How Writing a Book is Good For Business & Why You Shouldn’t Do It Without a Coach

Testimonial (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made.

John Jantsch (00:16): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash scale. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jans. My guest today is Lee Schulman. She’s a writer and writing mentor with two decades of experience under her belt. She founded the Inspired Writer community, an online mentoring community for writers at any stage in their writing lives. Her bestselling book, the Writer’s Roadmap, paving the Way to Your Ideal Writing Life helps thousands find their Way in the Writing world. So Lee, welcome to the show.

Leigh Shulman (01:30): Thank you for having me. It’s really great to be here.

John Jantsch (01:34): So I’m going to start off with the most important question. How did writing a book in your experience, impact your business?

Leigh Shulman (01:44): I think the way writing a book impacted my business is that suddenly there was this calling card that could go anywhere in the world quickly and easily, whether digitally or a printed copy. And I didn’t have to be there so it could be disseminated without me even knowing about it. I think it’s actually Seth Godin where I first heard him say that a book is like a business card, and it very much is. It very much is.

John Jantsch (02:14): You haven’t asked me the question, but I’ll go ahead and answer what people are probably thinking. How did it impact my visit? I’ve written seven books now and I can certainly attest to the fact that writing a book was pivotal, frankly, to my whatever level of success I attribute to my business. I certainly would’ve survived without a book, but I think for me it just amplified everything 2007, so almost 17 years ago, my first book, it really kind of put me on the map, certainly added an air of credibility. It was harder to write a book then than it is today. So I think that made it stand out even more so I support the mission of your business completely for that reason. Do you find there are types of businesses that a book just more particularly beneficial for?

Leigh Shulman (03:02): I feel like a book is good for any business. I’ve worked with actresses and I’ve worked with a few actresses. I’ve worked with people who are doing copy editing businesses and psychologists and everything in between. And I don’t think there’s anything that telling a story or sharing a process can’t help.

(03:23): And I think when you were asking before, how does it help your business, yes, it gets your name out there and it can sort of spread and it’s also a very low bar for people to buy, maybe if your prices are higher, but people can easily get a digital copy of a book. The other thing that I think writing a book does for you is it really solidifies what you’re doing because it’s one thing to meet with clients and to go through your process or even to have a process written down, but when you write it in a book, it really forms it and give it to other people knowing you’re shipping it out into the world. It really solidifies what you do. And I think it also helps pave the way for the next step because you’re like, okay, this is the story that I’m telling.

(04:09): And when you’re finished telling that story, you kind of know your next step already. So as an example with my book, the Writer’s Roadmap, it’s a business plan for writers and it can fit any type of writing business, which is broader than I think most people think it can be. And when I was done writing it and it went out there and I started to see the responses to it, one of the things that I heard from people the most was how rejection gets in their way. So then I wrote up on rejection and it became really obvious also what I wanted to do in my client work and in my community work where people really needed support in a way that I maybe wasn’t doing as much as I could have been and now am.

John Jantsch (04:52): Yeah, that’s probably not talked about that much. I think I have a lot of author friends and a year after their book has been out, they’re like, oh, there’s so many things I would now put in the book. Knowing what I know now, and obviously I have a good friend, David Meerman Scott, I think he’s on this ninth edition of The New Rules for Marketing and pr. So I guess you go back and rewrite. But I do think that paying attention, I mean it is almost like you start the conversation and so then you’re inviting that kind of feedback, aren’t you?

Leigh Shulman (05:22): I think that’s a really good point. I think we often think of books as these sort of static things

Speaker 4 (05:27): When

Leigh Shulman (05:27): Really they’re part of a process and in the idea that we’re always learning and always growing. Of course, you wouldn’t want to write a book and then 10 years later have it apply a hundred percent and nothing has changed. You want to grow.

John Jantsch (05:41): Yeah. So we talk about, and I think a lot of people say, oh, it’s a marketing piece, or it raises your authority. Talk a little bit about directly driving business, like getting clients, generating revenue. Do you find that a book is a good tool? Not just as an untangible kind of your brand thing, but as directly like, oh, I read your book, I’m going to hire you.

