Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 164 – Dan Janal

Peter Winick

Ever thought about writing a book? Or have you written one, and need to know how to make use of its full value? If you’ve ever wondered how to write a non-fiction business book without wasting time or money, this episode’s for you!

Our guest in this episode is Dan Janal, one of the founding fathers of internet marketing and publicity. He is President of PR Leads to Profit and author of six best-selling books including Write your Book in a Flash and Risky Business. Dan’s is currently focused on being a book coach, developmental editor, and ghost writer, and he knows the secret of making a great book – without wasting your time! He’s here with a lot of amazing advice for those who have written a book – or want to write one!

Dan joins us to share how stories are important, how you can research to ensure your book hits the mark, and to let you know that writing a book doesn’t have to be a solo job. Listen in, this is a great episode!

In addition to all of Dan’s incredible advice, here’s some tips from TLL! Check out our blog post on the 3 Things Your Book Needs from You.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, and you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today my guest is Dan Janell. Dan is an interesting fellow to say the least. He’s one of the founding fathers of internet marketing and publicity. He wrote one of first books on this subject back in 1994. He’s the president of PR Leads to Profit. He has also run a company called Write Your Books in a Flash. and he has written 13 best-selling books. He has been a contributor on CNBC, New York Times, USA Today. If I spent the rest of the time we had together going through his accomplishments, we wouldn’t have much time to talk, and welcome aboard, Dan.

Dan Janal Thanks a lot, Peter. I’d much rather spend time on content than on background. Great. So you work with

Peter Winick lot of interesting, you know, similar folks to, to we work with, right? So you work with authors and thought leaders and speakers and help them write their books and get their PR out there. Do you want to give us a sense of the types of things that your various companies do for folks?

Dan Janal Sure. I have a good background in PR, but to tell you the truth, that sort of runs itself. We can get into that if we want. But I’m spending a lot of my time now as a book coach, developmental editor, and ghostwriter, because frankly, it’s more interesting. I find the long form a lot more interesting right now. So some clients come to me with a first draft, for example. And as we all know, all first drafts suck. Anne Lamott said that, Stephen King said that. And if Stephen King says that his first draft sucks, Then. It gives us permission to try and make it better. And that’s what I do. I was a newspaper reporter and editor, so I’m trained to look for what’s missing, what could be made better, if you bury the lead and such like that. So a client can come to my first draft. In fact, one guy came to me with the first draft and it was a good book. It was a book about communications. He was another PR professional. Right. And I said, this is a really good book, but you don’t have any stories. It’s all theory and a lot of scientific based information. It shows that you’re a really smart guy. you’ve done your homework, but there’s really no personality here. He said, well, I don’t like to tell stories. And I said, if you did like to tell stories, what story would you tell? I learned that from Tony Robbins. And he said, he proceeded to tell me the story when he was PR director for Scholastic Publishing, and his boss came into the office one day and said, Hey, we’re going to start to promote a new series of books by this English author, and she’s really crushing it in England, and you have to go out and do the PR for this. And he said, well… I’d really rather train someone to go out and do it, because I don’t want to spend the time on the road. So he told the story about how he mentored this woman who eventually did all the PR for, you guessed it, the Harry Potter series. So here you see this wonderful guy who’s seen as a mentor, who’s giving, you get to know, like and trust, because he didn’t want a hog the spotlight and be known as the guy who brought Harry Potter to America, he gave that great gift. to one of his underlings, one of his direct reports, and she became B.G. Rowling’s best friend. And now she runs some of her foundations. So it’s a great book. He couldn’t get that from himself. He needed to work with an editor like me who could get it out of him. He had it in him. He didn’t realize it.

Peter Winick So I want to talk about oftentimes, particularly for first-time authors, it’s overwhelming, right? There are some assumptions they have that need to be cracked, meaning they need to do this all on their own, or they need a higher ghostwriter and do nothing. Could you go through the continuum of various levels, right? You’re someone that might help you spar around the intellectual property. There’s copywriting, there’s editing, there is book framing. Talk about the different sort of functions where folks could use some help.

