?? What It's Like to Be an Author

Many people have asked me over the years about the process of becoming an author. So many, in fact, that I figured the topic warranted its own edition of this newsletter. Here's a few thoughts about my journey of becoming an author. It has been full of interesting lessons, and plenty of highs and lows along the way.

You'll notice I didn't say that people ask me about the process of writing a book. Truth be told, that's often the opening question, but behind that question is another. A very common reason people want to write a book is to become an author, because they believe it will help their professional identity or personal brand evolve in a positive direction.

Here are four truths about being an author:

1. It's a recognized accomplishment. And I think that recognition is deserved, in most cases. It takes quite some effort just to write a manuscript. It takes far, far more effort to get a publisher to want to invest in it, including (for me at least), many years of failures and rejections. But even if you don't land a major publisher, it's a heavy lift of time and effort. Some might view it as a vanity milestone. While that might be a goal for some people, I think most authors do it for more reasons than this.
2. It enhances credibility. Usually, if someone has taken the time to write up their thoughts to the tune of 50,000 words on a specific topic, it means they cared enough about it to invest quite a lot of energy. The fact that someone would do this is in itself a testament to their belief of the importance of the topic and the impact they hope to make in sharing these thoughts with others.
3. It expands reach. People love to read. Even if today, more content is consumed online, and in multimedia formats, the written word remains a very powerful form of communication. When you can speak a few words to someone, but also hand them 50,000 more words in the form of a book in the same moment, you extend the duration of your reach, and you're able to get a deeper, more complex message to a wider audience.
4. It opens doors. Once you've written a book, assuming you also promote it so people can be aware of it, you start to see how it's a door-opener. Professors might adopt your book as a course material, and the next generation of professionals might take inspiration from it. Readers reach out to express how it helped them in some way. Suddenly, relationships you could not have forged on your own become a possibility.

Do all of these things really change your professional identity? That really depends, and I don't believe should really be the end goal. There are many ways to evolve your identity as a subject matter expert or a person of influence in your chosen profession or industry. A book is just one communication format in a single medium. How you communicate more broadly, to any audience, is the most important of all. Being consistent in your style, your values, your approach, is what helps convey your unique value to others.

(Same basic principles of branding apply to your personal brand.)

Bottom line? You don't need to become an author to improve your professional identity, or to further your personal brand. There are countless other ways to do that. You might love networking. Perhaps you're a great speaker or teacher. Perhaps video is a natural format where you shine, or a podcast if you love that format. Choose the way that aligns with your talents and what you love, and this will help others find you who seek what you have to offer.

But if you love writing, and the written word is how you best express your ideas, becoming an author is a rather natural evolution. If you embrace the concept that your writing can reach a broader group of people and help someone out there you might not otherwise connect with, becoming an author elicits great joy.

Helping Other People Become Authors

What's it like to help other people become authors? It's incredibly enjoyable for me to be part of the process of books that other people have written, even if my name never appears anywhere as having been a part of it. Seeing others' names on the cover instead of my own, but quietly knowing that I was somehow part of the process, is a point of pride. It feels so much more special to know that I'm supporting others and hopefully helping them accomplish a dream, one that I've already been fortunate to experience myself.

The first time I was part of such a process was at HubSpot, in which my colleague, Dierk Runne , became a co-author and had his name listed alongside our co-founders of HubSpot, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, when we published their book, Inbound Marketing, in Germany. Dierk translated every single word of that important business book, heralding the HubSpot brand and building credibility in Germany, which is a nation that highly values reading and education.

In my opinion, no one could have done this with greater success than he did, because he knew the content, the authors, the underlying concepts, and so much more, and translated or reviewed content on similar topics every single day. This book sits with great pride on my bookshelf next to all the books where my own name appears. But what was even more special to me is that it felt like a victory for the entire translation industry, which often gets zero visibility or recognition for the important work they do. To hold that book and know that my team member made it happen, and seeing their name right there on the cover, was an extremely memorable moment of pride.

And recently at Zappi, we've launched a book with four co-authors. I have the honor of working with Steve Phillips and Ryan Barry , impressive leaders who've done incredible work building a world-class consumer insights platform, along with our customers from PepsiCo, Stephan Gans and Kate Schardt , both of whom are visionaries and change-makers at one of the largest consumer packaged goods mega-companies on the planet.

Now, they are not only authors, they are #1 Amazon Bestselling authors! What fun to be part of such a great success story! What great pride in seeing the authors stand holding their new baby, I mean book, featured on the Nasdaq billboard in Times Square a few weeks ago. The joy on their faces and the celebration of our employees was incredible.

