should you write a book for your business?

Summary

I’ve self-published two books, The Garage Gym Athlete and Killing Comfort. neither one made me rich on royalties. both of them did something I couldn’t have bought any other way.

books don’t really make money. that’s the first thing to get straight. the math on royalties is brutal. if income is your goal, write almost anything else.

what books actually do: they build authority. they solve a specific problem for a specific person. they generate leads. and they force you to clarify your own thinking, which usually exposes the holes in your own business.

I wrote The Garage Gym Athlete to plant a flag in a category I wanted to lead. I wrote Killing Comfort because I kept solving the same problem in the same conversations and needed something to point people to.

reasons to write one:

1. you need authority and don’t have the social proof yet.
2. you keep teaching the same lesson and need a permanent asset for it.
3. you want a lead-generation tool that does double duty as a brand asset.
4. you genuinely have a strong idea and you actually enjoy writing.

if none of those apply, don’t write a book. write blog posts.

Transcript

introduction to the podcast and topic

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Should you write a book for your business? Can it help your business grow? I’m Jerred Moon. This is the Better Human Business Podcast, and I have written two books. They are both self-published. The first book I ever wrote, it was called The Garage Gym Athlete, and the second book I wrote was called Killing Comfort.

So I’m going to dive into why I wrote those books and how I went about publishing them, all those good things. And then I’m going to discuss maybe what you should consider if you’re thinking about writing a book for your business, because I’ve learned a lot in the process of having published, self-published two books.

discussion on the strategic reasons behind writing “the Garage Gym Athlete”

And so let’s dive into it. So first, a little bit behind the scenes of why I wrote those two books. Well, the first one, The Garage Gym Athlete, a lot of you know, or may even know me from my other company, garagegymathlete.com. And ultimately, I kind of wanted to own that space or be known in that space because of the brand, Garage Gym Athlete.

I wanted people to know what I was about, so I put in a lot of good information in there. It was kind of like a series of blog posts I had, you know, done throughout the year. I had an editor clean it up, and we published it. And ultimately, it’s been a great book. It’s sold a lot of copies, and I think that it was really beneficial in owning the space at that time, and was really helpful.

But what it didn’t do was make me a ton of money. All right, so I’m going to come back to that. The second book I wrote was Killing Comfort. Now, Killing Comfort was written at an interesting time because I was still working with a lot of athletes, but I also was kind of going into this category of consulting for other business owners.

insights into the creation and impact of “Killing Comfort”

And I noticed a commonality in the problems that they were having, and that was just getting shit done. They just weren’t doing the things that they need to do. This is like coaching 101. If you’re a coach out there, you understand it’s the hardest part is just getting someone to do what they know they need to do.

And so I wrote that book to try and solve that problem for both business owners and for athletes. And if you read the book, you’ll realize it’s not really geared towards any particular niche or avatar. It’s very general. I mean, the subtitle to that book is the prerequisite for extraordinary results, meaning you need to learn how to kill comfort before you can go see any result or have any success of any kind.

That’s why I wrote that book. I was ultimately trying to solve a problem. So the first one was more strategic in nature, garage gym athlete. I wanted to own a space. If you search my name, I wanted to pop up on Amazon. I wanted people to be aware of who I am, what I was about, my brand, all of those kind of things.

financial realities of self-publishing and book sales

The second one, I wasn’t trying to go as big. I wasn’t trying to own the killing comfort space. You know, I was just trying to solve a problem for people I was working with in the best way that I knew how. And I should also tell you, I really, really enjoy writing. When I started my company end of three fitness years and years ago, it all started as a blog because I really enjoyed writing and to this day I still really enjoy writing.

So that was kind of behind the scenes of why I wrote books. I enjoy writing. And then also, you know, one was more strategic. One I was trying to solve a very specific problem. Now killing comfort sold really well, but also didn’t make me a ton of money. And the reason I say these books didn’t make me a ton of money and I’ve sold tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of copies, I’d have to go back and add it up.

Like I’ve sold a lot more than most authors ever will who self publish. I didn’t have a publisher. I didn’t shop around. I specifically wanted to self publish. I don’t know if I could have gotten a publisher to pick it up, maybe, but I never was trying to do it for that reason. I wanted to move fast.

reasons to consider writing a book for your business

I wanted to publish it fast. I wanted to get out there. So going through resources like Kindle Direct Publishing and you can hire freelance publishing companies to help you with these kind of things without them having to put their mark on your book and all this stuff. So anyway, I wanted to move fast.

I didn’t try and shop it around to any publishers. When I write my third book, which I’m in the process of doing now, I’m still not going to go to publishers. I just want to self publish because I can move fast. I can fully control the content and publish it when I want. So here’s the deal. Should you do it?