Dan Janal and what the differences are between them. That’s a great distinction because it really does take a village to write a book. In fact, if you write a books, you’re really writing a manuscript and you turn it over to copy editors and layout people and book cover designers and production people. So it really is not a one person job. So if you take that stress off you from the very beginning, you’ll have a much easier time. When I work with clients, I start with what I call a quick start program. And with this, we look at say the executive summary of the book, rather we create an executive summary for the book. There’s a lot of people having thought about that. In fact, one of my new clients came to me the other day and he gave me a first draft and it just started out with stories and stories and stores. There was no focus, it’s like who is this book for? How will it help them? How will make them better at their jobs or their lives? Why are you the right person to write this book? Give me that kind of information. So that’s really where we start. Then we look at things. customer avatar. Who’s the right person to read this book? Because if you say everyone, then it’s no one.

Peter Winick I want to pause you there for a second because the avatar piece, we spend a ton of time and energy working with our clients, developing client avatars. Same line of thinking, but we’ll have someone come to us and they’ll say, oh, I’m an expert or leadership or communications or management or whatever. Well, who does this work for works for everybody at wrong answer. And the point in developing the avatars is if you have the level of specificity of who you’re trying to connect with, it actually makes your job easier. Right. If you know it’s someone in, you know, that manages people in financial services is different than someone that’s an engineer in technology. So how do you go about helping people shape or define avatars. I’m sure our methodology is very similar because you hit on a lot of the key points there.

Dan Janal I think one of the most important things we can do with our clients is hit them over the head with this idea because they really think that they’re messages for the entire world and it could be but you don’t have enough time or money or energy to market the book to the entire world. Sure. Frankly there are people who are you’re better you might be more easily hired and that’s the purpose of the book, to get people to like and trust you. So they see you as the true leader who can take them from mess to success. And if you have more success in that, in the construction industry than in the manufacturing industry, then go for it. Or you may not like to work with lawyers or doctors, but you do like to work with accountants and CPAs, then why not make it easy for yourself and focus on the markets where you’re most likely to be hired, where you have the most fun, where we have the highest profit margin. Right. So my clients come to my avatar back and forth. as you say, spar, and I say that in a loving way because, you know, we’re challenging each other to find what works. We’re looking for the angle. And if we say, gee, let’s go after the construction industry leaders, because that’s where you have experience, that’s where they know you, that where you the credibility, then throw out all the others because frankly people in that industry want to hire an expert like you. They don’t want to hire a jack-of-all-trades. So as you said, the narrower we can focus this, the off it will be for everyone.

Peter Winick Yep. So you’ve got your avatars and then, you know, you’re sort of helping them shape why them. What happens next? So you got the avatar and then take us through the process a little bit more. Sure.

Dan Janal the only reason anyone will read a book is to solve a problem. So you need to find out what problems your avatars, your prospects, have. And you can do that simply by asking them. That’s one way. You can go to Amazon and look for other books like yours and see, read the reviews and see what’s missing. They’ll say, I like this book, but I wish it focused more on whatever. And if you see that. then you know what people are interested in. You can also go do a Google search. What are the biggest trends in this industry? What are biggest problems in this in this? What issues do people in this industry face? And then you’ll find answers there. If you have a decent sized mailing list or if you have presence on social media, you can ask your prospects or your followers there what their biggest issues are. I wanna…

Peter Winick just sort of parallel track here for a moment. We call those pain points. So you have an avatar, and that just defines the who. And now the pain points are what’s keeping them up at night. And it’s ultimately the promise that you’re making to them that, you know, give me several hours of your time to read my book, and I can help you solve that problem. Or at least I understand the pain that you are in. And I can give you different things to look at or different frameworks or different models or methodology. So it’s a drill down a little bit deeper under the avatar to Thank you. What’s really keeping them up at night? What does a people manager in financial services worry about? Is it retention? Is it talent acquisition? Whatever. What are the things that they’re struggling with?

Dan Janal how do you connect with that? Exactly, because that’s what’s going to make them want to read the book, or at least read the chapter that relates them in the book. And in that chapter, you dazzle them with your case studies, your personal stories, your signature stories, statistics, information, maybe even liven it up with cartoons or charts or graphs, information that appeals to all the visual.