But I also loved seeing the hard work of our creative team up on that billboard (fun fact: Zappi tested the cover design with consumers and let them decide on the winner!), and the extensive work of my team members in making the entire process happen. I was also super proud when we did a Tube Station Takeover in London last week, and could see everyone's eyes lighting up as our bold and vivid brand brightened up their daily commute.

My experience as an author has told me that getting a book into the world, while a huge undertaking, represents only the first 10% of the work in the lifecycle of a book. Making sure it reaches people is 90% of it. Promoting a book can be fun, but it's definitely a huge commitment for authors, brands, marketers, and anyone involved to get the book out there into people's hands after a book is born. It takes ongoing effort, hard work, lots of time, and frankly, pure grit, to make a book successful in the long term.

And it's fun to be a part of it, even if you're not one of the authors featured!

Becoming a Solo Author

There have been two times in my life when I published a book as a solo author. The first one was with a book from a long time ago, Telephone Interpreting. That sounds very funny to me now, since "telephone" sounds very old-school these days. Hey, it was 2008! I actually wrote not just about analog and auditory modes, but about the future of digital audio, text-to-speech, and video interpreting as well.

(Speaking of technology, this photo of me and my friend Jorge U. Ungo at my book launch reminds me of how far digital photography has come in 15 years!)

I was always interested in the potential of technology to help accelerate and enhance human productivity, long before AI was trending. I'm proud to say that most of what I predicted in Telephone Interpreting has since come true, although I'm still waiting on some pieces of my predictions to happen. It's fun to look ahead and dream of possibilities for technology to help an entire profession evolve, as I did in that book.

My most recent "solo author" book, Take Your Company Global, just turned one year old a couple of weeks ago! Hard to believe it has only been a year since then. What a fun book that was to launch with my friends at Acolad group in Paris (thank you Grainne Maycock and team), and on a webinar with friends and colleagues across the globe. What a memory!

Working With a Co-Author

My most "successful" book in the traditional sense of how many thousands of copies were sold, and the other metrics the publishing world really cares about, was Found in Translation, written with my co-author Jost Zetzsche . Publishing a book with Penguin-Random house felt extremely special, because they're one of the top publishers in the world. What most people don't realize is that, even when you sign a book deal with a major publisher, the hustle of promoting the book is largely on the authors' shoulders to bear.

For that book, I can't count how many things I did to promote it. I must have read 30 books on how to promote a book. It was a lot of work, especially for an introvert! I organized my own book tour across the United States, doing keynotes and bookstore signings in 20 major U.S. cities, culminating in a keynote in front of 10,000 professionals to whom the book was devoted. I spoke at Google, Microsoft, United Airlines, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library (he even sent me a thank you note!)

I did several dozen radio interviews, appeared on some extremely popular podcasts and in major media, and devoted a huge amount of effort and time to getting the word out. I wrote countless articles and blog posts. My co-author did the same, and we drummed up tremendous support for the book over many years.

My Next Co-Authored Book

I'm very excited about the book I have coming out next year, with the incredible Katherine Melchior Ray , a veteran CMO for some of the world's largest and most respected brands. She's a marketer extraordinaire who has led marketing at Shiseido, Grand Hyatt, Louis Vuitton, and Nike, among others.

Fun fact: Back in 2014, when I was working in my first job leading the entire marketing function for a software company, I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, "Hyatt Hotels Executive Has a Spare Evening Gown in Her Bag." I read the article with fascination about this incredible globe-trotting polyglot who seemed to have what I considered... a dream life! Wow, what a cool life she had. How could she possibly build such incredible brands as a marketing leader and take them into new local and global markets, all while exploring the world, having children, learning new languages, and making the most of one's time on this earth. What an inspiration, to me and many!

So imagine how I felt when she reached out to me a decade later, as a result of reading one of my Harvard Business Review articles and using it in her classes at University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business , where she is now, among many other things, a professor in global marketing. To be invited to contribute to a book with her was very much a "full-circle moment," and a testament to the fact that the world is, truly, a very small place.

Drum roll... here's our new book!

While Katherine is the lead author, and is writing the majority of the book, I am contributing some chapters on the areas I have deep expertise in as a veteran marketing leader and tech exec (B2B marketing and digital marketing), sharing examples in others, and have the great pleasure of being the first to experience her amazingly vivid and compelling writing. She has so many fascinating and insightful examples from her own lived experiences working for such wonderful and iconic brands over the years. What fun to add my own into this mix.

I cannot wait for all my marketing friends, and all my globally-minded readers, to get their hands on this book! It gives people a deep view into what it's really like to build enduring brand value in multiple markets. It's going to be an incredibly valuable resource for marketers and internationalists alike!

The good news? It's already available on Amazon for pre-order.

