You’re Writing Your Business Book Wrong with Josh Bernoff

Joe Casabona: We live in an age where everything needs to be fast, easy, and in high volume. I’ve seen people say, “I’m going to write eight books this year.” Josh Bernoff, today’s guest, thinks that’s a load of crap. See, if you want to write a good book, just like anything of quality, you need to spend time on it. And Josh knows. He’s a bestselling author or ghostwriter of eight business books, and he’s contributed to 50 book projects that have generated over 20 million for authors.

Josh’s new book, Build a Better Business Book, is a masterclass on how to do just that. Today he’s giving us the best parts of that book. In the pro show, things get real as we talk more about the charlatans of writing as well as ghostwriting.

But for now, look for these top takeaways. To write a good book, your idea has to be big, right, and new. This will make it distinguishable from everything else and increase your impact and influence. Number two, a good business book consists of two things, answers to your reader’s questions and case studies. Your book is nothing if you don’t have case studies to back up your claims. And number three, are you a planner or a pantser? Pantsers write by the seat of their pants, which creates long, rambling, incoherent manuscripts. Planners start with what Josh calls a fat outline so they know the story they’re telling before they ever put pen to page.

This is one of my favorite interviews to date and I know you are going to love it too. If you want to get the entire episode ads-free, you can sign up over at casabona.org/join, and you can find a link to Josh’s book and everything we talk about over at streamlined.fm/321. But for now, let’s get to the intro and then the interview.

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Intro: Hey everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast where you get free coaching calls from successful creators. Each week you get actionable advice on how you can build a better content business to increase revenue and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.

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Joe Casabona: All right, I am here with Josh Bernoff, a bestselling author or ghostwriter of eight business books. That is a lot of… that’s like James Patterson-level books, I think. Josh, how are you?

Josh Bernoff: I’m doing great. It’s good to be here.

Joe Casabona: I am so excited to talk to you today because writing a book has been top of mind for me. We were talking in the pre-show about how I’ve written five books. They were all pretty technical books, lots of programming. I would tell people they’re page turners because most people will just turn the pages until they get to the end of it. But this is a great topic because books are a great way to establish authority.

So the first question I want to ask you is about this adage I’ve been hearing a lot. They say a book is the new business card. What do you think about that sentiment?

Josh Bernoff: That’s total crap. Honest to God. First of all, if your book is gonna be any good, then it’s gonna be a lot of work to create. Refining the idea is a lot of work, writing it is a lot of work, promoting it is, research, all of that. And if you put all of that effort in, and then all it is is a business card, that’s a hugely expensive and difficult business card that you’ve just created.

Of course, you can very rapidly and easily now create a book and put it out there, even though the quality is crap. And then basically your book business card says, I am a loser that doesn’t put any effort into anything. And so yes, if that’s really what you want to communicate, go for it.

Joe Casabona: Oh, man. First of all, I love that we’re starting out at this level. But you’re right. There are people who are like, oh, you could just publish a book by taking blog posts and putting them together. And I’m like, how though? How would you… Unless you started writing your blog like it’s your book. You can’t just take like 15 blog posts and put binding on them and say, here I have a book.

Josh Bernoff: It’s interesting that you raised it that way. Both of the two books that I published most recently were produced… Well, they were sort of debuted as blog posts. But when I was writing those blog posts, I had an idea of how everything was gonna fit together. So that was more like drafting things in public than it was like, Oh, look, here’s a bunch of blog posts. I’ll just dump it all in into a bin and call it a book.

Joe Casabona: I think that’s the core difference, is that writing in public, building in public is one thing. And then like retroactively saying like, Oh man, like I’ve had my blog since like 2001 or 2003 maybe. I can’t just today be like, Oh man, I’ve got 20 years of blog posts. I’m just gonna pick my favorites and you know, the Chronicles of Joe Casabona and make it a book, right? Those first, I don’t know, a hundred blog posts were awful. I was a teenager. And they were bad, really bad.

Josh Bernoff: Okay, I gotta name two people who can get away with what you just said. One is Guy Kawasaki, he did that, and the other is Seth Godin. Now, if you think you’re as good as Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin as a writer, go for it. But the other 99.99% of bloggers don’t really have what it takes to do that.

Joe Casabona: Yes. This is exactly what I say to podcasters who are like, “Well, I don’t edit my podcast. People like hearing the raw interview. That’s what Joe Rogan does.” And I’m like, yeah, Joe Rogan has like 11 million downloads per episode. So if you think you can be Joe Rogan, then by all means, but most of us have to actually edit our work.