Leigh Shulman (06:04): I do think it relates very directly to what you do and finding clients. So my book is about setting up a process of, alright, it’s basically setting up a business plan for writers and it breaks it down into pieces. And the first and most important part is what is it that you want and what’s your vision, what’s your mission? And particularly for books, and I think in creative fields in general, people tend to shy away from looking at it in that way. It’s creative. It shouldn’t have a mission or a vision that doesn’t make sense or goals. But people would read my book and suddenly realize, oh, actually it’s not this whole business oriented thing. There’s a creative element in figuring out what you want and laying it out. And many people have contacted me after reading my book. Well, they usually contact me, they get to my website, they come to a, maybe they test out what it’s like to come to a workshop before they contact me to work or to join the community. So it allows people to know who you are, how you work, what your voice is, what your temperament is before they’ve even met you. And I think people maybe fall in love a little bit with your process

Speaker 4 (07:22): And

Leigh Shulman (07:22): That’s why they want to get to know you. Sometimes people treat you like you’re a celebrity because you’ve written the book. Oh my God, I read your book, your name. I found it here. And I’m often a little uncomfortable with that. But I mean celebrity and authority, I think there’s a little bit of difference, but I think celebrity authority means, okay, I’m coming to you for work. Whereas celebrity is almost unearned in a way, which is I think why I feel a little uncomfortable with it. But it’s a cool thing. And then you get to meet someone and be like, alright, let’s get to work. Let’s be real people here and to get this done.

John Jantsch (08:06): Well, I think part of the customer journey, the most important part I always say is trust. And I think that rather than celebrity, it might just be other people have trusted you, somebody trusted you enough to help you put this book out there. If I’m comparing two people, you’ve got a book. I mean, there’s just all those kinds of things. It doesn’t have to be celebrity, I think it’s just a real trust banner.

Leigh Shulman (08:30): Yeah, for sure. Well, and I think people when they know your name, they see you. They know they can find you online or on Amazon or on a bookshelf. There is an automatic trust that’s sort of given to that because not everybody writes a book and not everybody puts it out there.

John Jantsch (08:47): Well, one of the things you said early on in that last answer was this idea of there’s lots of reasons to write a book, but you just have to have one, right? I mean there has to be the goal. Is it to make money on my book? Is it to raise my authority or to help people know that I stand for X as opposed to is it to get me business? And I had an editor a long time ago, I think it was on my second book, David Muldau is his name. He’s still out there editing for various publishers. And he said, the first question he asked me is, what’s the one thing you want somebody to do after they read this book? And I was like, I don’t know. He said, well, you got to get clear on that first, then we can start talking about what should be in the book. And I think I still today think that’s brilliant advice.

Leigh Shulman (09:32): No, a hundred percent. I’m very big on one sentences, one sentence mission statement. I call it the about of your book where what is it that you want your audience to understand and feel when they’re finished reading your book? That moment where you sort of sit down as a reader, you finish reading and you’re like, oh, I see things a little differently now. And then figure out, well, what is the next step? So I work with people with fiction and nonfiction. So fiction is usually, it’s different than nonfiction in terms of how that one sentence affects people. But with a nonfiction book, a nonfiction tends to be very process driven, which makes it easier to write in a lot of ways. And I read this online recently where people who think, oh, I can’t write a book. Oh, it’s going to be too big. If you’ve been doing your work, you’ve kind of been writing your book your whole life.

(10:30): And so you know what it’s going to be, what’s in it. And when I mentioned I’ve worked with actresses, there was one woman, we did a one hour and in one hour we managed to sit down and not only outline, know what her book was about, outline the whole thing and know exactly how it was going to be laid out. And you said in terms of people writing books, I think at base, I believe most people want to write a book and have the ability have a book in them and have the ability to write it all people.

John Jantsch (11:02): Yeah. I’ve seen research something like 89% of people surveyed have at least expressed some desire to write a book. Yeah, it’s crazy. So you’ve mentioned fiction versus nonfiction, and I think in the context of my listeners, we’re probably talking mostly about nonfiction, but I’m curious your take on, they’re very different. So are they different people? I mean, I saw recently James Patterson is going to write a nonfiction book and I’m wondering, is a lot of people successful nonfiction writers, can they be fiction writers as well? Or is it really a whole different brain

Leigh Shulman (11:40): As far as I’m concerned, people can write both. I actually gave a workshop recently and it’s a how to plan your book workshop. And half of the people who showed up were writing fiction and half were writing nonfiction. And usually it’s all fiction, the people who come to that. So as I was going through it, I just made sure to apply it to both. For the people who are writing nonfiction, it’s slightly different. Like I said, fiction tends to story-driven, whereas nonfiction is process driven. But because nonfiction, there’s always a story in it. If you’re talking about a character, there’s still a character in a nonfiction book, but the character is the author or the examples that you give or the person that you’re writing for. So if you’re always relating to people on the story and arts, we talk about the arc of the story, both have an arc. The arc might be a little different, and the impact on the characters or the people in it are a little bit different. But it lays out relatively similarly,

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(13:44): That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct. Tape the part. Always when I retire, I keep telling people, threatening my wife, I’m going to write a fiction book. And the part that I’m always so drawn by the fiction books that I really like, the part that always sucks me in is dialogue. And to me, I always find, I look at that and I go, how do they do that? All I do is I go out and I do something and I write about how I did it. Whereas the idea that you’re going to fabricate theoretically this entire world of characters and they’re going to talk to each other just to me seems like crazy art.

