SHOWNOTES
Steve Gordon is a 2-time entrepreneur, bestselling author of 5 books, including “Unstoppable Referrals”, and his latest book, “The Magnetic Author Method”. He's interviewed over 185 world-class entrepreneurs on “The Unstoppable CEO Podcast.” Steve and his team help smart entrepreneurs go from being the best-kept-secret in their industry to being "The Person Who Wrote the Book" in 30 Days.
In this episode, Steve shares
Why a business owner/entrepreneur should write a book
Why it’s OK if someone else has written the book that you should have written
Why writing a book is a must in this age of commoditization
How to NOT give away all of your secrets for free
Why the textbook model won’t work for your business
How transformational books lead to business
The three types of books
The best way to launch your book
How to leverage your book to get speaking gigs
Don’t miss this episode and let me know your thoughts after you listen. I always love hearing from you.
RESOURCES
I always love hearing from you. Let me know your thoughts after you listen in the comments below.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:02.590] - Gary Vee Hey, guys, it's Gary Vaynerchuck. And you're listening to the Front Row Entrepreneur Podcast with our girl, Jen.
[00:10.790] - Jen Lehner My guest today is a two-time entrepreneur, bestselling author of five books, including Unstoppable Referrals and his latest book, The Magnetic Author Method. He's interviewed over 185 world-class entrepreneurs on the Unstoppable CEO podcast. He and his team helped smart entrepreneurs go from being the best-kept secret in their industry to being the guy or gal who wrote the book in 30 days. Welcome, Steve Gordon.
[00:39.050] - Steve Gordon Hey, Jen. So excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Read more...
[00:42.210] - Jen Lehner Yeah, I'm just so ready to ask you so many questions about writing books because I myself have been considering writing a book, but I think there's, like, lots of roadblocks and I don't know, I have so many questions. So let's just jump in. First of all, why should a business owner or entrepreneur write a book?
[01:03.190] - Steve Gordon Well, the truth is maybe you shouldn't. Okay, so if you're selling something that's pretty easy for people to understand and really easy for them to kind of wrap their arms around, you probably don't need to write a book. So I gave a speech one time. It was a small group of CEOs of businesses, and in that group was a gentleman who owned a Krispy Kreme Donut franchise. And he didn't need to write a book. He just needed to go out on the corner and hand out some free hot Donuts, and he'd be just fine. But if you're selling anything more complex than that or selling anything intangible aAnd this is particularly for people who get paid for their knowledge and expertise and wisdom for the application of that to a client's problem. People in professional services, it's really difficult sometimes for clients to understand what you do, why it should be so expensive. Why are you charging me that much? $250 an hour. $500 an hour? Are you kidding me? They can't quite wrap their head around the value of what's involved, and it's a fantastic tool to help demonstrate the value that you offer to help establish your credibility.
[02:26.750] - Steve Gordon You mentioned in the intro to be the one who wrote the book. Right now we're living in the age of commoditization. And maybe 20 or 30 years ago, if you were in one of the professional service areas, you might not yet have been commoditized like maybe a manufacturing business has been in the 80s, but now everybody has been commoditized. And you need a way to stand out. And being the one who wrote the book in your niche and your market is the way to do that.
[03:00.110] - Jen Lehner What if somebody else has written the book that I should have written?
[03:06.570] - Steve Gordon I get asked that question. But if you went out on your own and you started your own business, you did that for a reason. Most every professional that I know started out by working for someone else. And then they looked at that person and said, you know what? I'm better at this than they are. And I've got a different way. And I'm going to go do it my way. And what goes in your book is your way. I call it your opinionated worldview.
[03:37.230] - Jen Lehner But what about service providers? I'm interested to hear, like some of maybe the range of professionals and entrepreneurs and service providers who have written books with your guidance, because I would imagine, like, it would be harder for someone who sells insurance, for example, to write a book than someone who teaches people how to be stunt doubles. I have no idea where I came up with that. But you know what I mean? It's like kind of boring.
