The Cost of Publishing Thought Leadership | Bea Wray

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The costs and rewards of publishing your thought leadership in a business book.

An interview with Bea Wray about her upcoming book, the costs of publishing and best practices to ensure you find success.

Today’s guest is Bea Wray! Bea has been a speaker for 20 years on the topics of entrepreneurship, leadership, and women in business. She is the co-founder of the Millennial Women Network and author of the upcoming book What an MBA Taught Me…: But My Kids Made Me Learn which is available for pre-order!

Bea and Peter dig deep to explore the questions many business authors never ask themselves and why 1/3 of authors writing business books never actually finish them. Bea tells us the Who, What, and Why questions you need to ask before you put pen to paper. Plus, we examine not only the financial cost of publishing a book but the opportunity cost which many overlook.

Don’t miss this incredibly insightful conversation for anyone looking to publish a business book from two people with a ton of real-life experience on the topics.

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:

• What questions thought leaders should be asking themselves before starting a book.
• How can thought leaders figure out the real cost of a book and what can you expect as a return on that investment?
• What thought leaders can expect from publishers and how to ensure the long term success of your book.

If you’re trying to write or publish a book and need help with various aspects of the process, contact Thought Leadership Leverage.  Also, we can help you understand the rewards and costs of publishing thought leadership as well as devise a strategy to get your book published and into the hands of the right people.

 

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Transcript

Peter Winick Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. So today my guest is Bea Wray. Bea has dazzled audiences for 20 years, speaking about entrepreneurship, leadership and women in business. She’s the author of the newly released What an MBA Taught Me. But My Kids Made Me Learn to. Simon and Schuster is her publisher. She’s the co-founder of the Millennial Women Network Empowering and Mentoring Women in 24 Countries. She’s launched several high tech and non-tech companies. She had one exit that afforded her to take a six year hiatus on a resort bridge, Ellis Island, where she dedicated her time to raising her three children. She’s a founder, mentor, investor and board member to several companies, and she was also the executive director of entrepreneurial nonprofit The Creative Coast and was the chair of the Forbes book Entrepreneurship Practice. She’s got an MBA from Harvard Business School and graduated summa cum laude from Emory. She lives in Charleston with her husband and three kids. So now that we’ve gone through that pretty impressive bio, we don’t have much time to talk. So we’re going to get to see.

Bea Wray What the three year old is. You have like a lot of things that you keep doing, and so you keep adding them to the list, Right?

Peter Winick Right. Well, I would say to accomplish the old thank you. This is a state of mind. So you’ve been sort of what’s interesting and you and I’ve spoken several times is you’ve been on both sides of this, right? So you’ve worn the author’s hat, you bonds, you’ve been on the publishing side in terms of the entrepreneurial side, the entrepreneurial hat founder have like you sat in all the chairs. So connect the dots for me through the lens of thought leadership. How have those served you and continue to serve you?

Bea Wray Well, one of the things is a, it’s so fun. It was so much fun meeting amazing speakers, amazing thought leaders, amazing authors, and just spending either a day with them or hearing, you know, what’s your passion? Why are you the expert in keeping teeth straight so that children actually sleep better at night? Whatever is the specific. That’s right. And that was fascinating to me. And I felt like a crash course, like an expedited college where you could learn whatever you wanted. And so that I love, love, love time with thought leaders and hearing their passion behind whatever is driving their niche, basically. And as one of the things I have mentioned to you is at one point I said, wait a minute, I don’t want to just help you. I want to be you. And that was really the flip for me is I realized I’ve spent my life thinking about people’s skills, trying to get better at, shall I say, I’m from wherever you’re from. I’m from 13 different. I grew up in 13 different homes. And so and as a mentor to leaders and executive leaders, that’s why I finally published a book that is really all about people skills and my expertise of executive leadership.