Josh Bernoff: Yes.

Joe Casabona: I love that. If that’s the case, if you need to go into a book with a story in mind, with some overarching cohesive message, and you can’t just put together the stuff you’ve written and hope for the best, like it’s some kind of serial killer’s letter with magazine clippings, why should founders write books?

Josh Bernoff: Well, it’s about making an impact and creating influence. I like to talk about the things that distinguish an idea. And this can be either an idea for a new organization, an entrepreneurial idea, or an idea for a book. It has to have three things. It has to be big. That is, having an impact on a large number of people. It has to be right. That is, you have some sort of evidence that shows that your new insight is different from what people have seen. And it has to be new. It has to be differentiated. You don’t want to be the 11th person that came up with this idea. You want to have your own spin on it.

So that big, new, and right, that is the kind of thing that tends to define an entrepreneurial idea. It’s also the kind of thing that helps to define a book. And if you produce a book that says, here’s the problem that people have. Here’s my idea about how the world’s gonna be different and how to change things, and here’s how to implement it, you have created a powerful argument that you have insights that nobody else has. And presumably that translates into you have a corporation or an entrepreneurial venture or whatever that deserves to be successful in the world.

Joe Casabona: That’s great. I’m gonna repeat this. Big, right, and new. This is like… I don’t actually think I’ve ever said his name out loud. Atul Gandhi. Gandhi?

Josh Bernoff: Mm-hmm.

Joe Casabona: The writer of the Checklist Manifesto. This book on Amazon, it’s saying 2011. I can’t imagine that’s the earliest published date, though. This book has seemingly been around forever, cited by lots of people, but now it’s like if somebody put out a book today that’s like, Oh yeah, you need to make checklists. That’s not… obviously I need to make checklists. That’s not a new idea.

Josh Bernoff: Well, it’s interesting there are a lot of ways to be new. You could write a book called the Checklist Manifesto for Financial Services or The Checklist Manifesto for Gen Z, or here are 29 worksheets that will allow you to implement the checklist. Let’s just say content marketing as an example. There are thousands of books on content marketing, but if you are focused on, let’s say, TikTok, maybe you have insights that nobody else has. That is all ways that you can differentiate. There are all ways that you can be new. You don’t have to basically say, Okay, I’ve invented something nobody’s ever seen before called artificial intelligence and that’s completely new.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, this is great. I’m really glad you said that because I think this is something that people kind of get in their own head about. They do this with blog posts too. I remember in the early mid-2000s, people would be like, why should I blog about this when whomever, right, when Seth Godin has already blogged about this? Well, I mean, you’re not Seth Godin, but also you are not Seth Godin, right? You have different lived experiences. Seth Godin has a huge audience. Maybe you could talk about it from the point of a brand new audience or whatever.

Josh Bernoff: I faced this when I was looking at this book I just wrote called Build a Better Business Book. It’s not as if nobody’s ever written a book about how to write a business book before. But there were two things that I thought would distinguish it. First of all, most of it that’s out there is about writing, and I wanted to talk about publication models and ghostwriting and how to do research and how to structure the book and how to promote it, and what happens after it goes to the publisher and all of this stuff that nobody talks about. I also wanted to get an idea that I don’t think people understand, which is that business books are stories. And unless you write as a story and you write with a lot of case study stories in there, it doesn’t hang together. It’s boring and it’s not really a good book.

Joe Casabona: That’s a really great point. Again, we’ve kind of heard that from the… Don Miller talks about the hero’s journey, which of course was cited by George Lucas, which of course was not invented by George Lucas. But like putting it in the context of writing a business book I think is really important because you’re not just brain dumping. As we record this, I literally wrote that this morning, that stories are so important.

My dad would always ask me when I was a kid, how can I remember every line to every movie I’ve ever seen and I can’t remember what I learned in math class earlier that day? And I’m like, there are no stories in math class. Math class is boring and the movie I watched was a compelling story, and so I remember it better.

Josh Bernoff: Well, since I was trained as a mathematician, I just think that your math teachers didn’t tell you the stories through the math problems the way that they should have. Once there was a variable that no one knew who it was and then the mystery was revealed.

Joe Casabona: And I’ll a caveat that I was very bad at… I think I might be the only person with a software engineering degree that is bad at math. That’s a story for another time. Before we get into, how do we find our book topic, how do we make a business book a story? Because again, my sciencey web developer brain, my programmer brain is like, just present the facts. I’ve said business books could be 25% of what they actually are if you just had the facts in there. But-

Josh Bernoff: But no one would read them.