[04:08.430] - Steve Gordon So I'll give you two kind of ends of the spectrum there. So I just literally before we jumped on to record this interview, I was interviewing one of our clients on our podcast, and she is an expert at helping businesses grow their LinkedIn presence and attract leads through LinkedIn. And we helped her write a really great book around that. And you might think, well, that's going back to your first question. There are a million books out there on how to use LinkedIn. But she had her unique approach, which makes this book, actually, when I look at it and I've read most of the books that teach you how to grow on LinkedIn, I think it's amazing because she's got her unique approach and that's what helps it stand out. But that's somebody who you would think, okay, it makes sense that they wrote a book, they're consultant. They've got kind of their way of doing it. So let's go to the other extreme. You mentioned insurance. Our most successful client who has written three books with us and we've got a fourth in the planning stages, sells life insurance.
[05:16.350] - Jen Lehner Wow.
[05:18.510] - Steve Gordon I got to tell you, there is not a more boring, less interesting topic in business than life insurance.
[05:27.050] - Jen Lehner I agree.
[05:28.010] - Steve Gordon You can't use it until you're dead. Now, he would argue with that. He'd say, no, there's some ways we can make that pay off for you while you're alive. But for most people, they believe that this is something I get to pay for while I'm still here. And then when I'm gone, you're going to have a really big party with the check. And it's not a topic that anybody wants to talk about. But we actually produced for him a book on life insurance, captured all of his wisdom and expertise on how to use it, particularly in the area of retirement planning. And put that book together.
[05:57.740] - Steve Gordon It's been out now for about a year. I'll never forget, like within a couple of weeks of the book coming out, we were talking and he said, yeah, we just sent an email out to our database of prospects and clients, and we had 54 people reply back and ask for a copy of the book. So he sent them those 54 people got sent a copy of the book in the mail. They also got invited to a webinar that was happening a couple of weeks later on the same topic of life insurance.
[06:30.310] - Steve Gordon And he got 37 of the 54 to show up to that webinar. And now they've read the book, or they've at least perused the book. Now they're showing up to the webinar because they saw something that was worth investing more time in. And 15 of those people booked appointments to buy life insurance from him.
[06:52.650] - Jen Lehner So it is the ultimate lead generator.
[06:54.970] - Steve Gordon I think it's the best thing out there. And I've tried everything and we were actually kind of drug-kicking and screaming to the point of helping people write books. Our clients just kind of demanded that we do this for them. When I first started out in this business, I was a general marketing consultant. I live in Tallahassee, Florida. If you don't know, it is the 11th largest market in Florida, which means it's not a big place.
[07:21.450] - Steve Gordon And I had some local clients and I was doing okay. And we were like a one and a half person firm. It was me and a part time assistant. And I'd had this idea of writing a book in my head for a couple of years. And I tried a couple of times actually, and failed and ended up throwing the work into the trash because I'd get stuck. I'd get through the process and that little pesky blinking cursor beat me. It won twice. And I was listening to a podcast And I wish I could find where it was.
[07:58.410] - Steve Gordon I've gone back and looked and whoever said this was brilliant. And they were describing how they got all their leads from a book, which reinforced the idea that I knew I needed to write a book at the time to grow the business. And he said the thing that made it easy for me when I was finally able to do it was I really broke it down into a lot of detail in an outline. And he talked through how to do that, and I did that. I followed that process. And in a day it was on a Saturday. I told my wife, I'm going into the office. I'm not coming out until I get this stupid book that I've been wrestling with for two years on paper in an outline. And by 04:00 I had the thing outlined and that book got written in 30 days. And I didn't get stuck like I did the first two times. And it was really because I had broken it down into enough detail that I never stared at a blank page. I wrote that book and we can talk about what happened with that. But clients started seeing that and they said, well, hey, can you help me do the same thing?
[09:06.840] - Steve Gordon And that's how we've kind of ended up here.
[09:10.870] - Jen Lehner When you talk about the LinkedIn person and you talk about the insurance person and how they both, you know, they talked about their special sauce. This is what trips a lot of people up because I know it trips me up. And I've talked to clients and colleagues who feel the same way. If this LinkedIn person is going to share all the ways to optimize your profile on LinkedIn and how to use LinkedIn to do business isn't she can't talk at a high level throughout the whole book? Doesn't she have to get in the weeds and say, A-B-C-D make a recipe out of it? And then at the end of that, hasn't she just giving away all of her stuff that she would ordinarily give on consults?
