Kitces & Carl Ep 40: How To Turn Your Advisor Marketing Content Into A(n Entire) Book

***Editor's Note: Can't get enough of Kitces & Carl? Neither can we, which is why we've released it as a podcast as well! Check it out on all the usual podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Spotify, and Stitcher.

Show Notes

• Scribe Writing (Book In A Box)
• Books By Larry Swedroe
• Ash Maurya: Running Lean Book Case-study

Kitces & Carl Podcast Transcript

Michael: Welcome, Carl.

Carl: Greetings, Michael. Fancy seeing you here.

Michael: Who knew this was coming?

Carl: Well.

Michael: Before we jump in, some people listen to this by audio, some view it on the kitces.com site or on YouTube. So they get the video as well. And so I need to point out that the audio listeners are missing out on a really interesting thing, which is that you have a new setup now where you are in the UK that perfectly frames you with what I can only describe as a Kitces Blue couch. I'm assuming this was just happy coincidence, that you didn't literally buy a couch the color of my shirt just to honor this podcast. But I love that you are now, like, bathed in Kitces Blue surrounding you on all sides.

Carl: You're ruining it. You have no idea.

Michael: Because you have this wonderful blue couch as a backdrop behind you.

Carl: Now, everybody who's just listening to this, please go watch because I get more comments about this couch because people are like, "I love that couch." My wife is an interior designer, and this is her couch. We brought it from New Zealand, and she is now going to be devastated that somebody referred to it as a Kitces Blue couch. So I will have to clean all that up. So good.

Michael: I'd say it's a color. It's a legitimate color.

Carl: Well, it's not the color of this couch. That's fine. You can call it whatever you want, but this couch is not Kitces Blue .

Michael: All right, Cori and I will have this separate conversation at some point. I will get her on board with Kitces Blue as the color since she clearly has a natural affinity for it.

Carl: Yes, for sure. She'll blend that into her interior design business, "I could offer this couch in Kitces Blue."

Michael: Fantastic. Get it out there.

Carl: Perfect.

Michael: So I did want to talk today, though, speaking of like taking little things and making them bigger than they needed to be. We've been spending the past couple of podcast episodes talking about kind of like taking content, taking ideas, like, taking things in our heads and breaking it down to the point that we can turn it into content that we put out there and share in the world, right? Like, well, you don't have to make this any more complex than take the questions clients are asking you, answer them, capture it somehow, and put it out there in the world, and even every piece of task after I thought of the thing and gave an answer, which could be as simple as recorded into a voice memo because most of us don't have talker's block. Everything that happens thereafter can pretty much be either automated or easily hireable, or some combination of the two.

What Happens AFTER You've Been Creating Content For A While? [02:48]

But I want to talk for a moment about what happens after you've done that for a while, or even some people who are listening who have already been creating content for a while. They've had a client newsletter or a blog or a podcast or whatever it is, like, they've been making some stuff for a while. I know there's a whole other level of what you have done with this, that you've created content for a long time, and you've created a number of books over the years. And that is not a coincidence that you've made a bunch of columns and that you've made a book, there's actually a connection between these. And so I thought it would be a good topic today to talk about this translation of content from, "I'm making these pieces, I'm making, like, these snackable, bite-sized content pieces, what do you do with them?" What does this build up to? Or at least what can you build this up to? And what's been your process for it?

Carl: Yeah, this is a super fun conversation. So one thing I think we just need to get square in our minds, I want to talk about writing a book. And again, we don't get hung up in artifacts around here, but I'm telling you, there's one artifact that has special meaning in our world, and it's a book. Like, people say, they wrote the book on that. And I don't care if no one reads it. Obviously, we want people to read it, but just the fact that you've written a book. And I'm, again, thinking of underserved voices in our industry. Oh my gosh, can you imagine having written a book? Right? It just changes the game. And I know it changed the game for me and it changed the game for just about everybody I know who's done it. So let's just talk about a book. Like, we can have the debate, the fight if you want to, just come at me @behaviorgap or send me an email and we can have a private conversation. I'm happy to do it with anybody around the book idea. But let's just hold book there for a second.