Peter Winick And so I want to go there for a moment because you’ve been around sort of in a way that I have sort of once removed from the book, right? So advising people, helping them with their platforms, etc.. Yet in spite of that, you chose to actually go to the other side. And also, I should say you should have known better. But why, in spite of all that you’ve known and seen in terms of what it takes, not just to I mean, most people, you think it’s you know, the hard part is writing, but it’s actually getting it out into the world. It matters to you to have an impact and have an outcome. So what you know, what made you think that would be a good idea to be on the other side of the fence? Well.

Bea Wray I hope I don’t get shot for this, but writing a book is a great way for rich people to go broke. I mean.

Peter Winick Well, if you’re not quite rich enough to buy an airline, it’s sort of. Yes, it’s a much lower tier. Right? Right.

Bea Wray It is. And I decided I just was going to live that reality right now. Hopefully. Luckily, I’ve already been broke, so I didn’t need to add that to my list of things to do. But I do know exactly what you’re saying, in spite of what I have seen, because I have worked with really hundreds of people who are thinking about writing a book, what I.

Peter Winick Mean.

Bea Wray Is it takes about three years for the average person to write his or her business book, which is why many condense and get help from people like you and ghostwriters. And only about a third of the people actually finish. And so because they go back to whatever it is they’re doing that is so great, that’s actually paying the bill. Sure, there are many opportunities to jump off of that train.

Peter Winick When or under it.

Bea Wray Right. That’s a good way to put it is I had an experience. It was actually only last December and I was always saying to be I was already a keynote speaker and of course a Covid thing in the past it seems.

Peter Winick But right.

Bea Wray I remember that I was speaking to audiences of. 200 people and building a little bit of a living that way. Yeah. I loved it. I loved writing for blogs or doing writing. I loved speaking. I love the challenge of saying not here’s my can’t speech, but what do we need to focus on in front of this audience to really move the needle and make this event successful? Coming up with that puzzle was so fun until one day when I gave a keynote speech that was supposed to be around 200 people. They tried it and had 600, and they said, I don’t want to lose intimacy. So long story. As I got up there and I was as authentic as I could be and I got a lot of thank you notes. Floods of Texas floods. Right. Thank you for telling your story. And at that moment, I realized I still do love this. I still do love meeting the people. I still standing in front and that energy. But even if I didn’t, I would have to do it because someone needs to hear the message.

Peter Winick Yeah. Yeah. So there’s more of a intrinsic or evangelical piece besides the financial. I want to go back to a point that you made earlier that I think was critical is you sort of somewhat jokingly said, you know, it’s a great you know, writing a book is a great way for someone with money to lose their money or to go broke, etc.. I want to unpack that because although that could be true, it doesn’t need to be true and quite frankly, shouldn’t be true. And I can give you case after case after case where, you know, smart people, really, really smart people do really, really stupid things because there’s a herd mentality. So I have to hire like a top level PR firm and I got to do this and I get it, you know? And now, you know, you’re committed to like $300,000 and stuff. And then if I ask them to explain what is Group A that you hired test to do and what is success look like? I get the, you know, the deer in the headlights or what is the outcome that you’re expecting from being on 40 Am radio stations or whatever the case may be? And they’re sort of clueless. And I find that that kind of sad because to me, you know, if you’re investing six figures into something with five figures, whatever, whatever the number would be, you should have a sense of what your expectations are, what your desired outcomes are, what are the what’s the business case for this? Because unless it’s just straight up ego, right? Like, hey, I just, you know, I want to see my name on my book. I think you have to have those things done upfront, like what is realistic? And then underneath that, there’s a place to play big and say, yeah, you know, I do need to be, you know, do a book tour or whatever the case may be. More often than not, the reality of a book is really being deliberate and thinking about if I got this in the hands of the right 100 people, 200 people, a small, manageable number. That could be a game changer for me business wide. So play with that a little bit with me in terms of let’s talk about how not to go broke.

Bea Wray Absolutely. And there’s really sort of three areas I want to talk about in this. And the first is kind of simple is I’m a tennis player or like playing tennis captain of my college Tennessee. And that’s my thing. That’s what I love to do. And with your feet in place, you can get your racket back. You can make contact with the ball. But if you do not follow through.

Peter Winick Right.

