ago, there was a really narrow niche audience for that book and it did tremendous things for your career. And so when people come and say to us like, "Okay, well, help us think through this book," one of the first questions is, "Who's your ideal reader? Who do you want to read this book?" And oftentimes it should correlate with your ideal client, but it really gets people to focus in on who that ideal reader is, what their pain points are, their desires, ultimately the transformation that you help them achieve. But the more clarity you have in doing it, the more effective you're going to be with your book, the easier it's going to be to write the book. And when you have that constraint, suddenly it's like, "Okay, this is actually achievable."

Paul’s 6-Week Book Writing Process [1:09:46]

Michael: So, now walk us through a little bit more like, okay, so how does this actually work in 6 weeks?

Paul: Yeah. So, the core of our process that we take people through is it's based around the idea that your typical advisor is someone who has experience. And this could be 5 years' experience. It could be 20 years, 30 years, but they have experience, they have enough interaction, they know what they do. Oftentimes they'll have a CFP, and maybe they'll have other designations. It doesn't really matter, but they have a basis of knowledge. I think really the key thing that they have in common is that they're naturally good at leading and influencing people. And one of the reasons that we love working with advisors is because this just really describes most successful advisors when they're having these relationships. They're good at talking. And so I guess what I'm trying to say is that they're naturally good at talking, telling stories, taking complex concepts and using examples, analogies and stories to make them relatable to a person who doesn't have that type of knowledge. They're naturally persuasive.

And so what we've found works the best, whether or not they consider themselves a writer and most don't, is that we take them through 6 1-hour Zoom sessions. We have a book coach in our company, and our coaches work exclusively with financial advisors. And so we just have a structured process that takes them through 6 1-hour Zoom calls where we're essentially having them talk out the content of their book. And as part of that process, what we do is that's on Zoom so they can do it from their office. They don't have to travel.

And we use a really cool technology, which you may have heard of, and they're just cropping up all over the place now, but we use one called Otter.ai. And it's one of those note-taking things that now I see more and more advisors using. But the magical thing about it is that the calls we do are recorded, and it'll capture word for word the entire conversation, all of the content. But most importantly, it's the author's, it's the advisor's ideas, their stories, their examples, the way that they communicate and all those things. Because at the end of the day, there's reputation risk.

And so when you write a book and put your name out there, it needs to be a good product. It needs to be something that you're really super proud of, that you believe represents your voice and makes you look good in the marketplace. And so the whole process is designed around getting them to talk out their concepts through active coaching. But ultimately, it's a book that represents their ideas in their voice.

Michael: So, help me understand a little bit further what happens in these 6 1-hour Zoom sessions, how it goes, or what you ask.

Paul: Sure. And just to add to that, the reason for that 6 weeks is just because we've decided to time space them so that they're an hour a week. And so for someone who's like, "Hey, I want to do it in 4 weeks," or, "I want to do it in 10 weeks," those are both available. But we found that 6 weeks for us is optimal because really the question that people come to us with is like, "Okay, it sounds good, but all in, what's my time here?"

And a key to the success is that we want people to come prepared to the call. And so before any of the calls, we create an author workbook. Based on the information they've given us, we help outline the chapters. We have questions. We want them to take the time typically about an hour to 2 hours per week mentally preparing and jotting down ideas and concepts so that when they actually are on the call from start to finish, it's super purposeful, super structured. And we're trying to get them to expand and articulate the ideas in their own voice, the stories, challenge them where appropriate, ask them to expand and clarify where appropriate.

But throughout that whole process, we're collecting I'd say northward of 50,000-plus words of really rich content. And so then additionally, on our team, we have a professional writer who's tasked with going through all that. And now during that process, they create for the advisor, first, the first draft. And I say that intentionally because even the best first draft is about 70% the way there. You don't get to perfection or really polished product in one try. So then, as part of that process, we give them first draft. We have them read it, and then we spend 2 to 3 sessions as part of the 6 or so to get their feedback. What do you like? What do you want to expand upon? Take away all those good things. But at the end of the process, we should get to a point where like, my goodness, that's me, and that sounds like me. Those are my ideas. And if anything, it's a more polished version of the way that I would normally say them.

