Episode #160: From idea to amazon
The story behind the book
With the US publication of my book, No Bullsh!t Leadership on the horizon, we decided to dedicate this episode to tell the story of how the book journey unfolded, from start to finish.
There are some important takeaways from this tale, which I know you’ll be able to apply to your own career journeys. I talk in detail about the strategy, delivery, people, marketing, and PR aspects of the publishing process. I also expose some of the obstacles we had to overcome along the way.
Anything this episode does to inspire you to be bolder, and attempt grand things will make this totally worthwhile.
From idea to amazon: The story behind the book
EPISODE #160 TRANSCRIPT
It's the final week leading into the publication of my book, No Bullsh!t Leadership, in the USA, and Em thought it would be a really good idea to tell the story of how the book journey unfolded from start to finish.
I know that some of you listening will have published books yourselves, so you might be interested to compare notes. I don't want this in any way to be self-congratulatory. So I hope you know me well enough to know that that's not really my thing, but I do think there are some important takeaways from the story as you apply this to your own career journeys.
Let's face it, who am I to think I can have global reach and crack the incredibly competitive US leadership development market?
I'm no one, but Em and I have never suffered from a lack of ambition to do the big things with what we've got. Anything this episode does to inspire you to be bolder and to attempt grand things, will make this worthwhile.
I'm going to run through why I wrote the book
I'll talk about some of the people that helped me, particularly Dr. Nick Morgan, who was a real game-changer
I'm going to go into the writing process just to give you a taste of that
Of course, no story is complete without the impact of COVID. How we handled marketing and PR, the logistics of a move to the US
And then what's going to be next
WHY I WROTE NO BULLSH!T LEADERSHIP
When Emma first came up with the brainchild of starting Your CEO Mentor, I said, "That's awesome. Let's start with a book. I've always wanted to write a book".
She laughed at me. Her response was "Dad that's so 2010, we're not leading out with a book".
Still, we realised as time went on that some people just don't listen to podcasts, and we were missing out on reaching these people with our message.
We were asked almost daily for years, whether we had a book, and this showed a real desire for it even from our long-term listeners. I'll go into this more at our launch event next week but long story short, we felt as though the book was our opportunity to really scale our impact globally.
In terms of positioning, we also wanted something that gave people an overview of our system, that would be a leadership classic and a brilliant standalone, but at the same time, wouldn't be as in-depth as Leadership Beyond the Theory. Leadership Beyond the Theory is for deep, real-time implementation and my contextual perspectives, but the book is an entree into the concepts.
It all started in late 2018…
I contacted a colleague of mine, Heather Linaker. Heather is Australian and an ex CEO of Wiley Publishing in Australia. As a complete neophyte, I had no idea what the publishing industry involved.
I sat down and had a coffee with Heather who was very generous with her time and her advice. And the one thing she asked me was "What are you trying to achieve with the book?" Which was a really insightful question.
Once I went through the need for me to have impact and how I wanted to reach more people, she said, "If you really want to have impact, you've got to publish in the US. If you publish in Australia, the book will never leave our shores. If you publish over there, not only do you have a much larger market, but if it goes well, they can distribute into other countries from the US".
So that's when the US publication was born.
I went home and did a bit of research obviously, and found out that there are five big publishers in the USA, and I wanted to get one of those to publish my book. That's how you get global reach.
Enter Dr. Nick Morgan
It just so happened that December 2018 to January 2019, I was in the US in Boston.
Emma had lined up a podcast interview for me with Laurie Ruettimann, who had a podcast called Let's Fix Work. Laurie was based in Raleigh, North Carolina, so I flew down there to record the podcast episode with her in the early days of January 2019.
Laurie is a great person and after the interview, she asked me a couple of questions. We were just chatting away. And she said, "Well, what do you have planned for 2019?"
And after I told her a couple of the things we were doing, I said, "Yeah, I probably also want to get onto writing my book". And Laurie said to me, "If you're thinking of publishing in the US, you've got to talk to Dr. Nick Morgan, he is THE guy for publishing and speaking".
She planted the seed.
I didn't think too much of it. I went back with what I was doing. We were just creating Leadership Beyond the Theory and running our first cohort.
I had plenty of client work on, so I didn't really get onto it. But a few months later, I picked it up again. And I remember the conversation I had with Laurie about Nick Morgan, and I started a dialogue with him, first via email.
After many conversations, we agreed to spend some time together when I was next in the US, which was in August 2019. Fortuitously, Nick was based in Boston, which is where I spend most of my time when I'm in the US.
We spent a day or two together, thrashing out the project. Is there something here that's unique and compelling that we can offer to a publisher? Like any business product or service what's different, who needs it, and is it valuable?