[10:03.490] - Steve Gordon Great question. It is the number one question that I get. And there are a couple of different ways to look at this. The first is from a practical point of view. The books that we're talking about riding are what I would call a plane ride book, something that you could read on the short leg of your next flight. We don't want this to be so long that it looks like a project for your potential client where they're not going to read it. We want them to consume it because we want them to be an educated buyer.
[10:37.030] - Steve Gordon So that means we're going to write a book that's going to be probably between 100 to 150 pages. And we're also not trying to write a textbook for them. See, textbooks don't work. We've just noticed that there's a big difference between the really effective books from a lead generation standpoint and the ones that really will frustrate you as the author, because you're not going to get any business from it. And textbooks don't lead to business. But transformational books do lead to business. And a transformational book really is one that takes the reader through a journey, and it identifies and empathizes with where they are today, the problems that they're facing, the challenges that they have, the aspirations that they have that they haven't been able to achieve. And then it takes them through a journey to get there. And the journey to get there is through your unique mechanism, the thing that you do that helps people. Right. And so we have to reveal some of that so that they can understand that you know what you're talking about and that you're credible. And then at the end of the book, we want to paint a picture of the bigger, better future.
[11:40.910] - Steve Gordon What's the amazing life that awaits you once you've transformed these challenges that you're facing? So that's sort of the story arc of the book. And that's very different from a book that is designed to teach them every little step along the way. Okay. The textbook that will teach them every little step along the way is going to be a long book. Remember your textbooks from College and high school? They were thick books. The format is going to prevent us from giving away everything right off the bat. There's no way if you really are an expert at what you do. And when I say expert, if you've been doing what you do several years longer than any of your clients have been trying to do what you do for them, then you're an expert in their eyes.
[12:28.750] - Steve Gordon It's going to be difficult to get all of that accumulated knowledge and wisdom and expertise crammed into 100, 250 page book. So the format is one way that we avoid that. Okay. The other way that we avoid that is we do talk at a high level because this is more about the transformation. That doesn't mean that we don't give them some actionable things to do.
[12:50.870] - Steve Gordon So great example of that, we have a client who coaches executives inside big corporations on how to leverage power and politics inside the organization. And his whole position is that people now are taught that it's all about authenticity and transparency and openness and all of that. And he says, well, you know what? That's all nonsense. It really is still human nature and it's power in politics. And in the book, we could have gone the route of giving them everything that he would do with them in a coaching engagement. But instead we gave them a few exercises that at the very beginning of kind of awakening to this new way of thinking, would help reinforce his point and also give them the confidence that they should continue going. And so instead of trying to give them the whole thing, which honestly would overwhelm most people, we give them the first little nugget, go do this, go get a result, go do this. This is doable. And this exercise that we gave them, they could do in between ten and 30 minutes, literally, they could set the book down and go do it, and they could get a result and come back.
[14:02.220] - Steve Gordon And in fact, we give them some space in the book to reflect on that. So there's a way you can give them real tangible value and also proof that your systems and methods work without giving them everything under the sun. And that actually helps build trust by giving some of that away. You do what most professionals struggle to do, and that is to demonstrate how you help before someone has given you money.
[14:29.570] - Jen Lehner So I'm assuming we're talking about self-publishing here. And if we are, then could this be at first, if somebody wants to go the traditional route and they're hoping to get picked up by Penguin Books or something, could this be a first step towards that?
[14:46.370] - Steve Gordon Absolutely. There are reasons to go that more traditional publishing route, but the reality is that unless you have a big audience already, the big publishers probably aren't that interested in talking with you because they don't have the marketing budgets that they used to. It used to be that because of the old distribution models for books where it was through bookstores and distribution networks that the publishers could sort of make or break you as an author. And self publishing wasn't a thing. But now that Amazon exists and you can self publish both on Amazon and all of the other major online bookstores, there's no real distribution advantage in going through a traditional publisher, except maybe it could get you in bookstores. But again, that's not where people buy books for the most part these days, 90 something percent of books are purchased through Amazon. So if you're not going to get that marketing help from the major publisher, then really what's the point? They're probably not going to do anything for you that you couldn't easily do for yourself. And the one thing that they are going to do is they're going to take an awful lot of time to get your book out.