Joe Casabona: No one would read them, yeah.

Josh Bernoff: So how to make a business book a story. I’m gonna talk about the beginning, the middle, and the end because that’s what stories have. The beginning of a business book is what I call the scare the crap out of you chapter. Chapter one is always to scare the crap out of you chapter. And there are two ways to scare the crap out of people, and they’re called fear and greed.

So fear is if you don’t do what it says in this book, something bad will happen. So for example, a cybersecurity book might be, you know, if you don’t prepare your company for potential data breaches, something terrible will happen. You’re like, Oh man, I better read the rest of this book. Greed is, you can make more money or be more successful if you read this. So it’s like, Oh, well you could triple your productivity if you organize things this way and then you’ll be able to get more done. You’re like, Oh yeah, that sounds profitable.

So you can have both fear and greed in the first chapter. In that chapter you describe the solution as well, but in a very brief way. So people are like, Oh yeah, well that sounds good, but you’re gonna have to prove to me that that actually works. So typically what comes after that is a chapter or two that describes the solution in some more detail and then you explore the elements of that.

One way to make sure that this hangs together as a story is to use what I call the reader question method. And that is each chapter should answer a question. So maybe the first question is, are cybersecurity breaches a big deal? And then the second chapter of the question is, how big of a problem is this? And then the third one might be, what are the strategies I can use to prepare my company? And then fourth is, how do I convince my management this is important? And if you look at the sequence of those questions, it’s like a natural conversation that takes people through to the end.

I write in my book about a woman who wrote a terrific book. Her name is Fotini Iconomopoulos, a book about negotiation. It’s called Say Less, Get More. It turned out to be a bestselling book. But she would sit and like cry tears of pain while she was attempting to write it because it’s like, how do I write this chapter? And once she found out about this reader question method, her blurb from my book said, Oh my gosh, you could’ve saved me so much trouble if I’d only known about that ahead of time.

Then basically writing the chapters is answering the questions. Now that’s not so simple, but that’s the basic idea of how the book becomes a story and how each chapter sort of fits into that story.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. So we’ve got the beginning fear and greed, and then we’ve got describe the solution in more detail by answering each question.

Josh Bernoff: Right.

Joe Casabona: How do we put a nice bow on this book? Is there a call to action? Again, not to dump on Don Miller, I’ve read all of his books. But some of them were like pretty heavy-handed in the, hey, buy my workshop, hire one of my people. How do we put a bow on this?

Josh Bernoff: A couple of things. First of all, you need to understand what the ingredients of a business book are. And they are case study stories, which is really important descriptions of people who had the problem and how they dealt with it. Then there are ideas and frameworks, what I call argumentation and proof points, which is like proof that you’re right. Then there is additional research and finally there’s advice. So every chapter should have some advice about what you need to do. And then taken as a whole, the book is an advice book. It’s like these are the things you need to do.

Now it’s very tempting to say, well, I’m gonna hold this stuff back and if you really want my help then you need to call me and pay me money. But people really hate that. They really don’t like the idea that they bought a book and that the end result of that book is just… it’s a big brochure and attempting to get you to sign up. So it’s a little more subtle. It’s really content marketing.

If somebody reads my book at the end, 98% of them are gonna be saying, Oh, well now I know how to write a business book. And the other 2% are gonna say, huh, I need to write a book proposal that will sell to a publisher. Maybe this guy, Bernoff, can help me. And even though the book doesn’t make a big deal about that, they know they can get ahold of me. And every other business book is like that. In the end, there’s a subtle message, you can hire this person to give a speech, you can hire this person as a consultant, you can buy these people’s products. It tends to pay off because thought leadership in general pays off that you’re like, I want to talk to this person because they are the expert.

Joe Casabona: Thought leadership in general pays off. This is great. Because you’re right. The books where it was very heavy-handed and like, “Hey, read this book and then hire me,” I was like, well you gotta just kind of sound desperate. Did you write this book as lead gen? You could buy Google ads or Facebook ads if you want to direct sell to people.

But what you said, if people will read my book and 98% will say, “Great, I can write a book, 2% will say I need help. I think another thing that people think is that, oh yes, the book is the first step and most people will then go into my funnel and want to hire me. But people who are reading the books, a lot of them are DIY and for the ones who aren’t, they were maybe hoping to be DIY and then realized that they want an accelerant.