Then there's the broader strategy, and this is all about 'thought leadership'. I don't claim that tag. I don't call myself a thought leader. Too many people brand themselves as thought leaders, but time will tell. The market will decide whether I am or I'm not. And I don't deserve the moniker unless I can consistently bring value to enough people over time.
But on the practical side, the book is the key to the door of the speaking circuit and all that comes with that. And this is where I'm at my best. I'm my most comfortable, fulfilled, and alive when I'm on a stage, impacting thousands of people, face-to-face. This is where I live to be.
THE PROPOSAL PITCH
Anyhow, after our time together in Boston, we decided there actually was something in this project so the next thing was to write a proposal pitch.
Now, you don't just go out and write a book. There's a whole range of reasons why you don't do that. But Nick told me about this thing called the 'slush pile'. When you write a book and send an unsolicited manuscript to a publisher, it goes on to a thing called the 'slush pile'.
At any point in time, there could be half a million, three quarters of a million manuscripts sitting on the 'slush pile'.
I asked Nick how often one of these things gets published and his answer surprised even me. About one, every two years, gets picked up off the 'slush pile'. So you've got to have a proposal. You've got to have a literary agent who's credible, and you've got to be able to secure a publishing deal before you go ahead and write a book.
From there, I came back to Australia to work on the proposal, and I was fitting that in between clients, and Leadership Beyond the Theory cohorts.
It became obvious fairly quickly, why I retained Nick services. Part of the book pitch and proposal is that you write a sample chapter. I completed the proposal on time and dutifully sent it to Nick for his comments.
When we spoke about it a week or two later, Nick said to me, "Look, the chapter you've written is okay. It's fairly solid. But I think you can write a better sample chapter".
Now I'd just put a bunch of work into this thing and thought I'd done a really good job on writing the sample chapter, but he said, "If you really want to have impact, and if you really want to get someone's attention, you only get one shot at this. So I want you to consider going back and writing a different chapter, which showcases more what this book is going to be about".
So that was the first decision point. Do I go with what I've got? Do I go back and rewrite? So clearly, I took Nick's advice and went back to the drawing board.
Once that was done, we started to shop the proposal to literary agents. Once again, without Nick Morgan's connections, that wouldn't have been possible. He said that we had about 12 potential agents on our depth chart, and you start from the top and work your way down.
Our number one draft pick was Jim Levine. Best in the business. When I went to Jim's website, it was obvious why.
He represents Ray Dalio, Patrick Lencioni, Scott Galloway, Jay Shetty, and wait for it...Tom Brady. Now that was a sign. It had to be Jim. He was the guy for me because I'm such a Tom Brady fan. We submitted the proposal to Jim and waited for him to respond.
This took quite a while and it required a bunch of patience and steely resolve. All the while, Nick was advising me. We were convinced that Jim was going to pick this project up, but there's a bit of luck in this stuff as well.
Even if they love the project an agent can always come back and say, "Look, this looks fantastic, but I just did a business book last quarter, so I'm not really interested in doing another one right now".
Jim Levine came back to us in early 2020, and when he did, it all moved really fast. Jim offered us three possible publishers, and we decided to go with Rosetta Books, which is an imprint of Simon and Schuster, one of the big five.
At the time, I had no idea what a good decision that was, but it's turned out perfectly, as so many things tend to do.
At Rosetta Books, we're dealing directly with the CEO, Arthur Klebanoff, who's a total legend, and a big shout out to Brian and Michelle who've done such a wonderful job for us. They're so good to work with. So collaborative, so patient and so flexible and they didn't offer an advance.
The other two publishers were offering modest advances, but this was the least interesting part of the deal. We managed to get the best of both worlds. The flexibility and collaboration of a small publishing house, with a massive global distribution might of Simon and Schuster. And with Rosetta, our values were completely aligned.
Choosing the title
Interestingly, when we first pitched the project, we didn't pitch the title, No Bullsh!t Leadership. We pitched half a dozen possibles, knowing that the publisher would decide what it was going to be. But our preferred title was 'What Real Leaders Do'.
Now Arthur Klebanoff loved 'No Bullsh!t Leadership' so much when he heard about the podcast, and we'd already built such a brand since 2018 with our global audience, that it just made sense to keep it all the same.
When it came to the subtitle, Arthur of course, was right on the same page with us. The trend these days is to have a very short title with a very long subtitle. So for example, Dan Pink's classic is called 'Drive', but the subtitle is 'The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us'.
Now, Arthur said "With a name like 'No Bullsh!t Leadership', you don't need a subtitle. Because for start, it says it all and for second thing, any words you put after the words, No Bullsh!t Leadership are likely to be bullshit".
AND THEN COVID HIT
I'm at the point of executing contracts with Jim Levine and Rosetta Books. We execute them electronically, between Australia and New York, with a publication date of April 2021, because this feeds into the spring publishing and speaking season.