Michael: Yeah. So, it sounds like there's some, I would say, pre-work. I don't mean that a negative, worky way, but just so there's some pre-work like there's a workbook I do in advance to try to start framing some of this up so you know what to ask me in the interviews.

Paul: Yeah. So, from the very beginning, someone signs up with us. We send them what we call a fast-track assignment. And we tell them upfront before they sign up with us, because we want to really set expectations clearly. All in, you're about 2 to 3 hours per week. It includes about 1 to 2 hours…and we'll use the word "homework" because we want people to appreciate that there is work that they have to do. The call itself is an hour. And so before the very first call, we'll give them an assignment, which really helps them to get clear and clarity on the book.

And so some people come to us and they have an idea of what the book is and other people, they're not sure and both are fine. But it really starts to get them to think through and essentially brain dump the ideal reader, the pain points, the desires, the ways that they help them, ultimately how they want to use the book and what they hope the book's going to help, take that journey that the reader is going to go through from the reason they picked up the book in the first place to the point where they finished it. That's all done before the very first session.

Michael: Okay, so you've, kind of, figured out these workbook questions of tell us about your ideal reader, tell us about the pain points they've got, what is the book supposed to do to help them. You're trying to prompt advisors and formulate this so the interview series goes more productively.

Paul: Exactly. Yep. Every hour of our processes... I'm very efficient and so... It's been around. Life happens, people get busy. And at that point, if I didn't have a chance to do the homework, we just say, "Hey, let's just reschedule," because it's not productive for them or for us to have someone come on the call and be like, "So, what do you think about annuities?" Instead, we need to have notes and ideas, because part of that idea behind time-space learning is that if you know what's going to happen like let's say next week, we're going to be talking about Chapters, say, 1 to 3. And these are the key themes. Really the questions are designed to help people reflect on their experiences and their knowledge. There's so much brilliance captured inside people's heads. And sometimes we forget it, right? We've been doing it for so long that it becomes very...we forget about how much we know, right? The first time you learn something, you're like, "Wow, this is so awesome. This is amazing." And then a week, a month, a year, 10 years later goes by, you're like, "Who cares about that?" And so we really try to capture that brilliance that's locked in there. And a big part of that's giving them a chance to reflect on those things and come up with ideas so that when they come in, they're like, "Oh, here's the things we're going to talk about."

Michael: And so the idea is each of my 6 weeks, I've got basically an hour or 2 of homework and then a 1-hour conversation. And my homework might be filling out a workbook. It might be looking at a draft. These are all elements of the homework along the way.

Paul: Yep, that's exactly right. And it's very structured. So, first week is reviewing the pre-assignment, which is the brain dump, just so that the person or book coach has a very clear idea of what the book's going to be about. The next 3 calls are our author workbook, and they're carefully going through it a third, a third, a third and filling out sequentially the information and just, kind of, working through the book. Those are the first 4 calls. And then at that point, we create the first draft. That usually takes us about a week, sometimes up to 2 weeks. And so it can delay the process a little bit, but we give them that. And then the final 2 sessions generally are...the first one, they and the book coach carefully go through the first half. They've already read it in advance and so they come in with their notes, but now's a chance to have rich dialogue and conversation about what's working, what needs to be changed, what ideas they want to refine, etc. But we find that the first draft is usually about 70% the way there, but by the end of the coaching calls and then the second draft that we create for them, it's usually about 95% to 100% the way there. At that point, they'll generally need to put up their compliance, which we expect. And the question hasn't been asked, but it comes up a lot is that, can I do this? And what we found, in our case, we've never taken on someone who we couldn't publish. So, I think maybe a captive agent might have some challenges, but everyone else, that broker-dealer, RIA, etc., we do a lot of work with people in the Ameriprise system as well as others. And so we've never had a book rejected, but we anticipate it's going to go through compliance. They're going to get the red pen. They're going to make some suggestions. But they're all easy to address, because we're not saying anything in the book that's...