The bad news? We have to wait a bit. It won't be out until 2025.

But watch this space for updates on the new book!

It's going to be fun to launch this one.

Remembering My Very First Book

There is one book that sits there on a shelf in my office, alongside all these other more notable books, published by major publishers. This one barely gets any attention, but is perhaps one of the most important I've written.

It has a humble little title.

It's 25 years old now.

The spine is blank.

No author names appear on the cover.

It's design aesthetic is, well... (creatives, please look away.)

But it's very special to me.

This is the first book I ever published, when I was just starting out in my career, only a few years after I had graduated from college. I was a co-author of the book you see here, a compendium of hundreds of technical glossaries, along with a fellow Spanish interpreter, Lorena Martin.

We worked at Language Line, a telephone interpreting agency, which was a division of AT&T (to which I'm ever-grateful for some incredible management training that I still rely on to this very day). AT&T eventually spun us out as a separate company.

As interpreters for limited English proficient people around the United States, Lorena and I worked on this book, a true labor of love, for the thousands of employees and interpreters who worked at our company.

We also did it for the people who were recipients of our interpreting services: doctors and patients, clerks and customers, judges and defendants, prison guards and prisoners, 911 callers and first responders, insurance agents and claimants, and oh so many more people. These were the customers we served, working through us as interpreters to help them bridge a language gap.

(If you'd like to learn more about that time of my life, listen to this episode of Radiolab.)

What an honor to look back after 25 years of a long career, and reflect on the fact that this nerdy glossary compendium was really my first book. It was hugely impactful on a specific group of people I care deeply about. That's pretty much my motivation for doing most things professionally, including the companies I join.

Because I believe our values ultimately dictate our professional identity and shape our personal brand out there in the world.

More than being an author ever could.

As a bonus, here's another reason this book is very special to me: the foreword.

Here is what my boss back then wrote about my co-author and me. It was such a touching surprise. I'm still embarrassed by my ineloquent words about my co-author. When I was asked, I didn't fully realize how it would be used. But I was so moved by what my co-author said, as well as what my boss wrote.

Who reads the foreword? Not many readers do.

But the author always does.

In fact, if you're an author like me, sometimes you read it some 25 years after it was written!

As you can see, Danyune was an incredible manager.

She made sure that the glossaries would be published, not just in a binder or as worksheets as was typical back then, but in a book format to make it extra special, and recognize all the hard work we put into this project.

I remember the day she told me, because she had to get budgetary approval to do it that way, and she clearly went out of her way.

She took the time to truly acknowledge us, make us feel seen, valued us as unique individuals with differences that mattered and were appreciated.

And then, she put it into words and memorialized it.

In front of all of our colleagues.

What a great leader, and how lucky was I to have her as my first role model in business.

She's the one who made me an author.

Grace Notes

I am so honored to be featured in one of the world's most popular business podcasts, Marketing Over Coffee. I discussed Zappi and how we're revolutionizing consumer insights with our customers, my oddball journey into marketing leadership at tech companies, leading the launch process for our HubSpot office in Tokyo (with a fun anecdote that I think you'll remember Dmitry Shamis ), and more. You can listen to it here!

Other Ways to Connect with Me

Thank you for reading this newsletter! I hope you found it helpful.

Here are 3 other ways we can connect:

1. Get my latest book.

If you're not sick yet of hearing about books by this point, you can also get your copy of my book, Take Your Company Global.

It was kindly endorsed by my longtime CEO at HubSpot, Brian Halligan.

“Take Your Company Global is the definitive guide to building a global business in the digital age.” —Brian Halligan, Co-Founder and Executive Chairperson, HubSpot and Co-Author,?Inbound Marketing

Already have it? Liked it?

Please do me a favor and leave a review on Amazon.

2. Download my guide.

Earlier this year, I wrote a 27-page career planning guide in the form of an eBook called Find Meaningful Work. This guide helps you figure out your values (longer term statements that help you steer your career in the right direction) and determine your priorities for your next job (shorter-term areas of focus that matter to you in the here and now.)

You can get it here.

3. Book me for a talk.

When I can, I do virtual inspirational author talks or fireside chats for marketing and localization teams. These are easy to organize and I don't charge for them. You can also use my books, or my Harvard Business Review articles, for continuing education and team discussions at work.

With enough advance notice, I can also do guest lecture spots for university students, occasional conference keynotes talks, and podcast guest appearances.

Want to find out if I can help you? Comment below, message me on LinkedIn, or email me: nataly (at) borntobeglobal.com.

Looking for my books, blog, and other writing?

Those are all linked on my website, Born to Be Global, where you can contact me too.

Have a great week ahead, and thanks again for reading!

Nataly