How often have you heard the words, “You should write a book”? According to Martyn Cook, Founder of Smarter Destiny Podcast, “A book is like a business card where you can kind of demonstrate that you actually know what you are talking about.” The best part is, he shares his secrets of how to become a best-selling book without writing a single word!
So, Why should you write a book? If you want to position yourself as an expert and authority in your field, then writing and publishing a book is one of the best and quickest ways to do this. With all the noise these days on Social Media, with everyone claiming that they are the best, when you take the time to put your knowledge and expertise into a book, people place value on that and you will discover that if you are a published author, people will take you more seriously.
One of Marty’s secrets to “writing” a book is that you actually don’t have to write a single word! So how do you do this? Well, you may have already guessed this, but the answer is that you can DICTATE the book. All you need is a phone and a microphone (or any other kind of recording device) and you can dictate your book while walking your dog, traveling in the car, exercising, cooking, etc. It doesn’t have to take any additional time out of your day. Because it is much easier and you can talk faster than you can type, you aren’t restricted to sitting in front of your computer or laptop to do this.
Now that you know that you can dictate your book, the next thing is What do you include in your book? Martyn has a structure that he follows that has worked very well for him and he recommends that you model when writing your book.
This includes: he discovered that the sweet spot is 300 pages that typically includes about 50 chapters. You can typically dictate a chapter in about 10 minutes. The first thing you need to decide is what your book is going to be about. What are you already an expert on? What do you have knowledge and experience in that most other people don’t that you can help solve their problems? If you need a bit of assistance with niche selection, you can watch his video here, to help get your creative juices flowing: https://smarterdestiny.com/findniche
Once you have your niche and topic, you can then start coming up with chapter ideas. You can go to Amazon.com to see what other books are talking about, do research by looking at articles, blogs, watching videos on YouTube, looking at product reviews etc. that are in your niche to see what is popular. When you have your ideas, you can then narrow down to 50 (Martyn recommends finding around 75 to start with) ideas and start grouping them based on the different themes that are showing up.
Now that you’ve got your chapter ideas, it’s time to start dictating your book. But where do you even start? In the first part of the chapter, Martyn tells a story that demonstrates the talking parts of the chapter. Then he gives some actionable advice, he follows up with a simple recap and at the end of the chapter, when it is relevant, he also gives checkpoints or homework for the reader so that they can take action and implement what they are learning.
After you have the chapters dictated, you can have them transcribed and edited. Martyn recommends using a service called Rev.com. They send it to a Dropbox folder and then you can upload the transcription onto Google Docs so that it can be edited. Once it is cleaned up and includes all the additional information, you can then load it up onto Schrivener.com to format the book properly for you.
Other things that you will want to include in your book are: You may want to consider finding someone reputable in your niche to write a foreword for you. This is optional, but highly recommended, it is also a great way to help sell copies of your book because they have given you their stamp of approval. If they say it’s great, then other people will believe them and want to find out more. You will also want to ask people for testimonials. Offer to give them a copy of the book to read for free in exchange for a written testimonial.
Now that you’ve got these things, How do you market your book? You can pre-launch and build hype by creating a book funnel similar to Martyn’s. He uses Kartra, however, you can feel free to use whatever program you want. He created a simple lead capture page to let people know he had a book coming out and gave them an option to get on the waiting list. The best way to market your book is to tell everyone about it on Social Media, once they opt into your list, you can share information about the chapters to get them excited and also ask the people that wrote testimonials to please share with others. Affiliates are another great way to get the word out about your book. You can put it on Amazon.com. Some people hire a professional to help them with marketing their book.
If you would like to get access to his book for free and to model how he set up his book funnel head on over to: https://imthatgeek.com/MartynCookFreeBook to grab your copy.