The famous last words I made to Arthur and Jim, when we signed the contracts were, "I'm going to jump on a plane to New York City next week, where we can meet in person".
And then, COVID hit. International travel suspended. As of today, I'm yet to meet Jim and Arthur in person.
I wrote the book between March and August of 2020. I had the best people I could possibly get around me to guide me through the process. Obviously, Nick Morgan took the lead. But Sarah Morgan, from his company Public Words, also did all the editing, and we will all be glad that she did when you read the book. It's much more readable than my original draft. I also had two key leadership mentors who I listen to and trust because they get it.
One of them is my sister and longtime advisor, Bridget Gibson. She read the book critically and wasn't afraid to give me the feedback I needed.
And then of course, Danny Hovey. Not only was he a leadership guru that helped me to pioneer these concepts, but he gave me constructive, direct criticism during the writing process.
Without Brigid and Danny, the book wouldn't be what it is today.
As I look back, I reckon that the book was 95% me and 5% Nick and the others, but it was the 5% that made all the difference.
In my view, the book is 200% better because of that 5% input, if that makes any sense.
The moral of the story is get the best people around you. Don't ask everyone for their opinion. Ask the people who you respect and know what they have to contribute.
For those who are interested in the mechanics, I used specialist authoring software called Scrivener. If you're writing a book, no matter how you decide to publish it, this is the duck's guts. Make sure you use Scrivener. I also tracked how long I actually spent working on it. I tracked all of my time, and the writings, revisions and rework up to the point of giving a final manuscript to the publisher, took me about 450 hours. That's all up, start to finish.
Okay let's talk about COVID for a minute. As we went through the next month or so two things became obvious.
The first was that COVID was creating massive delays all over the place and changing the world that I was writing into.
This gave me a chance to make some observations and tell some stories in the book, especially around ambiguity and decision-making, that are really useful in our new paradigm.
But of course, I didn't want it to be a book about COVID. The leadership principles are timeless. Still, it became obvious pretty quickly that spring 2021 was not going to be the flourishing, publishing and speaking season that we had all anticipated. So I called Arthur at Rosetta and asked if we could push the pub date back to the fall.
Once again, Arthur was super flexible and agreed that the fall 2021 publishing season would be much stronger than the original April date.
The contract was changed to have a delivery of the final manuscript by 31st of August 2020, with a pub date of the 31st of August 2021, exactly a year later.
Yep, you heard that right. One year to the day between delivering the final manuscript to the publisher and the actual drop date.
Now, I didn't know how much there was to do between the final manuscript and the pub date, but trust me, everyone's been working incredibly hard for a year to prepare for next week.
I've got to say the whole COVID thing wasn't all downside for me. Just prior to March, I remember having conversation with Emma about my ability to write the book because we were so busy doing other stuff.
I said to her, "I just need to lock myself away for a few months to get a really clear run at this book.”
Low and behold, lockdowns, no travel, and companies shutting up shop so my client load dropped massively. I managed to write the book between April and August and delivered it on time easily.
Of course, no one expected COVID to go on for as long as it has, but even as we sit here now, the conference market is still waiting to come back in the US and the world's still working out how to turn the pandemic into an epidemic that we can all live with.
In the meantime, I'm just going to keep working on the things that I can control and making the best decisions I can at any given point.
And the disruptions just keep on coming.
You might recall, 31st of August 2021 was the pub date, which was about three weeks ago. But I got a contact from the publisher just prior to that saying "Our printer has run into logistics and supply chain issues, and can't get the books to the Amazon warehouse in time to meet their deadlines. So we're going to have to push the pub date back". Thus our new date of September the 28th 2021.
Let's talk marketing and PR for a minute
A book's only useful if it gets visibility. What's the point of writing a masterpiece if it sits in the bargain bin in a retail store?
Like any product or service, you have to be able to reach your potential customers.
Here's some fun facts about books:
There's about a million books published each year in the US
Half or more of those are self-published
The average book sells less than 250 copies
98% of books never sell 5,000 copies?
The competition in new books each year is pretty fierce and that's not even counting all of the old classics you're competing against, 'The Five Dysfunctions of a Team', 'Good to Great', 'Why Smart Executives Fail', that's what the market looks like.
Given our whole purpose is to improve the quality of leaders globally, we wanted the book to be visible.
Distribution, being handled by Simon and Schuster, is great. They have the channels in place to all the retailers, both online and bricks and mortar, and they have global distribution capability, assuming of course the book is successful.
I'd love to see the book translated into other languages. One of my articles for Fast Company was translated into Portuguese last week and run by Fast Company's Brazil publication. And I've got to tell you that really tickled me.
So for us, the next step was to actually create a marketing plan, that would give the book the visibility it needs.
I don't mind telling you, we've invested heavily in marketing and PR. We'd never marketed anything like this before.
While the principles were the same, Emma was learning everything on the fly. For example:
What's important on an Amazon page?