Because I’m telling you the book doesn’t make a lot of money and I’ve sold more books than a lot of people other than being like a prolific author or a New York Times bestselling author. I’ve sold a lot of copies of my books, but I’m telling you they don’t make money. So why write a book? Well, you write a book for a few different reasons.

evaluating if writing a book aligns with your business strategy

One because you can’t not write it. And I think that’s the most important thing when writing a book is like if it’s in your mind and you just can’t let go of this idea and you enjoy writing and you want to get this solidified, that’s the number one reason that you should write a book. Not everyone’s a writer.

You don’t have to write a book, but if you feel like you’ve got this burning idea and you really want to try and tackle it, absolutely go for it. Write a book. Second would be strategic in nature like I was talking about.

I think writing a short book, more of like a pamphlet or 50 to 100 pages or whatever on a very specific problem for your niche and publishing that on Amazon is a great way to build some authority because you’re a published author now or at least people can find you on Amazon and it gives you kind of an edge in a marketplace you wouldn’t otherwise have.

how to use a book for lead generation

Because if you’re not like e-commerce trying to sell something on Amazon, if you have a book about a very specific thing like if you train soccer moms and Pilates and you want to like own that market, maybe don’t call them soccer moms, but you know what I’m saying, you can go very niche down with your content and it’s going to help you have a lot of authority.

That’s a big reason I think to write a book. If you are just kind of drowning in this space, you don’t have like a lot of authority to your name. You don’t have the degrees. You don’t have social proof. If you’ve been doing this for one or two decades, but you’re trying to get your footing, then I think that’s another great reason to write a book.

Now the third and final reason would be lead generation and that’s it. I don’t care if you’re giving your book away for free. If you do write a book and you want to generate leads, it’s a phenomenal lead generator. This is different than an e-book, right? I’m talking about a legitimate book that can actually help people.

tips for preparing to write your book

You can generate a lot of leads either through selling it which would make them more qualified leads or by giving it away in exchange for name, email address, phone number, contact information, all those good things. Those are the three main reasons I would write a book. I would not write a book to make money because the only people who are going to make money in writing a book are the people who do shop around and get their book to a big publisher and they sell a lot of copies and it’s not like just a timely book.

It’s an evergreen book, meaning it’ll stand the test of time. It can sell 100,000 copies a month every single month because markets are growing and people are always going to be interested in the topic and how you write it. So that is ultimately what you want to keep in mind when you are thinking about adding a book to your business.

Now I mentioned I’m writing another book. Why am I writing a third book? They don’t make money. Like what’s the whole point here? Well I’m writing a very targeted book and don’t worry, I’ll be sharing more information as I go through it.

conclusion and final thoughts on the benefits of writing a book

Very targeted, very specific problem, very niched down to a specific problem for entrepreneurs and again I want to kind of launch into that space a little bit more where I’ve been working behind the scenes for years but I don’t have necessarily anything to really launch me truly into that business space and here’s how it’s helping me as I’m going through the outline process and the publishing process is it’s giving me a ton of structure to what I want to offer because when you go into trying to help other people in business whether that’s consulting or whatever it is, you’ll realize that you could help people in a lot of different ways.

Like I have just years of experience in so many different things, online advertising, email marketing, leadership, operations, like there are all these different areas I could go and I don’t want to write a book about all of that.

Like I want to write a very specific book that will help people in a very specific way and so that’s what I’m working on but like I said it’s giving me this phenomenal structure on my process, what it is that almost highlights everything else I’ll be able to offer to people as I publish the book and ultimately generate leads and get more customers in this new offer that I’m going to be launching here this year.

That’s the biggest thing it’s helped me do is it’s giving me structure to my ideas and so I would say even if you don’t write a book, spend some time, spend an hour, spend two hours outlining what your book would be about if you did write a book. Whether it’s big picture entrepreneurship or it’s very niche down to a very specific problem and very specific avatar that you help, write out the outline for what this book would be.

Grab other books off your shelves and look at how they structure chapters and sections to the book and think through how you would do the same because ultimately what it’s going to do is it’s going to give you a process. Whether you publish this book, whether you write it is irrelevant but I think it’ll really help you understand what your process is because you might already be good at what you do but you don’t fully understand your process.

But after you go through this exercise, you’ll understand it better and then you’re either ready to publish a book and use it strategically, use it for leads or use it for whatever purpose you want and if you don’t want to publish anything at all, you’ll really understand your process and when you can truly understand your process and you can communicate it, you will very easily be able to sell things to other people because now they will be able to understand it just as well as you do.

So those are my thoughts on should you publish a book. A lot of things to think through. Ultimately I think it’s a great asset for any business to have. It’s just how you utilize it and how it correlates to exactly what your business and your core mission is. If you can make all those alignments and it’s not some random book about your philosophy that no one cares about, you will make a lot of progress in having a book for your business.

It honestly can’t help. Either way, you’ve got to try harder to get something like that done. Good luck.