Bea Wray I might do anything. And so that is exactly, you know, you personally have forgotten more about what that means then I’ll ever know. You know exactly what it means to follow through when it comes to a book. And of course, what I love about what you said is it starts with the idea I’m going to make X investment. What kind of return am I going to want? And setting out that plan. And you mentioned the number 50,000, which I think is often a number I have seen for people, even if they’re writing their own book. But the tune, by the time you pay for the layout of the illustrations, I’m alone.

Peter Winick Yeah, right, right.

Bea Wray But what they’re not calculating in is their own time and it’s really taking the three years or it’s going to take more till you do the publishing of it. You really need to think about the opportunity cost. And this is to my second point is one of the things we always talked about and I know you are an expert in this, is the riches are in the niches. You’re right, you’re in a certain niche. And once you become well-known in that niche, then you can expand upon that. But if you don’t get that first saturation point And so so I want to tell kind of a little funny story about this is I as you know, I speak a lot and I’m speaking of these snakes. And this one professor that had hosted me had some assignment, and all of the students had to write back, This is the most important thing. This is the action item. Overwhelmingly, there were 5 or 6 things that came back, 5 or 6 different. The most common one was people liked. The riches are in the niches. I’m going to stick by whatever that the riches are. And so we talked about that. But one guy this is what I love, how the most successful things I’ve ever done in my life are often mistakes. And this is.

Peter Winick Sure.

Bea Wray Is. This guy wrote back and he said, I loved when you said the riches are in the ditches.

Peter Winick I never even thought.

Bea Wray That and I certainly didn’t. Say it, but it was so funny because I laugh with my sister because she and I have shared some financial burdens at times and it’s hard to look in the ditches. There would be our millions of dollars.

Peter Winick Send them. Send them a pickax or. Right. Right. If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave us a review and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts.

Peter Winick Now I want to touch on, I think, a couple important points you made. The riches are in the niches. We talk about that in the context of being really clear around who your client avatars are. So who are you writing this book for? And don’t tell me leaders or managers, because I’m going to throw up, but get really, really specific. Founder You know, second generation CEOs and family owned businesses that are growing compounded annual rate 20% a year in the trades. I love that because I can find it. I can do it. I know how to work with the leaders of companies. I don’t know what that meet lately. That is so useless, right? The other piece in this this I think is critical is this opportunity cost piece. So I remember I was speaking at a business Book Award event a couple of years ago and had 50 people had just won a business book award for their business. So these are obviously the better of the pool of business books. And I said, you know, show of hands for the last call it a year, nine months before the book, the book, and then three months release, whatever you call it, about the last year. What percentage of your time was spent in book related activities, either writing, thinking about it, marketing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the number was somewhere like 65, 70%. And this is great. What percentage of your income in the last year came directly from the book sales and it was like 5%. So I said, Do you see the problem here? If I said to you, here’s, you know, you made whatever, a hundred grand last year for five grand, can I have three quarters of your time? You tell me to go bouncing, but you’re all doing it for yourself, right? And you know, there are other reasons to write books besides money. If you if you just need to get the message out there, if it’s if it forces you to modify your thinking, whatever. But strictly from a financial perspective, people don’t sort of think about that opportunity cost. And it’s not just the check that you wrote, but you can usually get the money back. Most of us are smart enough to earn it back. I can’t get back nine months of my life. I can’t get back a year.

Bea Wray And the people who are doing that have all sorts of staff around them and they know, Hey, I’m not the best project manager. I’m going to hire a project manager. I’m not the best executive assistant. I’m going to hire an assistant. Well, the same is true with marketing your book and getting it into a bookstore and leveraging that thought leadership, which, of course, I don’t need to tell you, but it’s much better to save your 65% of your time and let someone who’s really great at Leveraging Thought Leadership set that in motion. You know, you can’t sit in and be your podcast guest for you, but you could do the other stuff that.