Michael: Yeah, it's usually like, "Let me do 12,000 words about how awesome my investment performance has been."

Paul: Exactly. So, it's a pretty simple, straightforward process.

Michael: And so the idea is, by the end, I get... So, the first 4 weeks, essentially the material's getting formulated. Weeks 5 and 6, I'm looking at the first half of the book, the second half of the book. And I guess per your comment, right, the other virtue of "only" doing a 12,000 to 25,000 word book that you can read in an hour or 2 is that means you can read the first half of it when you're doing your own edits in 30 to 60 minutes. You're not slogging through your own personal edits to “War and Peace.” The book's not that long like not in a negative way but the book's not that long, so it doesn't take you that long to edit through and give feedback with the writer.

Paul: That's exactly right. And we do have...our longer program for the book, that's more towards 25,000 words, is 8 weeks, 8 sessions. So, we do allow a little bit of extra time for the longer book. But exactly what you said is that what we've found in doing this is that...again, our client, they're successful. They know their stuff. They're good talkers, good storytellers, but they're not writers. And if given too much to do at once, it just becomes overwhelming because it's outside their comfort zone. And so just by breaking it down to the segments, it becomes much more manageable. It becomes enjoyable. I get the benefit of my book coaches and writers, but part of what I do day to day is I watch the recordings of these calls just to check in, make sure everything's going on track.

And it's always like the moment of truth, right? So, that fifth session when they're seeing the book and we're getting the reaction and they were just thrilled. And they said it in their own words. It's like, "This is like us but better." And it doesn't mean that's perfect, right, because we still have the next 3 sessions. And what you find is that there's...and we call it the substantive editing process, and there's so much more to polish it and finetune it. But we know that we're doing our job when that first draft comes in and they're like, "Wow, that really sounds like me."

Michael: And so what's my all-in time on this. Am I really down to 2 or 3 hours a week times 6 weeks? I'm 20-ish hours and I'm done. Is there anything left?

Paul: That is by and large it. There's a little coordination, getting it through compliance, getting it back, but those are just, kind of, a little bit paper pushing. But we try to make it as easy as possible for clients. We find that, when we do coauthors, which we do a lot of, sometimes the homework time can take a little bit longer just because they approach it as partners and they spend more time talking about it and considering it and reviewing it. But for the individual author, that's essentially what it should come down to.

Michael: And so then what's the cost for the advisor to go through this process?

Paul: Yeah. So, this is an interesting question because I always get a variety of answers and so I just want to preface it with that. And so the very first book project before I started my own business and did this, I helped a person who's a very successful financial advisor. He wrote a book called "SMART Retirement," and he went through a company called Forbes Books and it's pretty popular. You may have heard of it. And the price tag on that was about $100,000 plus. And then since then, I've looked at other ones and oftentimes they're in the 25, 50, 100 [thousand dollars], so really varies.

Michael: Yeah, I know. Scribe Media was out there doing this for a while.

Paul: Yeah, Scribe Media is one of the ones that comes up, and they range from 50 to 150 [thousand dollars]. And so it's just really all over the place partly because our books are relatively shorter. And so our books are about 12,000, 25,000 words. and oftentimes those books are probably more 50,000 words. We're able to come in at, I think, a more attractive price point, but we have 3 different author programs and it ranges from on the low end, $9,000 and on the high end, $18,000.

Michael: And what defines where I am in that range?

Paul: It's primarily 2 things. It's word count and number of coaching calls.

Michael: Okay. And how do I know what word count I want? I'm not an advisor used to writing. I'm like, "I don't know whether I have a 12,000-word idea or a 25,000-word idea."