Josh Bernoff: I think if you have elevated the capabilities of a large number of people, if your book has made thousands of people more productive, it’ll pay off. When Seth Godin writes a marketing book, he’s not saying, oh, hire me. It’s like, no, I want people to be smarter and to think about a book like Blitzscaling, that’s Reid Hoffman’s book on growing companies, it’s not intended to generate leads. It’s intended to generate influence. It’s intended to make him the a authority on what it takes to scale companies up. And of course that results in all sorts of benefits of investments or his ability to influence legislation or who knows what.

So if you are the acknowledged expert in a field, then the benefits come to you. And that really is what the book is helping to accomplish. And along the way you’re helping thousands of people. If you’re generous with your advice in the book, then it will eventually pay off for you. If you’re greedy, it won’t.

Joe Casabona: Yes. Yes. Love this. Listeners, remember that part. Because this is what I say all the time. Like what should I make my free content on? Literally everything you know. Just tell people what you know. People want to know how. And then if they want it done for them or if they want a bespoke solution, then they’ll hire you. Look at James Clear. It’s not like he has in his book, Hey, if you want to form better habits, hire me, I’ll be your habit coach, right?

Josh Bernoff: If you’re successful at his level, you actually can make millions of dollars from book sales. But that’s unusual.

Joe Casabona: Right. Right.

Josh Bernoff: I have to say that for most people, the question is can you reach the 5,000, 10,000 people that really need to hear your message? You can be vastly successful with a book that sells 3,000 copies if those are exactly the right 3,000 people for you to influence.

Joe Casabona: Man, this is, I think, something a lot of people need to hear. Because you do hear New York Times bestseller or award-winning. I was talking to somebody who’s like, Oh, my book is award-winning. And I’m like, “Did you buy that award? I mean, they did. This is great. Can you reach the 5,000 to 10,000 people who need to hear your message?

How do we find our book topic? I’ve got like 14 ideas in my head, from how to start a podcast to how to improve your podcast processes. And we have your framework from earlier: it needs to be big, it needs to be right, it needs to be new. How do we find a topic that’s big and right and new?

Josh Bernoff: I’d say there, there’s sort of two ways to do that. One is an ongoing process where your work with clients generally informs that. Every time you do work you learn something. A memoir. I just edited a memoir. Oh, now I know something about a form of writing that I didn’t know before. Or if it’s somebody else, they might be like, Oh, here’s a coding project that involves artificial intelligence. Oh, I just learned something about how to use AI in coding. And that collection of knowledge is what everyone assembles.

Now the question is. how does that cohere? And that gets to basically what do you know that nobody else knows. That’s the new part of the big, right, and new. One of the things I do with authors is an idea development session where they’re like, Oh, I want to write a book about this. It’s typically me and them and then a third person who was like a stand-in for the audience, a trusted friend, or whatever.

And I will often hear their description and I’m like, That sounds boring. Or I think I heard that before. Isn’t that what somebody else said? Or the other side of it is, oh, I never heard somebody use that word to describe this, or that analogy is new. So I keep sort of pushing against the boring, same old stuff and going more in the direction of things that are unique and interesting. And at the end of that process, you end up with a differentiated statement that nobody else can make. And that becomes the title of the book and it becomes the sort of north star for where the book is going.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. I love that. Push against boring, same old, move towards new and interesting.

Josh Bernoff: I just feel like this question of idea development, developing an idea is usually important and nobody even thinks of it as a thing. But unless you spend time developing your idea, it will be either disconnected or too much the same as everything else out there.

Joe Casabona: I’ll be honest with you. I feel like at this point my business is struggling a little bit and I think part of it is because I focused so much on short-form content over the last year. So I would just tweet or post on LinkedIn the first ideas that came to my mind. That doesn’t take any work. Sure, maybe I had a conversation with somebody and they were like, Should you pay guests to come on your show? And I’m like, I have some thoughts about that.

But now I’m at the beginning of a new cycle where my newsletter is gaining traction and more people are coming to me because I’m writing… I just wrote a 3,000-word blog post on how somebody publishes their podcast and what you can learn from it. And now people are like, Oh, can you show me how to do… I can save 10 hours a month or 20 hours a month with automation for podcasts. Tell me more about that. I wish I had thought about what you just said sooner. Because I think people want to start just like hit publish, hit tweet as soon as possible without really thinking about how it’s going to affect the perception that people have of them.

Josh Bernoff: You need to have conversations with other humans in your space and outside who don’t believe everything that you say. So that pushback, it’s like, I don’t get it. I’m gonna tell you a technique that I used at Forrester Research where I was an analyst for 20 years that anybody can do to help somebody with an idea. It’s called the three huhs.