Peter Winick Yep.

Dan Janal You have charts or cartoons or comics or whatever, just to make it interesting. One, I love how you say,

Peter Winick say they, because I think this is an important point here, oftentimes we’ll think, well, I’m visual, so I would like some graphs here. Well, it has nothing to do with you as the author, but you can draw some logical assumptions based on the avatar and the pain points on how they prefer to consume content. And oftentimes, it’s a little bit of a shift to say, well, you know, I would put a graph here, and it might be, well maybe it’s an infographic, or maybe it something else, because that’s what those. people that are representative of that avatar prefer. And that’s a little bit of a mind shift. Would you comment on that?

Dan Janal I agree completely. I was working with a client who teaches people how to sell to the government, and he had a number of charts. And some of the charts, frankly, didn’t make sense. So it’s not just enough to have a chart in there, but you really have to have an edit on the chart and say, does that chart say exactly what I think it says? Because he was looking at it from a different modality than I did. And I said, that doesn’t make any sense to me. The same thing with stories. Sometimes I read a story that a client has written and I come up with a completely different conclusion than he did, and it would make the same point that he thought he did because he’s too close to it. That’s why you work with an editor who can come at it from a different perspective or a naive perspective and say, you know, I’m not in the construction industry. That’s what you need to hire me because I’m going to ask the questions that a newbie would have that would bring the book back down to a level that anyone can understand.

Peter Winick Got it. So I love the process. So you’ve got the pain points, you’ve got the avatars, and now you’ve gotta write the book. So before we get into the book writing process, I’m gonna just pause here and pivot a little bit. 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 podcast and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com forward slash podcast

Peter Winick Could you share with us some of your experiences and thoughts relative to the options and choices that an author has as it relates to publishing in terms of traditional versus vanity versus everything in the middle today? Wanna give us a little bit of a opine on that for a moment?

Dan Janal We could spend three hours on this, but I’ll try to make it really, really short. Publishers in New York these days are nothing more than vanity publishers. Very few of them are giving advances anymore and They’re basically asking you to pay them to publish your book So you might as well do it yourself also if you do get it your publishing house They’re probably gonna take anywhere from a month of actually a year to 18 months to two years to get the book into their Process and cycle so if you’re a consultant speaker author expert trainer Who wants to make money with your book tomorrow? you’re better off self-publishing today, and you can probably do it a lot cheaper than for what the New York publishers are gonna charge you.

Peter Winick Well, I don’t want to touch on what you said with the New York publishers that they’ve all become vanity presses because not all.

Dan Janal If you have a huge following, and I mean hundreds of thousands of people following, you don’t have to be Ellen DeGeneres, but you’re someone like that, a Daniel Pink, yes, you’ll get an advance. If you’re somebody like you or me, someone who’s a thought leader in an industry but we have 10,000, 20,000 followers, they’re going to ask us to pay them to publish the book and then you’ll have their imprint on your book, but they’re not going to lift finger to market the book or help you. in any way. It will look like a professionally published book, which is good. Sure. It will get into distribution, which is good, but you’re trading a lot of time for that and you’re giving them a fair amount of money to make that happen.

Peter Winick Well, I just want to push on how they do that because people say, wait a minute. But the McGraw Hills or whoever, not to name names, are not charging people to publish a book, but it’s actually when you read the contracts, there’ll be no advance, right? Okay. So that’s fine. So you’ll make it up on the back end and you have to buy, you know, whatever 4,000 copies at wholesale from them. So you just paid, you just took all the risk of running that first press run, alleviated them, you took the risk away from them by funding that, you have to go pre-sell two, three, four, 5,000 books. And then if it ever breaks that point to break even, you’re going to make a dollar or two per book. Plus you’ve subjugated your wants and needs to the publisher. Cause like you said, it’s an 18 month timeline. They’re going have editorial control, et cetera. So not that it’s a black and white situation, but oftentimes the big New York houses are not all they’re cracked up to be once you get, once you get under the hood.

Dan Janal I’m glad you said that because I agree completely and the math works out exactly the same way. So if you self-publish, you get to keep all the money.