So I'll tell you a funny story. I got a call. I'd been writing publicly for a while, and I got a call from...and again, I realize this is a, whatever, lightning strike. It's certainly one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me, but it demonstrates the point. I got a call from an editor at the publisher that eventually published my book, so Penguin, saying...introducing yourself and saying, "I've read everything you've written. I've organized it in chapters, and I'm wondering if you'd write a book for us." And I can...

Michael: Basically, like, "I've taken all of your writing and made it into a book. Can we book it?" Right? Basically, like, "I already took all your writing and organized it into a book. Can we book what we've already booked?"

Carl: Yeah. And again, I realize that's like a lightning strike thing. Like, luck and I are really good friends, and I'm super-cool with it. But it started in motion this idea. So I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." And then I realized I had to write a book. So we sat down, I remember, in my basement, in my house in Park City. I had one of the...sort of a creative team member come to my house. We printed out each blog post, or at this point, it was column that I'd written, but let's just...you can take each blog post. We actually printed them, and we taped them to the wall. We had this big wall that was blank, and we taped them at the wall. And then we just organized them. We just shuffled them around a bit and said, "Well, I think the flow is a little bit better." And so, again, you've got a pile...I don't know how fiction writers do it. But for me, it's like you've got a pile of words that you've lived the past 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, some of you 20 or 30 years. And now, hopefully, you've started turning some of that...we're just trying to get the wisdom out of your head. We've done that weekly through these content snacks we've talked about. Now you've just got a big pile of words there. So it was like, I woke up one day and there was a pile of 200,000 words. Well, I only needed 50 good ones. There's got to be 50 good ones in there. Right? And that's what we did on the wall.

Two Ways To Organize The Content You've Already Created [07:07]

So the way I think...I think there are two ways to think about this. It doesn't have to be this big overwhelming thing that it feels like. Like, do content, create content for the sake of your own metacognition and your content marketing efforts for a year. You're going to wake up, and there's going to be a pile there. And there's two ways to think about organizing those piles. One is...I like to think about one as a manifesto book. It's like, "This I believe." Right? And it could just be a set of...and we can dive into each of these in a minute. It could just be a set of beliefs. "This I believe. We believe that you should spend less than you make." Like, a manifesto book.

The other, which we're both really big on, is around solving a specific problem for a specific group of people. In other words, a specialization or a niche here in the rest of the world, a niche where you're probably listening to this. Right? Because then if it's a very specific problem, there's a whole nother pattern to go down, which we can talk about in another episode, probably. But I like the idea of saying like, okay, here's what you could do. What if once a quarter, if you want to chunk this out further, okay? You've written your weekly thing, or monthly, but I'm just going to stay right up in your grill about weekly, right? Like, you've written your weekly thing...

Michael: Well, that's very gracious because last podcast you were talking about like daily thoughts that we have to capture. So I'm...

Carl: Yeah, I've given you a break.

Michael: All right, I appreciate that. I can deal with weekly. I may have been stressing a little on daily.

Carl: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you've done your weekly thing, you've turned it into a blog post. It's been a podcast if you wanted to, and somebody turned it into tweets and Instagram posts. Everything's great. Your little list is growing slowly. What if once a quarter? You just looked at that pile of words and said, "Hey, can I produce a small e-book, a PDF?" Like, we put together a PDF of seven things that we think are important. That's like a manifesto-style book, like seven beliefs, right? Three, 10, whatever the right number is. I love sevens. So seven beliefs, right? You do that every quarter, and at the end of the year, we have 28. Right? And a really easy way to do that is then throw those 28 up on a wall. Like electronically use Trello. I like to use Keynote and Slide Table View. You throw each of those beliefs up on a wall, and then you just look like, "Do I have an essay for each one that represents what I want?" And if you don't, you create an essay. How do you do it? You speak it, you give it to the editor, the editor writes it.