Paul: Usually, as part of the process, I'll send them a couple of samples, one that represents 25,000 words, one that represents about 12,000 to 15,000 words so that they can, kind of, see the size and physicality of the book.

A lot of people come to us and they're like, "Hey, can I start in this one level? And if I decide to upgrade, can I do that?" I'm just like, "Absolutely." Because we know it's a big decision and it's, kind of, hard to make a decision without a little bit of experience. And so whatever...we try to recommend things, but ultimately it's whatever they feel comfortable doing is where we get started. And if that's the right program, fantastic. And if they decide to upgrade, fantastic.

Michael: So then I've got to ask. So I'm just trying to process this from the advisor end. So, is this "my book"? Is this a ghost-written book? Is that how I'm supposed to think about this? Am I supposed to tell people that? Am I obligated to explain that? How do I think through this "I'm the author but not the writer" dynamic?

Paul: Yeah. From my point of view, it's 100% their book. We start with a blank sheet of paper. All of the content is the content that they've shared with us. So, we're not out there doing research and coming up with ideas. It's 100% the ideas that were communicated through the homework assignments, through the coaching calls. And so the final product is something that, when they look at, they should be very adamant like, "This is my book," because even though they were assisted in the process, it really is their book in the sense that it represents them. It's their voice, their ideas.

And then part of the question is ownership and they retain 100% control. Our job is essentially done at the point that we help them publish the book, but the relationship that they have between themselves and Amazon is strictly between them. We don't take anything.

Michael: I think it's interesting the way you frame it. It's 100% the advisor stuff because you're not doing the research or coming up with the ideas. You're taking their spoken explanation of the things in the book and writing it down for them and editing it maybe so it flows a little bit better than a free-flowing conversation.

Paul: Yeah. At best, it's like... I mean, at one level, it's like editorial support, right? But instead of having to have them write it down and type it, we're just having them talk it out.

What Surprised Paul The Most Building His Business [1:26:18]

Michael: So, what surprised you the most about the path of trying to build a business, doing this for advisors? You've been at it for a while now.

Paul: I think, for me, it was just really discovering the right fit for the service. And so when I started...so, I've worked pretty much exclusively with financial advisors and professionals. I'll explain in a second over the past 9 years or so. And when I started, I worked a little bit more with, I want to say, insurance-based agents or focused agents. And then I've also worked with CPAs that do advanced tax planning and things of that nature. And I've worked with a number of financial advisors.

Currently, what we've really...and so we can work with all of them, but currently, what I really see is a sweet spot is I think really more the wealth manager, financial advisor, really someone that does it more holistically is not just trying to create a lead magnet to push a product. And I've done those books, right? I'm good at doing those books, but I don't think that's a sweet spot. So, oftentimes people will come like...and they'd be like, "Okay, I want to sell IUL [Indexed Universal Life insurance]." And oftentimes they don't have the experience…

Michael: This was your point earlier. The advisor of the experience, right? If I've been doing this for enough years, I've gotten pretty good at making points and explaining concepts to my clients and using some stories, particularly if I've got a thing I'm passionate about. I've probably done this story in front of clients enough times that it kind of rolls off the tongue, which means it gets a lot easier for you guys to edit that into book format because that's what we do.

Paul: That's exactly right. And so a lot of the people I'm working with now really a lot of them are doing behavior-based financial advice and talking about values and more holistic planning. And I'll share a quick thing. I just chose myself a new advisor just in the past, I want to say, 3 months or so, and this is a person who...he was at a trade show that was at. He was interested in the book. He came to me. He shared the concept of the book. And I just intrigued. As much as I work with advisors and close to 500 at this point, and I've heard the different ideas. I was just like, "Wow, that's really smart." And he took the opportunity to say, "Hey, if you want to have a call, we can do that." I'm like, "Okay." And usually I'm super hesitant about doing these things, right, but I was just so intrigued by it. And just behind the scenes, I'd like listened into the calls that he was doing, and I just got completely sold. And so I'm gone. One more example that I'll share if I may briefly...