[16:01.730] - Steve Gordon And so, yeah, we think that the kind of books that we put together. We think there are three types of books. There are the best seller list kind of books that they have the glossy jacket, and they do go through the traditional publishing route. Those are typically longer books and they have mass market appeal. And that's kind of the high end. And on the low end, you have what I would call a transcript book. And this is where somebody interviewed you and literally just took the transcript and got rid of the typos and put a cover on it.
[16:39.040] - Steve Gordon And that can be done really inexpensively. And in certain situations, that's a great book. For professionals who are trying to demonstrate their expertise, though, it doesn't always present you in the most professional way because sometimes when you speak the content and it doesn't get really well edited, it doesn't come off as sounding as intelligent as you'd like to. We kind of fit in the middle. We create what we call a lead-generating book, which is a written book. And so it's a little higher quality than those transcript books, but it's shorter and doesn't require all the time that one of those best seller type books is going to create. And for most businesses, that's really where you are. I mean, chances are if you're listening to this, you probably don't have a mass market book idea if you're going to use it to grow your business. Those are very specific things, and most businesses don't have that. So you're looking to fit in this middle lane and create a short book and do it quickly so that you can go get results from it, because if you have the idea to do it, you don't want to have to wait a year and a half to two years to get through that traditional publishing process.
[17:52.950] - Steve Gordon And one of the things we've really worked hard on is compressing that time down to as little as possible so that you can get through the writing part and get through the publishing part and get to what everybody really wants, which is the marketing the book and getting the clients part.
[18:07.130] - Jen Lehner Let's talk about that. So what is the best way? So we've got our book now, and what is the best way to launch it?
[18:19.270] - Steve Gordon The typical thinking is, hey, we have to go big or go home. And if you have a really big audience already, then by all means, yes, go that route. If you are like most business owners and you have a network, not even what you would call an audience, but you have a network. And even if you do have a small audience, if it's not 50 or 100,000 people, you probably want to take a little bit of a different approach. And what we advocate for our clients is what we call the inverted viral launch. And we want to start with the people who we are closest with and who are closest to buying already and get it to them first. And so that might mean that you're not going to get 100 copies out in the first week. But that's okay if you get copies to all of the people who are closest to buying. And it puts them over the edge because why do you care if you get 10,000 copies out if you've just won five deals? We start with the people who are already in your pipeline. We start with the referral partners who you already have a good relationship with, who are already advocates for you.
[19:28.410] - Steve Gordon And we use the book as a way to reignite all of the opportunity that's already within reach and give those people an excuse to pay attention to you and do business. We start there because you're going to get really fast results that way. Then from there, we can start expanding out and getting more and more reach. But most of the businesses that we work with, they don't have the kind of networks where they could go to somebody that has a following of 5 million people on Instagram and have them promote the book. So we need to think a little bit differently about how we're going to do this, that it actually gets an ROI.
[20:07.210] - Jen Lehner And I would imagine that unless your book becomes obsolete, like the one and only book I ever published, which is really more just an experiment where it was basically a transcript of a course that I did on how to create an Amazon Alexa briefing. I hope I didn't wake anybody's Lexi up by saying her name, but it became obsolete really fast because the way that you set one up completely changed. So I would think that as long as whatever is in the book doesn't become obsolete, it's just an evergreen marketing tool that you just really never stopped promoting, I would imagine.
[20:46.690] - Steve Gordon Yeah. In fact, I published my first book, Unstoppable Referrals, in 2014, as we're recording this eight years ago. And we got two clients last week who both told me, yeah, I got your book four or five years ago. One guy told me he had moved four times. And my book was important enough to him that he moved it four times over the course of those years. And this is one of the things I like about books, particularly physical books, because they own real estate in the prospects world, literally own real estate. So you're looking at my desk and I've got two books on my desk that are taking up space. I've got two completely full bookshelves behind me that are taking up space. So this guy said, yeah, I was just kind of looking at my bookshelf and I remembered your book. And I pulled it down and he said, this is like a month ago.