And then you can very easily through not much effort because you've already done the effort. You've actually already done the effort in your head for whatever number of years. Now you've done the effort of getting it out. And then it just takes a little bit of work. And then you hire a new person, an editor-type person that knows how to edit books. And you decide, is it a collection of 21 essays? I've got a book coming out that's going to be a collection of 21 essays. Right? There's no narrative. They are ordered in a way that they kind of build on each other but there's no like, "Last chapter we talked about Jonathan. And remember, he had two apples, and now he has seven." Like, there's no narrative, it's individual essays put together in a way that feels good with an intro and a conclusion. And I think that's where people really struggle with books, is you...I think you need to define what a book means. What does it mean for you to write a book? Like, how many chapters is it? Because I know so many people, "I've been writing a book for 10 years." Well, that means you haven't defined what it means to write a book.

So that's the easy way I know. Again, I think one of the reasons you and I both harp so much on specialization and niches is this idea that you're solving a specific problem for a specific group of people. Everything else becomes so easy if you do that because now you know what the book is about. Right? "The seven important things for dentists to know." "The seven important things for brain surgeons in the northeast." And you become the person who wrote the book for brain surgeons. Watch what happens to it. Well, we all know people who are specializing, and once they throw a book on that fire, it's over. So that's anyway. Where do you want to go from there? That's sort of how I think about this all.

You Don't Write A Book By Writing A Book [11:45]

Michael: Well, I love the framing to it because the essence of it is like, you don't write a book by writing a book. You write a book by just getting into the habit of creating some snackable pieces of content because people ask you questions and you answer them, but you answer them into a microphone voice memo that you then hand to an editor to turn into a thing that goes on your website or email list or podcast, or however it is you decide to take these recorded answers and put them out into the world. And when you do that on a repeatable basis for a moderate-but-not-hugely-long period of time, you can look back and literally find like, there is more than enough for an entire book just to take those pieces and start pulling them together.

And if you want to plan for it that way in the first place, you can just set a little bit at a high level to say like, hey, if I wanted a...whether I'm making my manifesto or solving something for a specific group of people, like, "Here are the 5 or 10 or 15 key points, key areas that I would want to cover." And then a little bit proactively say, "Okay, well, I've actually already done things on like 9 of the 12. I actually haven't done anything on 3 of the 12." So like, guess what? As I'm doing my recorded snippets for content in the next few weeks, I'm going to try to pick a question or a topic that maybe ties to these few areas that I've got gaps. And then another month or two, I'm going to have a separate set of content that covers this as well. And now I'm just down to time to pull it all together in a book. Awesome news, there are services out there, one of which is literally called Book in a Box, that will take a bunch of your content and turn it into a book. Like, they give you bookmaking in a box, "Here you go." Again, that is a very...in the context of what we were talking about last episode as well, that is a very hireable service. Like, creating the thing, the stuff out of your head, that's what makes you an author, that has to be you. But taking the words that have come out of your head to answer people's questions and turning that into a book and like the graphics and the cover art and the editing and how you get it up on Amazon, all that other stuff, that is a very hireable thing.

So I realize for some people who are listening, maybe you're earlier stage in your business or career, you may be googling around how to do this yourself because you're budget constrained. For advisors who've been doing this for some period of time, I can just tell like, relative to what we do in our businesses, it is not a big number. It is really going to be on the order of like, if one human being ever sees your book, is like, "That person seems smart, I think I want them to be my financial advisor," the one client will probably make back all of the costs for creating the book in the first place, like, just the one time. That even to me is something that people often miss when they think about books in the advisor space and why I'm a big fan of sort of self-publishing routes and not necessarily needing to find the big publishing house that you did. Like, publishing houses make money on book sales. So they want to sell a bajillion books. And frankly, I find a lot of them are not so interested in what we do as advisors because they're looking and they're saying like, "Oh, we're concerned that only 1,000 or 3,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 people might only be the market for this book, we can't make that a million-copy New York Times bestseller so that we can make our couple bucks a book."

