🚀 Your book is not for you. It's for THEM.
The oldest business advice on the planet: be in service.
This past January, I was on a reality TV show.
This TV show is called “The Blox,” and it’s a cross between Survivor and Shark Tank. While it was really fun to film, learn, and have the opportunity to get promoted to thousands or maybe millions (Season 12 comes out soon!), the best part was getting folded into a group of relatable, amazing, down-to-earth co-stars who are business owners and entrepreneurs like myself.
They all get it. Entrepreneurship is just tough. The mental games your brain plays with you on the hourly can turn you into mush. Luckily, I have these fun tricks up my sleeve these days like meditation, breathwork, and theta healing, but commiserating with this bunch finally made me feel…normal.
![Those are fighting words': Why Weston Bergmann won't stop until 'The Blox' changes every challenger's life Those are fighting words': Why Weston Bergmann won't stop until 'The Blox' changes every challenger's life](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd60f78ca-930c-4451-af1f-e288957640ff_926x1234.jpeg)
From talks with these co-stars, I got to learn that many entrepreneurs, founders, and business owners want to write books.
Why? They’ve gone through the ringer. They’ve learned so much, they’ve felt so much, and they’ve grown so much in their entrepreneurial journey that they just want to tell the world their story.
The natural human instinct is to share this wisdom with others. The glory of becoming an “author” feels like icing on the entrepreneurship cake.
Writing, as we all know here, is hugely cathartic. When we’ve been doing, doing, doing, and finally we have the luxury to look back and breathe…our natural inclination is to write it all down. To clarify it. To structure it. How could someone else who was in my shoes not-too-long-ago avoid the mistakes I made?
But I want to stop you in your tracks.
Before you (yes, you, entrepreneur/founder/business owner) start telling your life story from wee weaning babe to fearless scoundrel CEO, I want you to remember why any product in the world is created.
It’s to help other people.
Information products help people clarify the fog in their head and turn the Legos rattling around in their brain into bridges and castles.
Your book is a product.
Give your readers your methodology. As they read your book, turn their trust of you and your hard-won method into a desire to implement it in their own lives and businesses. That’s where your revenue, influence, and legacy grows.
When I started networking with my fellow co-stars from The Blox, many of them 6-and 7-figure entrepreneurs in their own right, I learned that their deep desire was to just tell their story. (Plus make more revenue from book sales and backend offers.)
What they forgot to clarify before they ever started writing, creating the cover, and looking for Kickstarter funding was:
who they were writing for, and
what that person wanted. (Desperately. That they couldn’t get anywhere else.)
In general, if your idea of a book is a self-help tome telling your life story, and you have the faint hope that it will inspire you-but-10-years-ago, you have already lost.
Because you are now writing for yourself, and you are no longer writing for them.
I want you to tell your story. In fact, your story is one of the most important tools you have. It makes you relatable. Approachable. Earthly. Interesting.
But use your story to get to the point.
The point being, how your story helped you create the method/product/service you are now selling (re: serving) in your business.
Ideally, your method should appear in full detail across your book, your business, and your offerings. Each piece of this pie is a level of intimacy by which a customer can encounter your method. Or, if you sell products, your products are a way for someone to implement your method into their lives (think Marie Kondo, the KonMari method, and those delicious organizing cubes at The Container Store.)
😬 Can you show me another example?
Yes. Let’s also look at the book Be. (a personal branding book written by 7-figure founder Jessica Zweig that helped double the size of her business in 1 year).
When Jessica first got her book deal, she was already selling personal branding services via her agency. These services helped VPs, CEOs, and founders figure out their personal brand architecture and create content online that authentically reflected this.
Each personal brand created did so using SimplyBe.’s trademarked methodology, such as the Personal Brand Hologram® and the Supernova™.
The cost of a personalized, unique personal brand created and managed by this agency? $20k-$200k.
The cost of a hardcover copy of Be.? $20.
Each layer delves deeply into the same method, helping the customer at each level either receive a:
DIY solution (the book explaining the method + journal prompts)
DWY solution (a 12-week program to get a personal brand architecture)
DFY solution (a 13-month program to get a personal brand architecture + creation of content that manages your online reputation)
Each layer includes the same thing: transparency, trust, authority, and personality. The doors are open wide at each layer; nothing is held back. Service is paramount. The price point simply reflects the level of detail and intimacy of service.
Where does the entrepreneur’s story come in?
Jessica opens the book about how she went from high-school nerd to failing actress to entrepreneur, and how that journey taught her how her personal brand catapulted her to the next stage in life without much extra hustling on her part. She even shares how, after starting her personal branding agency, she still struggled with understanding personal brand. She created her trademarked methods to help herself.
By opening with that story, she leads naturally into the proprietary methodologies her agency uses to get to a very clear, powerful personal brand.
“Oh, you want this too? Check out our services for how you can bring this into reality in your own life.”
Her harrowing entrepreneurship story is what sells her method.
Yours should too.
Because it will be in service.
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👇🏽 What are your thoughts about personal branding, thought leadership, and nonfiction? Is it more than just selling the book? Leave your comments below.
Oldest business advice indeed. Have you read How to Win Friends and Influence People? It's on point for you. I just wrote about it too. Well, in a slightly different tone :)