How can you make time to write your book? The Octo interview with Lee Robertson

Books Build Brands, Episode 4. From an interview between Lee Robertson, CEO of Octo, the app for financial planners and advisers, and Steven Sonsino, a business school professor who also publishes bestselling books.

If you’d prefer to watch the interview click here.

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Episode 4: How do you make the time to write your book?

Lee: So you’ve had this idea. ‘I want to write a book. I’m going to commit to write a book.’ How do you condition yourself, in your busy working life, when you’re seeing clients, and you’re generating business, and you’re dealing with staff issues, how do you go about writing a book?

Steven: So this is one of the weirdest questions I get. Because you are, you know, one of the busiest people aren’t you. And you plan your life to within an inch of itself. You know exactly what you’re going to be doing at any time of the next week or for months, even.

So if we can get this reason for writing right, if we can get the sense of urgency right, then you will make the time. Finding the time is a concern people have, but until they’ve got that reason why absolutely nailed down, these thoughts keep popping up. ‘Why am I writing this? Because my clients are grappling with X, Y, or Z right now, they need me.’

Clarify the reason you’re writing and the outcome you’re looking for

But when you have the reason why nailed down, you will make the time and the space clears itself. Other things become less of a priority. Plus you’ll stop watching Lost, or Coronation Street or whatever else is a time-filler.

But actually – and this is what I want to share next – I don’t know how long you think it takes to write a book. But it will eat less time than you imagined.

So here’s what’s been happening to Jacqueline and me. We’ve been trying to get better and faster over the years. So we completely deconstructed the process of writing a book. Last year, I filmed a one-hour live stream, summarizing everything we’d done that week, for 12 weeks.

And we’ve found, because we’ve written quite a few books now, that we can get a book from blank page to book on Amazon in 12 weeks. And, get this, still doing our day job, right?

Now because we’ve deconstructed the process, we know that in week one, you reach out to a dozen or 15 people… week two, you do interviews… week three, you get the interviews transcribed. We know exactly what needs to be done. We’re not faffing about.

Writing a good book can take about 12 weeks – if you’re focused

So one of the things we’ve done is to create a checklist that actually spells out exactly what you need to do over those 12 weeks of writing a book and I’ll give you a link to that at the end, we’d love for Octo Members to have that. Because part of people’s uncertainty about how long it will take is they just don’t know what’s involved in the process.

Now, to be fair, most people probably won’t manage to write and publish a book completely in 12 weeks. But even if you stretched it out into 12 months, that would be faster than many people would have considered possible before.

So we suggest you expect a book to take you something between six and nine months. And what we’ve found is that if you can allocate an hour a day for the time period you’ve chosen, you can have a book – and a good book – on Amazon fairly quickly.

As I said, we have a 12-week video livestream series to prove it can be done. We kept track of everything we’d done. I kept a time sheet to show you exactly what we had done. So I’m not talking through my hat here. This is not a rule of thumb guess.

And this is actually what we have been doing for the last few years. So here’s the key point – don’t obsess about the time. Just concentrate on why you want to write a book.

Get that clarity on what is the outcome you’re looking for. Where’s the urgency?

You can actually pull this off very quickly indeed if you’re motivated with a specific endpoint in mind. We manage it in about 78-82 hours, so that’s roughly an hour a day over 12 weeks.

David Meerman Scott, for example, I mentioned him in Episode 1, he wrote a book called Standout Virtual Events. It’s a lovely slim volume. How do you deal with the present situation, the pandemic, if you’re a keynote speaker? He used to speak on stage all over the world, but for a long spell this year hasn’t done anything. He’s been unable to.

So he wanted to get a book out on how to create a standout virtual training session. It would position him as someone who knew how to handle Zoom presentations better than anyone else. He also wrote it for people offering or running virtual events. I posted a video review on Amazon and LinkedIn, you might have seen it.

But he basically sat down and said, ‘I have to stop everything to write this’. And he sat down and crafted 20,000 words, added some elements from articles he’d already written, turned it into a single Word document, and threw it on Amazon.

So the key lesson is this – find the urgency. Because the urgency drives you.

Not just urgency, but importance should drive your calendar

Secondly, if you decide that you are going to make this happen, you will look at your schedule and say, you know, which things on my calendar can go and you will make the time. There’s a famous 2x2 matrix where you can plot urgency against importance and when you do that exercise sometimes you realise the important things you want to achieve are being pushed out of your life by things that are just urgent, but not important.

The other piece of this, which we alluded to earlier, is what do I actually need to do?

So we’ve got not only this checklist, but we turned it into an app. It’s called the Author’s Grid and it’s basically a giant Gantt chart. You open up the Author’s Grid and you look at it and it says, this is week two. You should be doing A, B, C, and D and nothing else.

Note: Here’s a quick video overview of the Authors Grid app – there’s a link at the bottom of this episode if you’d like to try it out. It’s free.

The app allows you to focus on the exact pieces of the puzzle that you need to do before you faff about thinking, ‘Oh, this book! I’ve never written anything that’s 30, 40, 50,000 words long before!’