It works like this. You say, what’s your idea? And then the person describes it. Then you say, I don’t understand it. What are you trying to get at? And then they get a little upset and they’re like, No, no, no, it’s like this. And then you’re like, No, I’m still just not understanding what you’re needing. And then they get really upset and they’re like, “No, it’s this and this and this. And then you’re like, “Ah, okay, now we have crystallized your idea. Because just by saying huh to you three times, I’ve finally got you to the point where you could describe it in a sentence in a way that you’re really excited about. Okay, now we have something we can work from.

Joe Casabona: That’s great. I went to the University of Scranton, a Jesuit institution, and they made us take philosophy classes, and we were really big on Socrates in my first philosophy class. And what you’re saying here as well as the chapter should be questions that the customer asks or the reader asks or whatever reminds me very much of this Socratic method. Right? Well, why is that? But why do you think that? And he would back people into a corner, but you’re helping them kind of come out of the corner and be like, oh yes, this is actually my thought.

Josh Bernoff: The amazing thing about that technique is that all of the insight comes from the other person. All I did was sit there and say, Huh, I don’t get it. And yet that gets them to be as clear as they need to be.

Joe Casabona: I have two similar experiences actually with my friend Jay Clouse, who at one point during the conversation we were having was like, I don’t really understand what I can recommend you do to people. You know, we have this person, they’re the whatever guy, and this person’s the virtual events guy. What are you the guy for? And I’m like, Oh, podcasting and automation. And it just kinda like came out that way. And I’m like, Oh, I never included the automation part, I just included the podcasting part. And like those people are a dime a dozen.

And then what you said over here, you need to have conversations with other people who don’t believe everything you say. My friend Justin Moore just gave a talk recently at Craft & Commerce where he said something very similar. He’s like, find the places where people disagree with you and dig in on that sort of stuff to find your niche, is what he’s saying.

Josh Bernoff: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: Ah, this is great. So ongoing process, you work with clients. This is, I think another thing. Like you can’t just do something once and then say you’re an expert in it. I’ve had people launch successful WordPress plugins or whatever, and then they’re like, Yes, I know exactly how to build a WordPress plugin business. Now I’m a coach. I’m gonna write a book. And like, Oh, well you did it once. Like you could have gotten lucky.

Collect knowledge and then have conversations with other people who don’t believe everything you say. This is great. Let’s say we have our idea now. It is big, it is new, right? How do we start writing? I think this is another thing that I think a lot of people struggle with. We were talking in the pre-show, I write a lot every day. Words generally come easy to me. My first draft always sucks, but whose doesn’t? But I have an easier time getting words on the page than a lot of people. Tell me about your writing process.

Josh Bernoff: Okay. I’m gonna tell you about writing in general because people get very confused about it. I once had an author, someone who writes fantastic stuff. She posted in this author’s group I was in and she said, “I don’t know what to do now. I’m 75,000 words into my 60,000-word book. And her frustration is almost universal because people write and write and write and write and then they’re like, Oh my God, what am I gonna do with all this stuff? It’s repetitive, it’s got holes in it, it doesn’t hang together. That is in general the wrong way to do things.

So in fiction writing, there is a distinction between two groups of people, two types of writers: planners and pantsers. Planners are people who know exactly what they’re doing, it’s all plotted out, and then they go forward based on that. And the pantsers write by the seat of their pants. You cannot be a successful business author if your pantser unless you enjoy pain, because that’s a very painful way to do it.

So I’m gonna tell you the right way to do these things. First of all, it’s very hard and you’re like, I’m gonna write a book. I’m gonna start by writing. Wrong. Wrong. Stop. You’re gonna start by researching. The biggest problem people have when they’re writing is not enough case studies, not enough stories. So the first thing you need to be doing is going out and saying, where am I gonna get a case study about a person who did this? It could be a client of yours, it could be a colleague, somebody else could tell you a story about it. You might read about somebody and follow up with them. But we need these human stories to make it hang together.

And then you have the rest of the research. How am I gonna prove that this is the case? What are the five ways that people do this thing? And you remember what I said about the reader question method. If you’re gonna write a chapter, you want to say, All right, I’m gonna assemble the case studies and the research that applies to this particular question. How do I prepare for a cyber attack? Or what are the three main tools that I need to use to automate my podcast business or whatever it happens to be? But we haven’t written anything yet. We just collected a whole bunch of this research.