Michael: Yeah, please, please.

Paul: ...is there's a lot of different things that we've talked about when it comes to creating awareness for the book. We talked about the inner circle soft launch, the virtual speaking tour, the COI strategy. Those are all fantastic. But a very easy one and a low-hanging fruit one is just really take the book and integrate it into what you're already doing. So, imagine there's 2 advisors. They both have the same experience, the same CFPs and other credentials, maybe give similar advice. Maybe they even work with the same company. And when a person goes to one of them, they can have a great meeting and say, "Wow, it makes sense and maybe I'll move forward but I want to think about it."

But in another case, if the book is used as a tool and maybe sent to the person in advance and they have a chance to read the book before the meeting, it's a completely different dynamic, because trust has been built in advance, assuming that the person resonated with the ideas. And now it's a completely different conversation. The "prospect" is now thinking, "I wonder if this guy will take me on, and I wonder if there's a minimum, and I wonder if I'm going to work with him or if I'm going to work with an associate advisor." So, it's just the most ideal place to be, in my opinion.

I didn't get into sales because I'm a natural salesperson, but I do sales every day. And what I love about what I do is I fully embrace what I call, and we talked about the authority marketing approach, which is establish your expertise through a book or a podcast or what have you and then get your message out there, so that by the time people come to you and show up on your office or your Zoom room, they're already pre-disposed wanting to work with you. That's where, to me, it's so enjoyable to do what I do.

The Low Point On Paul’s Journey [1:30:55]

Michael: So, what was the low point for you on this journey?

Paul: I shared a little bit of this before, but just when I was doing the one service where we're helping...aside from authorship and we're just helping people, at that time, use LinkedIn to generate leads and appointments. I went into that thinking, "This is fantastic. I'm fulfilling my job. I'm going to become rich and all these different things." And then over the course of a couple of years, just really describe it as a dismal conversion rate and just, again, because trust was not part of the equation. And so that was the low point is just like, what's wrong here? What's going on? And really the bright spot from there was to discover the power of authorship and just, kind of, really dial in, "Okay, the biggest constraint that advisors face and just probably professionals in general face when it comes to building these relationships where you become the trusted advisor and people are willing to engage with you, listen to you, and follow your advice is that trust is really the currency. And so what is the best way to establish trust and create trust?" And there's different ways. I think having your own podcast as you do is a fantastic way. It takes a lot of work. I think ironically, the easier way, which is counterintuitive that we've talked about is actually becoming an author, following The Short Book Formula approach is actually one of the fastest, easiest ways to establish trust.

The Advice Paul Would Give To His Younger Self [1:32:24]

Michael: So, what else do you know now you wish you could go back and tell you 10 years ago when you were starting down this journey?

Paul: I think it's when just you align your ideal fit clients with what you're really good at and what you're passionate about. It creates, I think, a very enjoyable business. And like myself, I love reading and learning about marketing but more specifically about things that have to do with authority-based marketing and influence more broadly. And so I'm just in this really lucky place right now where I've been able to write my book. And I've written multiple books. I've been able to do that. And I love going on podcasts like this one and talking about it. I love the people that find their way to my doorstep. At this point, we're really growing and I'm building out a bigger and bigger team as we get more and more demand for our services.

And so I think, at this point, sometimes I just need to pinch myself. I feel like, is this really all happening? And so I guess maybe to answer the question, knowing what I know now, I would have written my book sooner. I wish I had known about authority-based marketing sooner. And then at that point I would have written my books sooner and I would have gotten to where I'm at today 2 or 3 years sooner.

Paul’s Advice For Advisors Considering Writing A Book [1:33:45]

Michael: So, any other advice you would give? Just advisors who are thinking about going this path of writing a book and have trepidation or are still just trying to figure out is this for me, is this actually my thing.