[21:42.930] - Steve Gordon And then so I went to your website again. I hadn't been in a while. And I kind of got back into all your stuff. And here I am and he's a client. We're going to help him write a book. So that's the power of this. It is the only marketing that I've ever created, the only marketing asset I've ever created in my career that people don't throw away. So the very first thing I ever did from a marketing perspective was back in my first company, which was an engineering consulting firm. And I didn't know anything about marketing at the time.
[22:16.120] - Steve Gordon And this is kind of really early days of the Internet. We didn't even have a website yet, I don't think at that point. And we hired this graphic designer to create a full color, like eight-page brochure for us and chuckle, right. And we had like all of the appropriate stock images. And the stock images are not like they are today. They were really expensive to license. And she put this thing together and to print it at any kind of reasonable price, we had to print like 5000 copies. So we had boxes and boxes and boxes of these brochures. And I know that when I left those behind, people threw them in the trash. Even though we went to all this expense and effort. And I'll be honest with you, it probably costs less today to print a copy of a print on demand book, which is what all of them are these days than it did to print one copy of that eight page brochure. And when I give somebody a copy of the book or when they buy a copy of the book or they get a copy of it from someone, they move it with them wherever they go.
[23:27.100] - Steve Gordon And five years later they show up and become a client.
[23:30.530] - Jen Lehner It's so true because for most of us, I think it's built into us that books are precious. What is the word? You just don't put a book in the trash. And currently we're renovating our house, and I've had to downsize. My mom and my mother in law both passed last year and we had to go through their households and get rid of stuff. And the books were really the hardest part because it was like, we can't put these in the trash, but there's so many. And some of them are so old, like, not good old, like just really worthless old yellowed pages and whatnot, but just physically could not put them in the trash. So it just took loads and loads of books to Goodwill, but never to the trash. And if I look at my own bookshelves, there's books I haven't read, they've been sitting there for years. And I keep thinking, well, I will read them. Just like the guy who took your book on four moves. I've moved at least that many times. And I keep taking those books with me.
[24:42.110] - Steve Gordon Yeah. This past weekend, my wife and I were chuckling because we've been the house we're in, we built six years ago. And last weekend was sort of the anniversary of the move in. And there is a box of books. It's my box. She keeps reminding me they're my books that is in our laundry room and has been there for exactly six years now. And I cannot part with them. One of them is my high school precalculus book. And I've been hanging onto it because I might have to help the kids with their math homework. It's that kind of crazy stuff that we do with books. And your potential client doesn't necessarily have to read it. You can't make this stuff up.
[25:32.620] - Steve Gordon I had a client that got a hold of me. He was in the UK. Remember when we started this conversation? I was a little one-and-a-half-person consulting firm in tiny little Tallahassee, Florida. And I launched my first book. And about two years after that got a call booked on my calendar through our website from this guy in the UK. And we had had a couple of people that I had connected with in the UK and Europe help promote the book when it launched. And so somewhere along the line, somebody had given him a copy of Unstoppable Referrals. And he said, this is great. And he stuck it on his nightstand with every intention to read it. And there it sat, as he told me for two years. In fact, he got on the call. Strangest way to open up a call with somebody you don't know, right? He's like, well, Hello, I've never read your book, and I'm not going to read it.
[26:27.960] - Steve Gordon I just want to say that right up front. I'm really sorry about that. But that's why I'm here. And he went on to explain. He put it on his nightstand, had been sitting there for collecting dust for two and a half years. And just the title of it. He knew he needed referrals in his business. And he's like, I'm not going to read the book.
