Dear Farillio member,

On 9th April 2021, you asked our brilliant expert Carl Reader on the Go Far Fast Show:

“How hard was it to write the book and did you find it helped you to get more business by any chance? I’m a coach and a business advisor and I’m wondering about writing a book to help get more work for myself. Is that something you would advise me to do? Is that something that was your intention?”

And Carl said:

Be mighty always, Farillio

Transcript:

““I'm probably going to upset everybody in the publishing world with my answer, but I'm going to go for it anyway because you guys want honesty. You don't want the PR veneer on this! There are a few parts I need to pick out. The first one, was it difficult? The difficult part nowadays is actually getting a traditional publishing deal, and that's for a couple of reasons. Back in 2014, when I got the contract for The Startup Coach, you had publishers and publishing was a much easier trade. I say easier because books were selling in a paper format more than in an ebook format. There wasn't too much piracy and there also wasn't the sheer flood of self-published books. It was relatively easy at that point to get a book deal. In fact, my book deal was from somebody on Facebook asking ‘is anybody writing a book on startups’? I put my hand up and I got offered a contract with an advance and all of that stuff from the world's second-biggest publisher, unheard of! That's not normal nowadays, and the hardest part about writing a book is elevating yourself above the noise. For every book published ten years ago, I would wager that there are 10 or 20 books published now. What makes it worse is, although that's across the board, it's concentrated in business books. Every single business coach, business advisor, and business consultant is trying to write a book. There are services now where you pay a few grand and, although the book is not written for you, everything is handled and they publish it for you. If you want to go down the traditional publishing route, actually writing the book is fairly simple. It’s a case of planning and having something you're passionate enough to write about. Did the book get me any business? No, books are just expensive business cards. Did a business card ever get you any business? No. I would say that the books have worked in different ways. The Start-up Coach gave me a very strong layer of credibility when I didn't have any. I wrote it when I had about 900 social media followers and I didn't really have any traction. It gave me a level of credibility, at a time when nobody else had been published, to say ‘you can pop into Waterstones or WH Smith and you can buy my book’. That gave me a level of credibility. It didn't win me any clients but it made it easier for clients to buy from me and it made clear it easier for clients to stay with me, much like traditional PR. If you were deemed to be the expert, and I was the business columnist for the Daily Express, it doesn't win you clients and it doesn't get you direct cold leads. However, when you're speaking to someone, it just gives them that additional reassurance that you know what you're speaking about. The Franchising Handbook was a niche book that probably did a little bit more from a business development perspective. Unfortunately Boss It, despite being traditionally published and charting in WH Smith, is up there against a lot of other books. Every person and their dog is writing a book at the moment. The reality is that there are companies out there trying to encourage every coach and consultant to write a book. Is it a valuable use of your time? Yes, it is because the process of writing a book allows you to really distil your ideas into workable models. That's probably the most value that you get from it. It's an expensive business card but, what I would say, is that people don't tend to throw books away where is El throw business cards away. If you are going to write a book make sure it's a thick book and make sure that your name is on the spine. Don't have a book that can hide away on a bookshelf. You want to be seen, but don't expect it to bring you in shed loads of leads. If I was to look at Boss It, I highly doubt that DNT has had any leads from Boss It. In fact, DNT possibly doesn't even know that I've written Boss It. It's not been written as a lead generator and, to sum up a really long-winded answer to a simple question, you need to question why you're writing a book. If it is solely to get leads then the content of the book will demonstrate that and then you have to pay to be published rather than get chosen to be published. There's probably a better way to spend that £6K or whatever it is that you would have to pay to be self-published that would generate warmer leads for you. However, if you have got a message that you genuinely believe you need to share and something that could really positively impact the world, then absolutely do it, but you won't get a financial return on it. I'm happy to give a very clear insight into the financials of writing a book because I think there is a big misconception about what you can earn as an author and the glory of it. I would say that for each one of my books, I've worked for less than minimum wage. Bear in mind that I was paid advances, which is a luxury that many writers don't have. The proofreaders and all those things were paid for and covered by the publisher – I didn't have to cover that expense myself. I know that an average business book sells a maximum of 700 copies, I think that will be quite an eye-opener for people who might imagine that it's in the thousands and thousands. The reality is that if I sell 5000 copies of Boss It, I would be delighted, despite it being in all of the shops across the country. That's the reality of the numbers because there are simply not many people that are interested in reading business books. When it comes to what you earn from them, while the books have a price of £12 or £15 on them, I probably see about 30p per book. You don't need to be a mathematician to then work out how much I earned from that if it's an average book with average book sales. Thankfully it's done more than the average already, but it's still not going to hey for my retirement. It might pay for a takeaway!”

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