Peter Winick No, I agree. I mean, there’s things that only you can only you can create new content based on your platform. 10,000 people could manage your social media only you can go do that keynote only. You can sort of write, be the guest on the podcast. And I think what happens is the list of what are the things that you’re doing and what are the things that you’re only you can do, you know are never put together. So let’s have some fun. Do me a favor and but some myths for me. So let’s pretend that I am not as brave as you. And I haven’t written a book yet. Right. Slap some sense into me and tell me these are the things I need to think about or should be thinking about. Or if I haven’t answered this question, put down the pen or the keyboard.

Bea Wray Goodness gracious. Okay, so I’m supposed to answer to you what you need to think about it.

Peter Winick Well, just. Yeah, yeah. I’m tired of. I’m always like the cranky one saying, don’t do that. I want somebody else to.

Bea Wray Well, what I the first thing I’ve always asked and I had to ask myself is why. Right. So you and you already we’ve sort of danced around this a little bit. So why are you writing your book? What does success look like for you and definitely for home for writing this book. And I think if you can get some clarity around those things, everybody has a great story. And of course your story is great. And that’s the first thing people want to tell me. But it’s it is not the case that it’s so easy to help people sell software. I ran a software firm and we held on to the source code. And what we ended up really doing is helping new software developers basically sell their products, which we always said was, Your product is great, your system is great. However, no one is going to drive up like Burger King. And it blew up outside of the window. Right? Like this is just not what’s going to happen.

Peter Winick You cannot drive. True for cloud software. We’re all you know, I’ll have fries with that and the database management.

Bea Wray People that we’re great technologists about how do I get it into the hands of the right people.

Peter Winick Well, that whole sales and marketing thing. yeah. So it’s not build it and they will come, right?

Bea Wray Those ten years of me trying to help people sell great software where they hadn’t made connections with who could use it is very similar to how are you going to get your hands for your book in the right hands. And so there well.

Peter Winick We’ll go back a half a step, though. I want to go back a half a step. You mentioned sort of the a couple of pieces to think about who you’re writing it for and all that other stuff. I think the other piece, quite frankly, and it’s a difficult conversation we have with clients is why the hell would anyone listen to you? Right, based on that topic? Right. So if you’re going to you’ve been married seven times, you’re probably not the guy or gal. We’ll talk about, you know, how to build a wonderful marriage, right? Like if you’ve never built a business, why should I like? So there’s to me it’s like, okay, what is it that unique about you? Your story, your experience, your life experience, your business experience, whatever that give you a if not just total gravitas or credibility, at least a unique angle as to. That’s an interesting perspective for sure.

Bea Wray Yes. So that is a very important question. And are you asking it of me?

Peter Winick No, no. I’m just in general. In general, the.

Bea Wray Answer, of course, is that I’m a wonderful mother.

Peter Winick Yes. And yes, of course. Right. Right.

Bea Wray I said that one time and then I realized, yeah, I wonder if my kids are eating. I wonder if they’re handing in their homework. I’m full.

Peter Winick Of. I wonder where they are. I wonder.

Bea Wray I must be a wonderful mother. Yes.

Peter Winick Remember that the public says it’s 10:00. You know where your children are now. Right? So interesting. Interesting. And any other things because I love I love sort of the tracking of where you’re going with things that we should be thinking about before making that investment of the book. Well, I think.

Bea Wray It’s really important for me in that first one, the why in the return, if we’re talking really just about money, what I found is it’s different levels of people and it usually is tied to what’s the average dollar value of your service, the people who are selling something that’s kind of unique. Like I worked with a guy who does captive insurance and the rescue of every one of his clients was $150,000.

Peter Winick To big ticket.

Bea Wray This guy invested $200,000 in having someone help his book and doing some investment. And it was the best investment he could ever make because he had to get it right hands of ten people. And he more than made money.

Peter Winick Yeah, eight x of money.

Bea Wray It was beautiful. So everybody has that. But a lot of people can say, gosh, if I just get eight more clients or ten more clients at the $10,000 level, sure. Look, you get to your ROI. And so when someone’s first talking to you, Hey Peter, I have this thought leadership in an area. I think that’s one of the first questions is what is the dollar value of your client, lifetime value? What does it mean to get one?