[26:47.010] - Steve Gordon I know I'm not going to read it now. And your name is on there. You're my guy. Can you help me? And how do we get started? They don't even have to read it. But the fact that it's there and it's working on them really is powerful, and it doesn't always take two and a half years. So we had my third book, which is all around how to use your podcast and a book together to grow your network with people who have your ideal client in their network or audience and then use the book to get referred, following the process I talked about in that book had a partner give away free copies of my podcast Prospecting book. On a Tuesday, Wednesday morning, I get an email from somebody who downloaded the book, and he said, I want to start a podcast. Can you help? Two days later, we're on a call. Within a week, we got a $30,000 client, so it doesn't have to take a long time either.
[27:49.070] - Jen Lehner Wow, that is fantastic. Do you do speaking and have you used your book to get speaking gigs?
[27:56.360] - Steve Gordon Yeah. In fact, I've had people seek me out for paid speaking engagements all over the country. And so I've done paid. I've done some free ones just at big conferences where I wanted to be in front of the audience. And so, yes, all of that. And that's one of the things that we share in the program. When we get to the promotion end of it, we got about nine different promotional strategies that we teach. We don't ever recommend that any client do all nine of them at once because that drive you crazy. But pick the one or two that really fit you. And speaking is an excellent way to use the book because people if you think about it, if they're putting on an event, if they can get someone in who wrote the book on the topic versus anyone else on the topic, they want the person who wrote the book because it makes the organizer of the event look better.
[28:45.770] - Jen Lehner So you said program. Are you talking about your group? Don't you have a group program? Is that what you're talking about?
[28:54.890] - Steve Gordon We have two ways that we help people. We have a service where we'll write your book for you, and we've got a team of writers who will do that, and they'll interview you to pull kind of all your great ideas out. But really, I think the program that's most effective for people is our group program. It's called the Magnetic Author Accelerator. And in about 90 days you can come in and have your book done, published out. And the idea is that we want you to get your first client in those 90 days, and we guide you through how to handle the writing part of it in about 30 days, 30 minutes a day for about 30 days, and you can be done. And the thing that makes that happen is that we've kind of reverse engineered a process that's really repeatable to get your book done. But, yeah, that's the program.
[29:51.750] - Steve Gordon And what I like about that is that it's accessible to most business owners to hire a ghost writer to come in and write your book. You can spend over $100,000. Now our program are done for you program isn't quite there, but this other program, the accelerator program, makes this within the reach of virtually every business owner.
[30:20.600] - Steve Gordon And the thing that we've noticed about the clients who come through that program is they have such a sense of accomplishment because they did it themselves that it's just so much fun to watch.
[30:32.930] - Jen Lehner Do you help with that part in the middle where when we were talking about your LinkedIn person, the part with how far you go with sharing the goods?
[30:46.140] - Steve Gordon Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, when someone comes in to our accelerator program, we're working really closely with them. Oftentimes we're communicating on a daily basis through our we use a tool called Slack to communicate back and forth. And so they might put together a draft of their outline and ask, hey, in this chapter, I'm not sure if I should share this detail in that detail in this other thing. And we're able to kind of go back and forth and I can ask them some questions about how integral is that? Are we giving away too much there and kind of help dial in exactly what's the right amount to give away, where it's going to give a lot of value to the reader without giving away everything that they know?
[31:34.650] - Jen Lehner I love it. This is so, so good. Thank you so much, Steve. I want to send people well for the program, would it still be magneticauthor.co or is that a different link?
[31:46.400] - Steve Gordon Yeah. No, they can go there and we have a 15 minutes video that they can watch that talks about the whole thing. And if that's something somebody's interested in, there'll be a link there where they can book a time and we can chat and see if it's a right fit for them.
[32:01.110] - Jen Lehner Okay. So Steve was so generous before we got on the podcast. He said, hey, I'd love to give a free copy of my book to your listeners so you can download a free copy of his book Magnetic Author at magneticauthorbook.com\frontrow. If you want a hard copy in your hands, then go to iTunes. Leave a review for this podcast, send me an email or an Instagram message with the picture of your review and I will send you a free copy of this great book, which I cannot wait to read myself. So thank you so much, Steve, this was just so informative. I'm really pumped to write a book now.
[32:46.600] - Steve Gordon You should totally do it, Jen. It's going to be awesome. I can't wait to see your book.
[32:50.850] - Jen Lehner Thanks so much. Take care. Bye.