What do different online retailers want from an author?
Who are the right types of endorsers for the book?
What are the right channels for promotion?
And who are the right audiences to focus on, et cetera.
It's easy just to spend money on everything, because there are so many options and the book selling and marketing aspect of things is so grey.
But working out methodically, what the most value accretive investments of time and money actually are, without knowing the book publishing process, has been a massive learning curve.
All the knowledge that Emma has captured will help us for the next book. Then of course, we had to test out the 'No Bullsh!t Leadership' messaging within the US market when it came to the media.
We've got a fantastic public relations team at Smith Publicity, and a big shout out to Mallory and Erin for all the hard work, but we had no idea if 'No Bullsh!t Leadership' would be welcomed in the US press.
That was the real test of how it would go, and it's all been very positive, I've got to say. Of course, there's been the odd person who's rejected the swear word, but that just tells us they're not our audience.
We talked to a number of potential PR firms before we engaged Smith, but we chose them because of their close alignment with the way we do things ourselves.
They actually understood the project and were enthusiastic about owning the publicity process. Since then, I've spent a bunch of time writing pitches and articles for publications like Harvard Business Review and Fast Company.
I've also been interviewed on a bunch of US-based podcasts, and I'm just starting to get TV appearances (see below) as a leadership voice. This is just another step in gaining a broader reach and having an even greater opportunity for impact on leaders everywhere.
MOVING TO THE US
For those of you who don't know, I've been married to my wonderful wife, Kathy, for over 13 years. She's American, Boston born and bred. We met in 2007 when I was at Harvard Business School. Since then we've been living in Australia, and we'd always considered a potential move to the US at some point in the future.
When I decided to start the process of publishing over here, I engaged an immigration lawyer to help me through the permanent residency process.
We started this thing over 18 months ago and due to COVID, it's still not resolved. Everything is on a go-slow with the US Consulates around the world for obvious reasons, but given we couldn't move the pub date, we decided to come over here, me just with a three month visa. I'll have to return to Australia to complete the visa process.
But in the meantime, I had to be over here for the book timetable. Meetings with the speaker bureaus, accessibility for media and PR opportunities and so forth. You only get one crack at pub date. It's the culmination of two years work. But personally, we're in complete limbo.
After months and months of dealing with immigration lawyers, specialist cross-border tax advisors, and a host of logistical issues making life extraordinarily complicated, this is another one of those points where we might well turn back and say, "Bugger it! This is all too hard".
Even when we did want to get over to the US, we had to get the Australian government to let us out, which was no easy feat. There aren't just inbound travel restrictions in Australia. There were also outbound restrictions, as part of the COVID policy. We had to seek a special approval to leave, which was granted only after much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
The concept of leaving our very comfortable, fortunate life in Australia, to head into the unknown, was a massive call.
I never underestimate or take for granted the support I have from my wife and my family that lets me live this dream of being able to influence leaders all over the world.
And yes, it's tough. Even saying goodbye to my daughters for three months was incredibly difficult. Knowing that one day that farewell's going to be more permanent. And we had to basically let go of everything material. It's just stuff and it doesn't really matter, but I'm so fortunate to have some cash in the bank, a lifetime of experience, and a world of opportunity ahead of me.
So what's next?
Well, our publisher tells us that the book is tracking really nicely for pre-sales so a HUGE thank you to everyone who supported us by pre-purchasing a copy. Obviously, if you haven't got the book yet, make sure you grab a copy here or through your favourite online retailer, Amazon, Books-A-Million, Barnes and Noble and so forth.
Don't forget we have our free virtual launch event next week, which I hope you can make.
I have a great interview that I've recorded with Riaz Meghji, who's a fantastic interviewer, about a lot of things I haven't spoken about before. Then I'm going to do a live Q&A with all the attendees, so I'd love to see you celebrate this milestone with me.
If you do get a copy, I'd love to hear what you think via an amazon.com review and on whichever social media channels you use.
Just be sure to tag me and use the hashtag #noBSleadership, so that we can track you down and personally thank you for supporting us.
I'm really looking forward to next week's episode, where we're going to replay the audio track from the launch interview that I do with Riaz. Until then, I know you'll take every opportunity you can to be a no bullsh!t leader.
RESOURCES AND RELATED TOPICS:
Pre-order the NO BULLSH!T LEADERSHIP BOOK - Here
Register for the Virtual Book Launch Event - Here
Explore other podcast episodes - Here
Take our FREE Level Up Leadership Masterclass - Start now
Leadership Beyond the Theory- Learn More
YOUR SUPPORT MATTERS
Here’s how you can make a difference:
Subscribe to the No Bullsh!t Leadership podcast
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts
Repost this episode to your social media
Share your favourite episodes with your leadership network
Tag us in your next post and use the hashtag #nobsleadership