So first ask yourself ‘what’s your reason why’: that gives you urgency that helps you create the space in your calendar. You probably need an hour a day. The writers that we’re working with tend to do that first thing in the morning. So 6:00am till 7:00am or 7:00am till 8:00am, something like that.

And secondly, focus in on exactly what you need to do. The Authors Grid app will help you to do just that.

And what you need to focus on changes over time, you know. The first part is research. Your primary research. The second phase is writing. And then – if you’re going to publish it yourself – you need to consider the editing and the design. But that can happen later on and the app will tell you exactly when you need to focus on that.

If you’re organised, writing your book will take no more than an hour a day

So what intending authors need to do now is to educate yourself as to how the process works, but we’ve done it for you with this app, Author’s Grid, and we’ll be happy to share it with you at the end of the session, if it’s any use. But amount of time? About an hour a day. I’m sure you can find an hour a day.

Lee: An hour a day. Okay. So just with your experience, because, as I say, you’re a best-selling author, you’ve published many books, we’ve seen some of them here. This is slightly cheeky question that’s come in. Does the world need another business book?

What’s the point? Does the world need another business book?

Steven: I don’t know if you read all the business books that come out, but I do read ALL the business books in my sector. And I think what’s behind the question is somebody who’s looking at a book and saying, this is rubbish. And you’re absolutely right. There are so many rubbish books out there.

So imagine what would happen. You have a super potential client, an aspirational client, somebody you want as a client. I’m being very commercial about this, but let’s go with this particular example. And they read a particular book, One of the not so good ones. ‘Oh, that’s rubbish,’ they say. And they’re still struggling to find an answer to their problem.’

They read another one… ‘Rubbish!’

And then they find yours. ‘Oh, that’s… Oh, wow.’

If your book is the right answer to that problem, the problem that has been annoying them, that they have had to trawl through half a dozen rubbish books for… well it elevates your quality. Your work, and your IP and your thought leadership has convinced them they should talk to you. And the trust they imbue you with, after reading the rubbish that’s gone before… well, you earn their trust even more.

So I’d say that the world’s needs better business books, because there are so many rubbish books out there.

Stand out – be the person that writes the better business book

So be the person that writes that better business book. Because if you write a good book, it will stand out even more.

And you’ve got word of mouth to think about, too. So somebody finds a great book – they will tell people about it for a long time to come. ‘Oh my goodness me, Trusted Advisor, David Maister! You’ve got to read this!’ And it’s like 30 years old and it’s still the best single book on the topic of trusted advisers that I have ever seen.

You know, there are other people writing about trusted advisors, but he’s still the best. I tried to get him to come on the podcast, but he’s retired now. He says, I don’t talk to anybody. But his colleagues are still running the business, and they are still running off his book. I mean, a good book is an asset that keeps on giving.

And just to go back half a step, one of the reasons I keep recommending Trusted Advisor, especially for people in our community is the trust equation, remember that?

Maister says trustworthiness – how much people trust you – equates to three things. Your credibility… so your professional training, you know, but all of our colleagues, all of our competitors have the same training, they too are credible. Plus, he goes on, reliability. You know, my word is my bond kind of thing. You’re serving your people, but so are all the competitors in your industry.

But the third element, intimacy... Maister makes this point that if you can deal with the most difficult issues that no one else can deal with, you’re the person I’m going to trust most.

Your book builds intimacy through stories

So if your book is a good book with great stories – and Octo’s FP Stories is a great initiative here – then you enhance the level of intimacy you have with potential clients and that can be a gamechanger when it comes to earning trust. Your stories matter.

So even though your potential clients are ‘only’ reading your book, they’re hearing your words in their head, they’re coming to trust you without knowing you personally and far more than they did when you were just a name to them.

And right now, without too many face-to-face meetings, with none of that happening at the moment, building intimacy through storytelling is more important than ever.

Stephen Covey Jr’s book, The Speed of Trust is, is probably the only other halfway decent book on trust worth reading. And the large bulk of that is about building interpersonal relationships, which has completely gone for now with so many working outside the office.

Write a book to build trust and transparency

So if you want a powerful way to build trust and transparency, share your stories, share your case studies, and your book will be so much better than 99% of the other texts out there for your audience, the ones just with bulletpoints and platitudes.

And your ideal clients are trawling through these books, desperately trying to find the answer they’re looking for, trying to find the person that they trust. So I would say, in answer to your question, ?‘Absolutely.’ It is well worth writing another business book right now.

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Discover Octo for financial planners

If you’re a financial planner or adviser, learn more about Octo here: https://octomembers.com

Resources to help you write your book in 2022

1) Ebook edition: If you need help to structure and write your book download our flagship title, You Should Write a Book.

Get it now from our website: https://authorschannel.co.uk.

2) Book Launch Blueprint (complete checklist): Get it now from this link:

https://authors.fm/blueprint

3) Authors Grid app: If you want to explore the Authors Grid app – it’s cloud-based, nothing to download.

Head to https://authorsgrid.com

4) Discussion: Or get in touch – we have a complimentary consultation that will help you shape what your book could look like and how it will win your ideal clients over.

Check that out at https://bookideaaudit.com.