Leigh Shulman (14:25): But I bet so many things. I think the minute you sit down and do it, it’ll start to lay out very, you’ll suddenly realize, oh wait, I mean you’ve been talking to people your whole life. Certainly that’s going to come into play.

Speaker 4 (14:41): Well,

Leigh Shulman (14:42): Not your whole life, but most of it. And actually when I write fiction, I start with dialogue because it’s like, and I work with people in doing that because it’s very easy to generate dialogue. Now, the truth is, when you first generate dialogue, there’s a lot of chaff. And the truth is, when humans talk, humans talking and dialogue are actually very different. We say things three or four times, we kind of bundle things up. So you get that down and then you kind of clean it up. And that’s the beauty of any kind of writing. You can edit it, whatever ends up on paper, you can then shave it.

John Jantsch (15:26): So this plays right into really your business model. But I was going to ask you a question that’s a silly question for you to answer, so I’ll sort of tee it up as though I know how you’re going to answer it. Does every writer need a coach? I mean, not every writer, but I mean, is it a really good idea? I mean, I’ve never written fiction before. The idea that I’m just going to go out without any coaching, without any practice doing it and write a bestseller is pretty crazy, right?

Leigh Shulman (15:51): I mean, it happens. It definitely happens. And I’m very big on the world of possibility and not counting things out before you even try. So I won’t say it never happens. I will say getting some guidance, having a coach, having someone who can help guide you through and get through the obstacles that come up. There’s so many people that I work with, they’ll say to me, well, I don’t know what’s going to happen at the end of this book. And people think you’re supposed to know what happens when you’re writing a book,

(16:20): But just to have someone there to say no, you’re not supposed to know the whole point is playing and letting it come out. And that, I think applies to nonfiction too, because it’s in that play and it’s in that chaos that some of the magic really comes to the surface. Having a coach really helps you get rid of a lot of the grief that comes along with writing and the giving up and the starting and giving. I started a book, but then I won’t come back to it for two years because I didn’t like what I was writing and it wasn’t any good. And all that self-talk and sort of lack of confidence that a lot of people have with writing your coach. And I see that with my clients. They say to me all the time, I don’t know why when I’m writing with you, this just feels so easy. And I’ve worked with coaches too, so it’s not like I’m just coaching others and I don’t know what it’s like to be coached. I very much believe in coaches because they give you feedback with knowledgeable feedback that helps you move forward so much faster.

John Jantsch (17:19): Yeah, and theoretically with the right relationship, it’s pretty judgment free. It’s like, no, we’re just trying to get you across the goal line here that you defined. Right. And as opposed to if I show my, she’s not here, so I can say this, if I show my writing to my wife, it’s like, yeah, it’s okay. I don’t know. It’s like, are you kidding me? It’s brilliant. So we’ve gotten, oh gosh, 16 minutes into the show and I haven’t mentioned ai. What is that doing to your world? I mean, just

Speaker 4 (17:46): Between

John Jantsch (17:46): The hype and the misinformation and the actual usefulness of it, where does that landing with misconceptions or maybe some really crappy stuff?

Leigh Shulman (17:57): Well, it’s funny you ask because I literally just took a course on AI because I wanted to know more. And I will say I left the course feeling much more positive about the possibilities of ai. I think some of the issues that people have with it is a lot of the chat, GBT and the other generators, they’re taking all this information from the internet often people’s books and proprietary

Speaker 4 (18:23): Information

Leigh Shulman (18:24): That they really shouldn’t be using. And recently, I think there was a publishing house or there was somebody, some group who had a law changed or something so that AI generators cannot use proprietary information. And I’m a hundred percent behind that.