Peter Winick Well, and I think the other side of that equation is there’s a disconnect between the publishing community and the author community. Several disconnects, but one is publishers, be they traditional or nontraditional, whatever, tend to think of books as seasonal. So that’s a spring 2022 release or whatever it is. So we’ll think about it for about 90 days, and then we go on to the next thing and the next thing or the next thing. And I think for most authors, thought leaders, particularly on the business side, you should look at your book within against as a capital investment with a 5 to 7 year amortization schedule. So your example of the gentleman that has $150,000 average ticket, he’s not in a high volume business, right? He’s not probably getting 20 new clients a month. He might be getting 20 new clients a year. So he said, I’m going to spend 200 grand. I’m going to amortize that marketing cost over five years. That’s 40,000 bucks a year. I need a third of a client a year to break even. Now you go, Wow. Okay, we. All right. So how could I not get a client a year or, you know, realistically, two clients a year. Seven years. That’s 14 clients. That’s a ten out of my money. Now, that makes sense. But I think as businesspeople, we have to push back on our publishers because they’re not going to necessarily be on your team in your three, 4 or 5 at the level they are in year one. That doesn’t resonate.

Bea Wray It absolutely does It And I did choose and get lucky enough to be able to traditionally publish. Not everybody wants that. And it doesn’t make fifth grade math sense for a lot of people when they hear this book. And it’s used as a way of opening a door or, you know, there’s nothing more powerful than to say, hey, I met you last week at this event. What we were talking about, I’ve written in my book, I put a marker on page three. There’s nothing more powerful than that kind of follow up when you are indeed the thought leader in the area. But oftentimes that’s more easily done with self-publishing. And so I’m a remote control. I don’t think there’s any shame. I think there I once was at one point there was this sense of one was good and one was bad. And that’s just not the case.

Peter Winick I don’t buy that in.

Bea Wray Answering that question. Why am I doing this? How am I going to see my return? And then then you start answering, well, how am I going to get there? And if the answer is self-publishing, well, then by all means, yeah.

Peter Winick When? And I think you can also be clever and creative and smart by conflating sort of content development, the writing phase with business development. So interviewing people that look like the client profile that you’re trying to attract for a call out in Chapter three of your book that lines up to a principle that they practice it, blah, blah, blah. Because there’s two calls that I can make to be, Hey, it’s Peter. I’m trying to sell you some stuff you may or may not take that call. Probably not. Or maybe I’m in the process of writing a book. And it’s about this issue that I know because I’ve seen you speak or write, whatever that is intriguing to you based on your role. Can I have half an hour of your time and interview to get your. Because everybody listen, everybody’s flattered to have their name in a book for sure is great.

Bea Wray And in a sense, all of that, those pages, 200 pages are real estate. So I didn’t my book is my personal book is much more sit down and I’m going to chat with you over a cup of coffee as if you’re at my home. And we’re going to talk about my MBA experience in business. But I did once write a column for a local newspaper, and one of the things that I loved doing was, in my mind, thinking of at least three pieces of real estate every single entry. So every column, every other week. I was thinking, who am I featuring in my community? And I would just have that wove into what we were talking about. But it was so powerful. They all loved it. Of course, got more and more people to the nonprofit we were running. They got more engaged. The rest of the community, the newspaper really loved it because it got people involved and it was just a little sort of a mental matrix that I was like, That’s Fantastic feature today.

Peter Winick Well, in real estate, by definition, it’s about location, it’s about scarcity. And I think oftentimes you think that people don’t apply that rigor when it comes to the book, say, Well, that’s valuable. I have only got 40,000 words or 200 pages like, How do I make the most of it? And not to dilute what you’re trying to say. You know, communicating your story and your methodology and your framework. Well, this has been great. We could we could chat for hours and we will any other day. But this has been awesome. Go check out. It’ll be in the liner notes BS Berkeley on Amazon, Barnes Noble, all the normal suspects. And I appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Bea Wray Thank you, Peter. Great to be with you.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly. Feel free to email me at Peter at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.