This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity podcast. Today's discussion is going to be several thoughts about writing a book. And we'll come back to the title in a second. But the concept, somebody asked me recently, are there some lessons you learned from your latest book project? And there sure are. So I'll go back through this just briefly. Over the course of my career, this is the seventh book that I've been involved in authoring many on healthcare to begin with, healthcare practical guide, the Physicians Manage Care Success Manual, the ASC Handbook, another book in ambulatory surgery centers. More recently, I've written books about business. The first one was blocking and tackling. The second, the entrepreneur's edge. And now third, building great businesses, create momentum, overcome sepax and scale with confidence. So what have I learned? The first thing I always learned is writing is incremental and iterative. It's not a one and done type of thing. So when I started writing business books a few years back versus the healthcare books I wrote 20 years ago, I first started with this concept of trying to put a lot of my business and investing thoughts in one place. And that first book that I did was sort of a hodgepodge. It served a purpose, but didn't come out nearly as cleanly as I wanted it to come out. So went back to the drawing board, wrote a second book with probably a little bit better publisher, but still largely self-published versus a true third-party publisher. And worked with the company, rewrote the book myself with some help from an editor, Grace Keller, who's fantastic. And the book was much improved. Not great, but not embarrassing compared to the first book, which I felt like I couldn't really share with people because it was just didn't come out all I wanted to come out. So that was it. But an iterative process, an incremental process. The third book, which is coming out in June, which we've made a tremendous effort to write and sell a lot of books, has been another incremental effort. I got serious feedback on the last book saying, the book is good, but you got to choose a lane, business or investing. And second, you have to tell the story of building a business, not just give ideas and thoughts on building businesses. So I went back last summer and spent literally three months, three or four hours a day writing every day to redo or rewrite or write this book, largely taking into account a lot of those thoughts and ideas. So this book is about 40,000 words, a great pleasure to write, but very much an incremental type of thing. Now, the thing about books is I could have kept on revising and improving this book, and no doubt it would have been improved. I do think it's far better than the last two books. It's not going to pull it surprised, but I think it's solid. But the first concept is writing helps you clarify what you're doing, getting outside feedback is really helpful as well. Second, writing itself is fine. We almost always, we often say to people who are building businesses, writing an article giving a speech is fine. It's the follow up with that article, sending it to your top customers, your top clients, sending to people in distribution that is so important. So with this book, at some point had to put a finish, a stop to it and say, we're done writing, and then work on distribution. And then you learn a lot in terms of distribution. You could do all the general advertising you want, the general promotion you want, but what really sells books, and it's the same thing with building a business or building clients, is one-on-one contact, direct messages, directly talking to people, giving talks and asking people, will you buy the book? But it's handy in combat. It's not general stuff. It's not general media. We almost always say about sales and marketing. One thing is a waste of money unless you've got a sales team to follow up on the marketing effort. So one thing is nice, it's ear support. The second thing, which is far more important, is the handy in combat, the regular direct messages, the regular working with people, the regular finding ways to distribute the book and find people to buy the book or to help buy the book. So that's the second thing I would say is, the third thing I'd say is that all this at the end of the day is a brilliant project for the mind. It forces you to think and connect with people, and it's really healthy for me to go back to whatever age I am now. Back in the day, I was a really good student, really good at sitting and writing. I didn't have as much attention deficit disorder. So for me, going back and having a project where I spent three to four months, literally writing three to four hours a day, is a fantastic use of my brain to start thinking again and putting together thoughts again and start thinking in depth again, not just fast. And there's this great book I'd written, or read, and I'm spacing the name right now, but it's something about workflow, Kehl Newport's book on deep work. I think that's actually the title of it, and I think that's exactly right. One of the first and fifth concepts I'll talk about is distribution or book is as important as writing the book. You've got to do both, and they've got to both be great. And then other things that I've learned are book distribution, book writing. There's a great concept that one of the people we work with shared with us. There are no bestselling authors. There are bestselling teams, and I think that's right. In creating a book, you need a team that includes a publisher, typically a writing and editorial partner that I've had in this project, Molly Gamble. You need a great strategy on it, and then you need a great team to distribute it. So for example, I can do all the writing I want, but getting involved with directly messaging thousands of people, you please buy the book, I can't do that by myself. That's done with the great help of one of my assistants, trying to essentially move books through podcasts, webinars, and so forth. It's all team that puts that together and does that. So the other thing I would say about writing a book is it is very much a team sport. It's not an individual effort. The writing, the first part of the writing is very much an individual effort, but then it's really a team game. But even from the get-go, I got some serious feedback from a really close friend, from a really professional editor, a writer, professional writer on what could be improved from the last book I'd written, and that was sort of the impetus for rewriting this book. It's all an incremental effort. It's a great, satisfying project. It'll either succeed or not succeed, but it's success in itself, just having the chance to write again and visit with so many people in and of itself. It's that old adage that the journey is really the thing. And I think that's so true here in writing this book. We'll be back with you this week. We've got episodes so far on the markets and what's going on with the Magnificent Seven, Microsoft and Meta platforms having a horrible year so far. We've got an episode on the making of millionaires in the country, 24 million millionaires so far in our country, households, and growing at about 1,000 a day. That's a fantastic stat. And finally, today, we've got this discussion on writing a book, some of the lessons on writing a book. We hope you enjoy all of these. We'll be back with you the rest of this week with some more episodes. Thank you so much for listening to The Becker Business and The Becker Private Equity Podcast. And a special shout out today to our Magnificent producer, Chanel Bunger, the best in the business. Thank you so much.