Peter Winick Exactly, exactly. So anything else, so the other thing that you mentioned, which is interesting, is that if you’ve got a massive followership on social or whatever, so you’re a Dan Pink or whoever the case may be, then the big houses would be quick to jump on you and give you an advance, but even when you do the math in those situations, it doesn’t always make sense, right? Because if I’ve invested 20 years of my life to build millions of followers, right, I should be able to extract the value from the community, from the tribe, without sharing 80% of those profits with a partner, right?

Dan Janal doesn’t make sense. Exactly, they take the lion’s share of the profits and you take the Lion’s share the risk. What’s the fun in that? Yeah, exactly.

Peter Winick Alright, so anything else that you’re seeing authors and thought leaders doing, let’s talk about before, right? So oftentimes, it’s time to write the book, it is time to get the book out and people are in sort of panic mode. But if I’m someone that’s thinking about putting out a book at some point in the future, a year, two, three, what are the things I can be doing right now to increase my odds of being successful when the time comes that I so choose to publish?

Dan Janal Fantastic. I wish more people had asked themselves that question before they sat down to write the book. They write a book without taking into account how the book will help them in their business. I look at the book as a big business card that everyone wants to receive. No one cares about getting your business card at a networking event, but no one throws away a book. They’ll keep the book on their bookshelves forever. And then they’ll say, Oh yeah, I need customer service. I’m having a customer service problem. We need to bring in a customer services expert. I met a guy somewhere at a networking event or a conference. He gave me his book. It was yellow. Ah, there it is on my bookshelf. Exactly. That’s what you. your book is a bridge point to your solution. And the question is, what kind of clients do you want? What kind of business do you and what kind of book will help you get to that point? So again, we look at the avatar, we look the problems, we looked at the pain points. We also look at how do I wanna build my business? As I’ve interviewed a lot of people as well, and the people in our community are very fluid people. They’re very smart people. They’ll go on a tact for five years or so and they’ll say, okay, I’m a little tired of this. Just like I was a little tired of publicity and say, what else can I do? And they’ll pivot and they will go from leadership to session planning, to financial planning, to whatever. They’ll niche it and niche it, and niche it because that’s where their minds go. So people, people like us are always looking for something interesting that keeps us engaged and creative and doing things. so you need to think to yourself, what do I want to be doing in three years? Who do I wanna be doing it for? What is the book title? What is content of the book that is going to help me do that? Am I gonna have fun with this? Because you’re gonna be living with this topic for the next five to seven years. You’re not only creating a book, you’re creating speeches, you’re putting seminars, online training courses, on and on. It is your core. for the next couple of years. Make it fun and make it profitable. I love it.

Peter Winick I love it. As we start to wrap up, Dan, any final words of advice for folks in terms of either in that pre-book stage or during the book or do this or don’t do that?

Dan Janal Definitely, once you have the idea for the book, start networking. Other people who’ve written other books about this topic are great people to network with. Yeah, some of them will see you as a competitor and won’t return your phone calls, will treat you as horrible person. Other people say, rising tide lifts all boats and if you help me, I’ll help you. I’ll write a blog about you and your book, you blog about me and my book, I’ll review your book. I’ll interview you for my book. I will promote you in my book and they will do the same for you. Your market, I mean your list, no matter how big it is, isn’t big enough. If you have 10 other people who you can count on, then you’re gonna reach 10 other, 10 times as many audiences that you could never possibly reach yourself or pay for to reach off of advertising yourself. I love that. So start networking immediately and never ever ever ever stop.

Peter Winick Well, and I think my experience has been more often than not, even if you’re writing in an area that’s, quote, competitive to someone else, it’s a big enough world, more often than not those folks would want to collaborate with you under the rising tides lift all boats mantra than the competition model. And I’ve seen some awesome collaboration of folks that you think would be competitors because the fact is, if you are interested in that category, it is not like you’re only going to read one author’s. perspective on it. It’s sort of a small-minded way of thinking. So I think reaching out to fellow authors or experts in your domain area and making yourself known and being generous as well is always good advice. So thank you so much, Jen. This has been fantastic. I appreciate it.

Dan Janal Well, thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure being on your show.

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 dot com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.