So the next step, crucial step, which avoids writer’s block is to create what I call a fat outline. So in a fat outline, what you do is you assemble these bits and pieces in order. You open up a document and then you start dumping this stuff in here and rearranging it. Not the whole thing, but like, you know, two sentences that represent a case study, the beginning of a quote that’s from a person that you trust, that kind of thing. And you assemble this stuff until it holds together as a story. And notice that doesn’t tap into writer’s block because moving bullets around is not stressful.

Okay, now, because you’re a planner, not a pantser, now you have everything all arranged. Okay, now it’s time to write. You sit down to write and you’re like, oh, okay, this comes first I need to write the case study story type, type type, type type. Oh wow, I just wrote a thousand words.

Okay, now I need to talk about the idea. Well, I know what elements go into that because that’s right there in my fat outline, type, type type, type type. Whoa, I just wrote 700 words about the idea. Okay, now I need to prove that it’s true. Well, I have like nine pieces of research to back it up. I have them already know what arrange they’re in, type, type, type, type, type. Okay, now I have the justification.

So that process is much less wasteful and much less stressful, and you’re not gonna end up 75,000 words into a 60,000-word book. If you do that, you’re gonna start on Monday saying, I need to write chapter seven. And you’re gonna end on Friday saying, Oh, I have chapter seven written. Then you string ’em all together, edit it, and you got a book.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. This is very illuminating for me because I always start with an outline. Like this is the one thing I learned in high school, not the one thing that makes my high school experience sound terrible. But this is one of the big things from high school that I use every single day.

Josh Bernoff: But I’m gonna tell you the outlines they taught you to use in school are far less useful because anyone can list a sequence of titles in order.

Joe Casabona: Right. Right.

Josh Bernoff: And then when you go to write, you’re like, Oh man, I gotta fill this in. The difference between that and a fat outline is the fat outline has got actual, it’s got graphics, it’s got quotes. It’s got actual content in it. It’s sloppy. It’s not as nice and neat with a one, you know, little a kind of thing. But it is much better when it time comes to actually write the thing.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, for sure. That’s such great advice. Someplace I like to start with the previous books I’ve written, which I mean you can easily turn this into a fat outline, is a mind map. I always like to just put all of the things I’m thinking about on this graphical representation. Right?

Josh Bernoff: Yes, that’s one way to organize the content. And it’s fun. Some people like to draw pictures. Some people like to just dump text into a file. Some people go into a whiteboard and scrabble around. But somehow you gotta organize the stuff.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. In the pre-show, you teased you can probably tell me why I can write a lot. Based on what you’ve just told me here, one of my favorite things to talk about is idea capture. I make it super easy to add an idea. Not just the title but what I’m thinking into a notes app. And whenever I sit down to write, this is the first place I look like, oh, what was that idea I had on my walk yesterday?

Josh Bernoff: There’s this thing called flow. It’s a concept that was first described by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. When you’re working and there’s resistance, but you know what you’re doing and everything sort of seems to come together and you get to the end and you’re like, oh my gosh, I just wrote 3,000 words in an hour, I was so productive, that’s flow.

And the thing about writing and flow is that not only does it feel great, but the writing itself tends to be excellent because you were in that state when you were writing it. And the necessity to do that is to get all the preparation work out of the way ahead of time so you can focus on nothing but writing. Whereas if you go and write without having done that, then you end up like Fotini in her coffee shop tearing her hair out cause she’s like, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing here.”

Joe Casabona: And it’s obvious, right? I’ve done that before. I’ve written out of flow and it just seems like a bunch of disjointed ideas on a page. And I’m like, this is not good.

Josh Bernoff: It’s one way to get where you need to go. It’s not the most enjoyable way.

Joe Casabona: Right. Right. It feel, you know, write a sentence, check Twitter; write a sentence, check LinkedIn

Josh Bernoff: I’ve ghostwritten books and that’s sort of like trying on somebody else’s clothes. And yes, that’s some of the hardest writing I ever did because I’m writing in somebody else’s voice. And if I don’t feel it, it’s like, oh God, this is so painful to assemble this stuff. It doesn’t come from that sort of I’ve done the research, I’ve assembled everything in it and I believe in what I’m doing.

Joe Casabona: That’s so great. I would love to talk more about that in the Pro show if that sounds good to you about, like ghostwriting and that process.

Josh Bernoff: Great.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. If you want to hear that conversation ad-free as well as every episode extended, you can sign up over at streamlined.fm/pro. It starts at just five bucks a month and you’ll hear this great conversation. It’s very interesting to me because I know lots of authors, including James Patterson has a few ghostwriters.