We know it from the advisor world like, you might only have a few hundred people ever read your book. Now do the math if a dozen of them became your client because they liked it, like, you will make so much more...there's so much more business opportunity because the book is your calling card for your advisory business than actually selling book copies. And I think that's sort of a secondary hang-up that's important to get past when you're thinking about creating a book and putting it out there, or kind of aggregating together this content that you've created to put it out there, like, you don't need to be New York Times bestseller. And the truth for your business model as an advisor, the book's not about book sales, the book is about prospects and clients. I know advisors that have made a zillion percent ROI on their books and they've never sold a copy, because they go out of their way to give it for free to everyone. Like, it's on Amazon, they list it for $19.99 so they can say it has a price, and then they give it away for free to everyone. The cost to produce often is nothing more than a few dollars per copy if you print, when you do it in bulk. I know one, he literally calls it...his name is Ray. Ray calls it a $4 business card.

Carl: For sure.

Michael: A 200-page $4 business card, and it looks way more credible than everybody else's business card that's just a little cardstock thing.

Carl: Look, I get so fired up about this because you need to realize we're not talking about an expense here. This is the best investment. Angie Herbers told me. And I don't know where the...I don't know exactly where the data comes from, but if Angie says it, I normally trust it. She said that six to seven times ROI on an advisor book. And I got so fired up about it a couple of years ago, I was like, I'll fund it. If you'll give me 50% of the revenue that this book generates, I will fund it. Like, I'll pay for it.

Michael: Well, careful because we have a lot of listeners for this podcast. You may have just...

Carl: Well, no, I actually wanted to...

Michael: ...literally stated an advisor bookmaking business.

Carl Throws Down The Gauntlet [17:21]

Carl: I actually want to do this right now. So anybody listening and...actually, I am going to draw a line in the sand. If you are a female advisor or an advisor of color and you are interested in writing a book, email me [email protected]. Put in the subject line "book," just put in the subject line "book," and I will help in any way I can. Look, because there are places, there are publishing houses...I have a good relationship with a publishing house. It's not the ones that published my book, but I have a good relationship with a publishing house that will "self-publish" the book. So you don't have to learn anything about printing presses and where to go. You get the same quality from the same press as the book sitting on the shelf. And they end up being...yeah, I've been calling this forever. It's the cheapest best business card you'll ever have. It's a $3 business card. I've always said it's a $3. It's a $3 business card because...

Michael: Because you can make your books in higher volume than Ray does, I think.

Carl: Yeah. Yeah. But that's what I'm saying, is this feels daunting to you, it's enough to figure out how to write a book, if this feels daunting to you and you are a female planner or a planner of color, email me at hello@behaviorgap and put "book" in the thing. And "behaviorgap" spelled the American way. I'm sorry, no "U." And I'll help because I want more of these out there. It's not daunting. It's the best thing you could ever do. And when I say "book," I wish I had a copy of the one that I love to hold up, these are 100 pages. Right? I looked the other day at the book that I love as the best example, I think it's maybe 10,000 words. Right? Because there's a bunch of whitespace and big call-out quotes. And it's a book you can read in...you could read it in an hour.

The Instant Credibility That Comes With Publishing A Book [19:13]

And when you hand this, here's what happened to me, "Behavior Gap" comes out as a book. I go to meet with my...the CFO of my biggest client. Between the company and personally, they had almost $50 million with me. I've been serving them well. So I think they already thought relatively highly of me. I hope, I would assume. I walk in and I'm talking to the CFO, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, the book got finished." And I hand him a copy. And I've seen this 100 times since. He looked at the book, looked up at me, looked back at the book, my name on it, right, and said, "Gosh, you're a genius." And I was like, "Well, you haven't even read it yet." And he's like, "I know, but you wrote a book." That's the perception.

Michael: There is an irrational amount of credibility that we just give to that physical manifestation of the things in your brain.

Carl: Yeah. And again, don't get us wrong, I'm not saying fill the thing with crap just so you can have people say that. It's going to be good. Absolutely, it's going to be good. But I'm just trying to emphasize how impactful it is, and it's not that hard.