Paul: Yeah, I think as a single takeaway, one thing I tell people is that when it comes to marketing, authority is the priority. And so just a simple way to think about authority is the priority, it's when you're looking at your marketing and what you're doing to generate new business, assuming that you're looking to grow your practice and attract new clients. If you look at your marketing activities from an authority standpoint, and really by authority, it's not this egocentric thing, "Hey, I'm important." It's really authority helps to accelerate the speed of trust. Whether that's done through a book or through a podcast, I think those right there are 2 fantastic ways to do it. If authority is the priority, because you know that authorship and really just authority-based marketing systems done well accelerates the speed of trust, make your life better, then you start looking at your activities at a different lens.

A number of years ago, I had launched a service where I had helped advisors actually do a podcast and I didn't do it too long, but I did for long enough. And just what I found was that, for most advisors, it was just a lot...it was too much, right? I think there was the occasional advisor that was a good fit for people that generally saw it as a long-term thing and just enjoyed having conversations, etc. But for most people, it was just too much work. And so I think podcasting is a great way to establish authority. I have my own podcast. I love being a guest on podcasts. But if I was to recommend... Someone that's looking to increase their thought leadership over time and maybe they're getting started or they're along the path, my recommendation would be start with a book. Second, get into guest podcasting. And then, third, think about starting your own podcast. And I think all 3 have their place, but that's how I would sequence them.

Michael: It's an interesting framing that I can certainly attest to it as well. Podcasting is pretty amazing from a kind of marketing and brand building perspective, but you have to show up repeatedly for a really long time to actually do that. Whereas, you make the book and get your thoughts down on paper and get it out there and you're done. It has an end. Podcasting for marketing really doesn't have an end. You have to actually like the journey of talking to people and doing the stuff that it takes to make podcasts happen. The book is a much more finite journey.

Paul: A hundred percent. And then if you expand that into the next one, which is the virtual speaking tour, as I call it, or guest podcasting, that's also just...relatively speaking, it's less work, super enjoyable, because you have a core message, right? So, you're not like having to go think about, what am I going to say today? You have your core message. It's well thought out. And what we typically recommend and help people do is to get on, say, 2 podcasts per month on ones that their ideal reader/prospect/client listen to. And twice a month, you get to have super enjoyable conversations like literally you and I are having right now at least from my perspective.

Michael: Yeah, yeah. Me, too.

Paul: I get paid to do this indirectly, right, this is awesome. And I literally published "The Short Book Formula" just shy of 2 years ago and my virtual speaking tour has not ended. I just keep on going.

What Success Means To Paul [1:37:11]

Michael: So, as we wrap up, this is a podcast about success and just one of the themes that comes up, the word success means very different things to different people. And so you're now on this wonderful journey with a fast growing team as you're doing, I think you said 500 plus books with authors, with advisors now. And so the business seems to be in a wonderful place. How do you define success for yourself at this point?

Paul: Yeah. I was prepared for this question. And so what came to me as I was thinking about this was cultivating your gifts in the service of others. And I think this ties back to what I do and just authorship in general is that the people that we work with and they're a good fit for what we do, that should become authors, and they have so many experience and knowledge and they make such an impact. And oftentimes they're making the impact one-to-one in the client meetings they have. And so, again, however you decide to do it, authorship being one vehicle, it really allows you to take your message, put it in something that you can get out into the world in a bigger way. It can be a legacy, right? I mean, it's something that it really allows you to serve your ideal clients in a bigger way and more of them likely than you're currently doing. There's a quote by Wayne Dyer, which is, “Don't die with your music still in you.” And so while there's, of course, a lot of ways to do this, I think, considering authorship is just one of those ways to really take all of the lessons and wisdom and stories that you've learned. And this is not just from the side that I've been talking about in terms of using authorship to grow your practice, but this is just really more on the impact side where using it to really...if you do work of value, it's to capture it and to share it with the world.

Michael: Very cool. Very cool. I love it, Paul. Thank you so much for joining us on the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Paul: Yeah, it's been my pleasure. I've really enjoyed the conversation.

Michael: Likewise. Thank you.