As an aside, I’ve mentioned James Patterson twice. I took his masterclass because I don’t really… I wasn’t a fan and I like to consume content from people I don’t like to try to change my mind. He changed my mind. I mean, his process was very interesting to me, but he puts out like 14 books a year. I’m like, nobody can do that. So anyway, we’ll talk about ghostwriting in the pro show.

The last thing I want to cover here, the last big topic I want to cover here is marketing. I am so bad… Even though I know I do it, I think I take a very field of dreams approach to marketing. Like, well, I wrote this book and now people will find it because it exists, which is, from what I understand, very bad. It’s very bad.

Josh Bernoff: Let’s just say it’s a common hallucination. Where’s all the audience? This is great. No, no, no.

Joe Casabona: I wrote this book in a cave for like six months.

Josh Bernoff: It really is like the biggest mistake people make. They put all of their energy into writing, they get all exhausted and then they give up. In every writing process, especially with traditional publishers, but the same goes with hybrid publishers and even self-publishing, there’s a time period when you have turned in the manuscript and then you have two or four, six months that you’re waiting before the actual book comes out, while they’re producing pages and getting it printed and so on. And you’re like, Ah, time to relax. No. Time to plan. Time to plan your promotion. So that is the time period when you do that.

I got a five-step thing here that I say is the keys that you need to think about book promotion. And the initialism for this is PQRST. P is positioning. What type of book is it and what’s the audience? This is a how-to book for podcasters or this is a self-help book for people with imposter syndrome. That’s the positioning.

The Q is a question, which is what problem are you gonna solve? I’m gonna solve the problem of… question is, how do I be more productive as a podcaster? Where the question is, how do I feel stronger and more confident? Those are the two things to start with.

And then R, S, and T are the tools that you use to get the word out. R is reach. How are you gonna get this word out to as many people as possible? Connect up with podcasters or get book reviewers or get your friend to write about it who has a million Twitter followers. Or write about something in the news. Do a contributed article on a website. So that’s reach.

Spread is how will you get that to resonate? Are you gonna have a posse of people who share things about the book? What are you going to give them to share? You know, videos, audio segments, infographics. T is timing. And that is about the question of how can you get all of this marketing activity, all this promotional activity to happen in the time period just before and just after the book launches.

Because your prospect, your person who want to hear about the book, they’ll be like, oh, I heard about that on the How I Built It podcast. And then they forget. And then they say, oh look, there’s a webinar going on about that. Oh, that looks interesting. And then they forget. And then they say, oh look, there’s a review of this in this website that I heard about. Man, I keep hearing about this thing. It must be the next thing. I’m gonna need to buy it. And you have to hit them over and over again. And if those same marketing activities happened over a period of eight months, it wouldn’t work. If it happens over a period of three weeks, they’re like, Ugh, this is like the hot new thing. I gotta get it. And then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It actually becomes the hot new thing.

Joe Casabona: That’s great. It’s almost like how a news cycle is two weeks, right? Like big story breaks on the 1st and then by the 15th everyone’s kind of forgotten about it and moved on.

Josh Bernoff: Right. But you need to stay connected. It’s interesting that you bring up the news stories because one of my favorite techniques, which comes from the author David Meerman Scott is called Newsjacking. And this is you’re like, oh, here’s a piece about Elizabeth Holmes going to jail. Well, I think that this is the perfect time for me to talk about the difference between her arrogance and what it takes to be really confident. So if you can hook yourself onto a news story and be like, okay, here’s how my unique perspective applies to, you know, Trump getting indicted or-

Joe Casabona: Ted Lasso.

Josh Bernoff: …the Brexit happening or whatever it happens to be… You know, and the thing comes out and it says podcasting has increased by 40% in the last year. Okay, I have something to say about that. These are ways for you to become part of the story and get more visibility.

Joe Casabona: Love that. And as a little… this is… I mean it’s not proof, it’s anecdote because it’s just me. But the last book I bought, forget the funnels, this exact thing happened. Somebody mentioned it on a podcast I was listening to. I saw a friend tweet about it. I saw another friend tweet about it. Someone wrote about it on LinkedIn. I must’ve seen the book mentioned like once a day for five days. And I’m like, yeah, I should get this book. It sounds like I need it. Concept, anecdotal proof.

Josh Bernoff: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: Love it. Gosh, Josh, this has been so great. I want to end with this. I suspect we already covered it somewhere here, but just for repetition’s sake. If someone wants to start writing a book today, what is the first two steps they need to take?