Michael: I think you made a good point there that...for a lot of advisors, what I find still comes down to sort of a version of what we talked about a few podcasts ago of that impostor syndrome effect, that fear effect that like, "Who am I to make a book?" Like, "Are my thoughts good enough and special enough to be a book that gets that level of weight, that level of credibility?" Like, we get caught in our own self-doubts about it. That to me is frankly why it's so powerful to think about the book in the way that you have framed it of, look, all we're going to do is take the questions that we get and answer them in the easiest way possible, which for most of us is just literally talk it into a recording device. If you like being in front of a camera or typing it out on the keyboard, like, more power to you, but just take questions that real people ask you, that you already answer, and answer once for the recording, do that on a sustained basis, mash your collected wisdom together, hire an editor to make it pretty, and you too are now a book author.

And you don't have to make the stakes higher than they need to be. I can tell you everything in that book will have meaning to the people who pick it up and read it because literally, it's comprised of answers you're already giving to people who are asking you questions because they want to know what you think about that thing. Like, it came from you answering meaningful questions of people who care what you have to say. Just give the opportunity for more people to get the same answers.

Carl: Totally. Let's do this. I think it's worth taking just a minute here and kind of going the opposite direction for a second. I want to give you another idea of how to do this. And this is sort of a little bit...like I've got a friend that calls it the content onion.

Michael: Okay.

Carl: So here's another way to think about this. Let's pretend that we were going to give you a class that you were going to teach weekly at your university. You're going to teach a weekly class at your local college or university. Let's say that you're an alum of a university that you love. You're going to go teach. Never mind. Let's get rid of all that. There's going to be 50 people who show up at a room. I don't care where they are. And they're going to show up for 11 weeks. And during those 11 weeks, you have 1 hour to teach them. I find this really effective exercise to think, okay, how long would it take you on a whiteboard to map out what you would...like let's say you have a specialization. That's fine, you go one direction. Let's say you don't, that's fine too. Like, you're going to teach them in 11 weeks the most important things that they need to know, or 21 weeks. Twenty-one is my favorite, but 11 is fine too. Eleven weeks the most important things they need to know, either about their specialization and money, or just your beliefs about money, sort of manifesto-style. Write those out on the whiteboard. Try and come up with as many as you can. I think of them as zingers, you could think of them as one...think of them as tweets, like, a really thoughtful tweet. See how many you can come up. Can you come up with 11? You probably can come up with like 25. Then maybe bring in a...

Michael: And so basically, like the key points of each lesson.

Carl: Yeah, you are just basically...

Michael: My one-hour lesson is only building up to like this point, "You have to learn to spend less than you make."

Carl: Exactly.

Michael: You have to get one takeaway. What are the 11 essential takeaways to take someone through some course that you're trying to help people get to an endpoint?

Carl: Yeah. And it could easily go from cash flow to life insurance, right? Like, your beliefs. You could pull out the CFP's sort of curriculum and just take somebody through a lifestyle with your beliefs. Now, this is why this matters. This is why we all say like...I don't care if 1,000 of you do this. I don't care if 1,000 of you do exactly the same thing, because it will be your unique voice, and it will help your unique community. Because the people you hire to work with you, you're going to tell them, "Your job is to capture my voice and amplify it, not to change it." So 11 weeks, or 21, whatever you want, but let's just stick with 11. If you do this exercise where you come up with...if I had 11 weeks, that's all I've got, what I'm going to teach them. First, write the syllabus. You could also think of it as...don't put pressure on yourself, but you can think of it as the table of contents of a book. Eleven weeks, here's the 11 subjects I'm going to teach. Wrap them up with one tweet, your belief about that one thing.

Once you have that, let's say you haven't created the big pile of content. So this is a way to start from scratch. Create those 11 things. Realize they're just guesses right now, right? They're strong opinions, loosely held, they'll change. I just want to go through this real quick. You're going to write them up on the board. Let's say you get 25, awesome, that was the goal. Bring in a couple creative partners, maybe another advisor, another planner, a friend, have them come in, mesh around a bit. That's called the messy middle. Play around with that bit a little bit, hit the nuance, think about the edge cases. You're going to eliminate some, you're going to add some, you're going to eliminate, you're going to combine. You'll do that a couple times and let's say you come up with what you feel like is a "final" draft of your 11 points. Cool.