Testimonial (18:42): But

Leigh Shulman (18:42): One of my big takeaways from the class that I took was, I think people are so scared of what AI might be that it makes them really rigid against it,

(18:54): And therefore it makes it harder to use it really well. And obviously you want to protect people’s copyrights. You don’t want to use their personal information. There was somebody in the class who does 360 reviews of our clients, but feeding that information of the chat, GPT or whatever, you don’t want that for everyone to see and to be used for all these things forever. But when AI is collaborative and because it really can sometimes when I use AI and I often will use AI for prompts for different things if I need writing prompts or there’s one prompt going around that’s basically based on all the searches I’ve done, tell me what you know about me that I don’t know about myself, and it’s that I don’t know about myself. That I think makes it really interesting because it did put something out about me that, I mean, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it almost made me cry because it was exactly what I want and it’s exactly what I want to be. And it was so clear. But I think as long as people are using ai, they’re clear about what they’re using, they’re transparent about it, and they’re protecting people’s intellectual property. I think there’s amazing benefit for ai.

John Jantsch (20:07): Yeah, I think what’s really getting in the way right now is the proliferation of write a book in two hours and make a hundred thousand dollars on Amazon stuff. And that kind of gets in the way of people actually looking at the practical use of these tools.

Leigh Shulman (20:22): But does that actually happen? Can people really write a book? I found that very hard to do a book.

John Jantsch (20:30): I think you can produce 45,000 words. How’s that? Yeah.

Leigh Shulman (20:34): And then, I mean, it’s so hard

John Jantsch (20:36): To, and then call it a book.

Leigh Shulman (20:38): You can do that and then you better have a really solid marketing team who’s willing to go to the ends of the earth to get that book out there. I’m not sure the book is going to carry itself. I mean, I’ve done that. The course software I use has an AI generator and just to see what happened, because I’ve been putting together an editing course and it generated it and it made it more complicated for me because everything was so top level that wasn’t, I couldn’t use it to teach the way I need to teach editing. And it wasn’t getting to the core of what it really means. And I suspect that’s what happens with AI generated books too.

John Jantsch (21:14): Yeah, no question. One question I’m sure you get all the time, especially people that own a business, have a life that is not an author’s life. How do you find the time? I mean, how do you help people find the time? I mean, obviously I think it’s probably, how do you make it a priority? It’s probably the same question, right?

Leigh Shulman (21:32): Absolutely. I mean, I think that really is it. Whenever people talk about that, how do you make time to write my two go-tos are set boundaries and say no to stuff so that you’re not doing as much. So you literally have more time. Now, the reality is every time if you have a week off, stuff fills that week really quickly. But if you’re intentional and say, alright, I’m going to spend, I’m work on my book this much

(22:01): And then continue to move forward. I mean, writing a book is so many other things, just one step at a time. You just have to take that next step and be aware that there might be chaos. You might sit down one day and amazing, brilliant 20 pages, and you may sit down the next day and you’re sitting there messing with a paragraph all day and it isn’t quite what you want. And I think getting used to that, getting used to that, your time may not always be used in the way you think it will, as long as you set it aside and use it, you will write that book.

John Jantsch (22:37): Yeah, I know. I just would always say, I’m going to every day write a thousand words, and sometimes a thousand words were really hard. Sometimes I’d look up and I’d written 5,000, but it was just the fact that I made myself sit down and start the kind of writer that it takes me 20 minutes of fussing to start to the keys going. And so I know if I just do it, if I just commit to it, then the fussing will be over. I’m not one of those people that go, oh, I’ve got a half hour break here. I’ll slam some stuff in. I have to have chunks.

Leigh Shulman (23:11): That makes sense. And I mean, I feel like most of the people I work with need that entry time where you’re just kind of spewing stuff out and letting get past the junk and the whatever you’re thinking about to get to the actual writing part, I think it’s easier to just sit down and do 30 minutes for me anyway, when I’m further along in the book writing process. So I’m like, okay, I have 30 minutes. I want to work on this dialogue piece, or I know this paragraph. It’s almost where I want it to be, but let me edit it. As opposed to when you’re beginning a book where you’re sure where you’re going yet and you need time to mess around a bit.

John Jantsch (23:49): Yeah, yeah. Well, Lee, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there anywhere you’d invite people to connect you and find out more about your certainly the Writers Roadmap book, but also the work that you do with writers?

Leigh Shulman (24:02): Sure. Well, there’s two places that I generally send people. The first one is specifically for podcasts, and so it’s lee schulman.com/podcast, and there’s a form there. So if people go there and you have a book idea or you want to connect over something, just fill out the form. Tell me about yourself. I love hearing people’s stories about their books, and so people, I’m sorry it went on forever. I love it when people do that. You can send that in. And then the other place to check is Instagram, and I’m the leash woman in Instagram, and that’s where, that’s sort of my main place on social media where I have all the information about the projects that I have, and I talk about writing, and I will always write back to you if you send a message or leave a comment.

John Jantsch (24:48): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully, I don’t know when I’m getting to Argentina next, but hopefully I’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.