Josh Bernoff: I’d say two things. First of all, you need to test your idea out. So this is where you talk to other people about it. I think my idea is this and that process of developing the idea will get it to that point where it is differentiated, where it is new and not just big and right. And the second thing is to start collecting stories. Because that really… when I work with people on books, I’m like, okay, what case studies do you have? And they’re like, I have three. I’m like, okay, you have 45,000 words to put in here. Three stories is not gonna do the job for you. So you should be like, squirreling those things away in a file. So now it’s like, okay, these are the people I’m gonna interview. These are the stories that I’m gonna take that were already public out there. A book that’s got 20 user stories in it is much easier to read and much more believable than one that has three.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. So is there a convention you think? Should it be like one per chapter, two per chapter, or one per concept or Proofpoint?

Josh Bernoff: I would say you should have at least one per chapter. And I made what in retrospect was probably insane decision in my book. There are 24 chapters in this book. They’re short chapters. They’re about things like book covers and editing and so on. But I decided that there would be a story about an author that led every chapter.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Josh Bernoff: And as a result, it’s easy to read and you’re like, Oh, I don’t want to get stuck in the trap that Fotini was in. Oh, I’m an employee working for a company. I need to find out how Rashad managed to finesse the IP elements of that. Oh, this is what happened when Josh first saw the book cover of the book that sold 150,000 copies. He hated it. What an interesting story! How did that turn from hate to love? So these things make it come alive. And yes, I think it would be great to have at least one case study for each chapter.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. And one last clarifying thing on this. I was gonna ask this and then you said Josh and I wasn’t sure if you were referring to yourself in the third person. Should you have stories about yourself in the book or does it give you more credibility to have stories about other people?

Josh Bernoff: I think unless the book is a memoir, it shouldn’t mostly be stories about yourself. So I would say 80% or 90% of the story should be about other people, because otherwise it becomes, You can be like me and do what I did. And people are like, well, who the hell are you? And why should I believe you? But you inevitably have personal experience. So I mean, there’s not that many people who’ve written a book that sold 150,000 copies. So I’m like, okay, I can talk about this.

But Phil M Jones, the guy who wrote exactly what to say, his book has sold a million copies. So it’s much better for me also to have a story about him because now it’s like, Oh, wait a minute, he’s talking about sales and Josh is talking about social media. These are two completely different books. I can learn from both of those things.

Joe Casabona: Awesome.

Josh Bernoff: If most of your stories are about you, then get out in the world and find some more stories.

Joe Casabona: That’s really the thing. When you’re building something new, you gotta talk to customers. When you’re writing a book, you need case studies. You can’t do anything in a vacuum. Right?

Josh Bernoff: Yeah, that’s right.

Joe Casabona: Because like you said, I see these tweets from people and it’s like, Hey, you want to be like me, do these things? And I’m like, I don’t know. There’s probably a lot of other things that you did or don’t have, like children that allow you to work for like 15 hours a day uninterrupted or whatever.

Josh Bernoff: It’s really important because if you start from the perspective of everybody else is like me, you’ll fail.

Joe Casabona: You have an audience of one.

Josh Bernoff: You want to write for men and women. You want to have some people of color in there. You want to have people who are famous and people who nobody’s ever heard of. You want to have somebody from the financial services industry and somebody from manufacturing and somebody from media. And it’s that diversity that makes people say, All right, with all these different people are solving the same problem the same way, then maybe it’s applicable for me.

Joe Casabona: Love that. Josh, this has been great. If people want to learn more about you, where can they find you?

Josh Bernoff: Well, simplest thing to do is to come to my blog, bernoff.com. I actually publish a blog post every weekday. So constant stuff, insights here about writing and about books. If they want to get access to the book, it’s called Build a Better Business Book. You can search that on Amazon or go to my publisher, which is Amplified Publishing Group and get a copy of the book there. I’m @jbernoff on Twitter, which I’m using less and less. But you can also follow me on LinkedIn, which seems to be where the more interesting stuff is happening now.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. I will link to everything just mentioned here and a bunch of other stuff we talked about in the show notes over at streamlined.fm/321. And if you want to learn a little bit about ghostwriting, become a member. You can do that over at streamlined.fm/321 as well. Josh, thanks so much for spending some time with us today. I really appreciate it

Josh Bernoff: This was a lot of fun. I’m glad I got the chance to talk to you.

Joe Casabona: Agreed. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks to our sponsors. Thank you for listening. And until next time, get out there and build something.