Now, go back to the beginning. Take point number one, pull out your recorder. You're going to spend a month on point one. You're going to record, you're going to send it to the editor, they're going to write the blog post. You're going to send it to the repurpose team, they're going to turn it into tweets. You're going to tell people, you're going to put up a little landing page, simple little landing page that says, "I'm exploring this journey. It might turn into a book. But I'm going to do it in public. If you'd like to follow along, put your email address in here." Right? The tweets point to that page. On that page, you've got your 11 declarations, your 11 chapters, that's all you have. Ash Maurya recorded an amazing video about how he did this. If we want to put that in the show notes. All you've got on that page is, "Here's the 11 things I'm going to be talking about. Sign up here." You do that. You could spend a week per thing. Or give yourself a little break, spend a month.

At the end of 11 months, you will have learned some more about the things, as you recorded the stuff, you would have learned a little bit. Maybe you've refined a bit. At the end of 11 months, you've got a pile of content. You've got a list of people who want to hear more about it. You've got people on the podcast, if you went that far, that are waiting. It's a gold mine. Not to mention, then you get it printed, and you've got a list of all your clients and people that you...other newsletters in your local community, all of that stuff. And the book is not a brochure. All you have to do in the book is put an "about the author" section.

I can tell you, I watched Larry Swedroe at BAM. And now, you can attest to this too. That guy is responsible for over $1 billion in assets because of the first book. All the other books have added too, but they handed...they've been handing that book out like candy for I think 17 years. And I heard, I talked to people who said, "I found this book in the coffee shop." Right? In fact, they can tell you stories...a good chunk of the employees. Right? "My cousin read this book, suggested to me." "My father gifted me this book." "I found it in the library by accident." "The community college assigned to this curriculum." Every one of those stories I've heard. It's $1 billion in assets. What did it cost Larry? Well, first of all, Larry was going to do it anyway because he had to because he had a thing he wanted to put...

Michael: So he just had and he needed to get it out. Yep.

Carl: Yeah, for that reason. But even if that wasn't the reason... Yeah. So that's all I have to say. Sorry for the rant. I want to repeat my offer. Female planners, planners of color, if you want to engage in this process, I need nothing out of it. You send me an email and I'll help you get started.

Michael: Awesome. Well, to me, the ultimate takeaway of all of this is just...right, it's that famous saying, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time?

Carl: For sure.

Michael: That we put...when you talk about something like, "Hey, how do you feel about making a book?" Like...

Carl: Hey, you want to write a book?

Michael: ...it's so daunting for most people. I think probably for virtually everyone, that once you start breaking it down to the pieces, like, no, no, just make the 11-week course you would teach someone, an hour a week for 11 weeks, what are the 11 key things that you want to teach, the 11 key lessons? Start recording into a microphone what you would talk about in each, and you have actually just formulated the 11 chapters of your book. If you're already producing some content, which can be nothing more than take the questions that people ask you, that clients are asking you and answer those, which again, you can even do into a voice recorder if you don't like to type it out and write. Capture those pieces. Do it for a period of time. Look back. You're going to say, "Oh my gosh, I've actually got a ton of content that we could just start packaging together into a book. We just have to organize it, mash it together." And that is actually a very hireable thing to do.

Carl: Amen. I agree just totally.

Michael: Don't put more on your shoulders than you need to, just create pieces of content. We can aggregate them together later. It actually becomes very manageable.

Carl: Absolutely. And please, please, please do it.

Michael: And please do it.

Carl: And please do it. Yeah.

Michael: And if you're answering questions people are asking you, like, what you have to share matters to people. Don't get hung up in your head? What you have to share matters to people. That's why you have clients and a business. So share it with more of them.

Carl: Totally. Amen, Michael.

Michael: Well, thank you, Carl. Appreciate the discussion.

Carl: Pleasure. Yep.

Michael: And we'll talk to your wife about putting Kitces Blue out there as an interior design thing.

Carl: Amen. Amen.

Michael: Thank you.

Carl: See you. Bye.