Читать книгу How to Run Seminars and Workshops - Jolles Robert L. - Страница 11

Whether you conduct open session seminars or closed session seminars, keynotes or actual seminars, you still will need to market your services.

Nothing else matters if no one attends your seminar. We call the populating of programs BITS, or “butts in the seats!” Fortunately, regardless of which type of program you choose to deliver, the marketing basics will not change. It all starts with your book.

Writing the Book

Like it or not, books build credibility. It might not seem fair, but that's the way it is. That means if you are going to run seminars and workshops, you better start working on that book now. I suppose all authors create their masterpieces differently. However, you're stuck with me as your mentor, and I'm going to tell you how I do it.

Step 1. Create an Outline

The most brutal moment for any author is the day the first word goes into that computer. It's brutal because it's a little like starting to run up a mountain path that's 100 miles long. The first couple of miles seem as hopeless as the first couple of words – that is, unless you've created an outline. That's the first step in this process.

A book outline allows you to create a blueprint for the work you will be creating. It would be rather hard emotionally to put your hands on a keyboard and start typing away without an outline. When I create my book outlines, I usually try to wait until I have a nice environment to be inspired. It may very well be one or two hours of the most critical time of the project, so I recommend you pick your environment carefully.

In 1992, when I started to create the first edition of this book, I'll never forget where that outline came from. I was traveling to Cairo, Egypt, to conduct a Train-the-Trainer course for Xerox Egypt. It was the first of many trips I would take to that wonderful city, but I knew I was going to want to come back with an outline. I checked into a hotel called El Gezirah Sheraton Hotel. When I got to my room, I stepped out on my balcony and nearly lost my breath. Fifteen stories below was the Nile River calmly breaking around the small island my hotel was on. I could look up the river for miles. Between the melodic calls for prayer from the mosques, the boats, and the beauty, I was entranced and inspired. With my trusty notebook and pen in hand, and in what was probably less than 30 minutes, I had a 15-page outline in front of me.

Each page represented a chapter. Each chapter consisted of bulleted points. When you are outlining, you are in what I call “expansion mode.” This means that this is not the time to evaluate what you are writing. Rather it is the time to simply write…and keep writing. While you are writing, make sure you leave some space in between those bullets of yours, because you will fill in the space shortly.

I'm assuming you will be writing about something you've spoken about before. At first, these bullets should flow in a logical sequence. However, information can be moved at any time, anywhere. Don't obsess too much about sequence. In between those bullets should be one- or two-word reminders of the stories, analogies, or other creative ideas you intend to make a part of your chapter.

Before you know it, phase one of the outline is complete, and you have yourself a loose skeleton of a 12- to 15-page outline. Never underestimate the empowering feeling of holding that outline in your hand. Along with it will be the first sensation that you actually have enough information and really can write this book!

Step 2. Adding to the Outline

With your trusty outline in hand or on your computer screen, you're on your way to the next step, which is to add to your outline. The idea now is to allow your mind to wander morning, noon, and night. Keep adding thoughts to that outline. These thoughts might be a story, a better way to explain a concept, a creative way to display something, or countless other ideas. Just turn your mind loose.

My suggestion is to use the record feature on your smartphone or invest in a small digital recorder.

Remind yourself, no matter how obscure the idea or how positive you are that you will remember it, to put it on the recorder. This is particularly important at night. I can't tell you how many times I've fallen asleep swearing I'll remember a certain idea in the morning, only to wake up remembering one thing. I'll say to myself, “I had an idea. Now what the heck was it?” It's a lot like trying to remember a dream; sadly, most of the time you just won't remember.

Step 3. Writing

Now, it's time to get started writing. The first couple of pages are the toughest. You might want to prepare this writing around an event; maybe you have a long train ride, you are flying cross-country, or you have a vacation planned. What you are looking for is three to five hours of uninterrupted time alone.

Personally, I've always loved to write on planes. It doesn't hurt that I travel a lot, but the planes create an environment that suits me to a tee. There are no phones ringing, and the humming engines create a type of white noise that works wonders for me. The few minutes of waiting to load, waiting to push back, waiting to take off, and waiting to reach 10,000 feet and open that laptop allow me to focus on my topic at hand.

I've never actually seen what I look like, but you'll recognize me if you ever see me travel. I'm the guy who usually appears somewhere between being lost in thought and daydreaming before the flight begins. Then I look like I was shot out of a cannon once the flight attendant makes the “cell phones and laptops can now be used” announcement. I'm also the guy who sends absolutely no signals to the person sitting next to him regarding the remote possibility of a conversation. Let me apologize in advance. My time at home is for conversation with family and friends. My time on the road is to write.

Wherever you choose to write, my suggestion is to try to do it consistently. If you want to get up and write early in the morning, do it every day. If you want to put the kids to bed and write from 9:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., do it every day. The key is consistency. The longer you adhere to a consistent writing schedule, the easier it is to fight off the doubts that will haunt you.

I've always treated my writing projects like training for a long race. As a former triathlete and marathoner, I used to train pretty hard. I wasn't crazy, but I was consistent. I used to set distances to run not by the day but by the week. For instance, I might set a month or two of training with a goal of 30 miles a week. In a sense, I didn't really care how I got to those 30 miles. I'd log my daily workouts and plan my normal daily activities to ensure I got them in.

Some weeks were much easier than other weeks. I might have some free time and take a few long 10-mile runs. That certainly took the pressure off the rest of the week. I never liked running in the rain much. If you ever saw me slogging by, it was usually later in the week. That meant I did not have my miles in, and I had no choice but to get wet.

Have you got the analogy yet? I recommend you handle your writing the same way. Set a weekly goal. I like 10 pages, but it's up to you. If you are like me and have a trip planned, you might do your writing then. You may not need to write at home at all. Maybe it's a short trip week, so there will be a little writing on the road and a little writing at home. Maybe you won't be traveling at all, so there will be a week of writing at home.

As for slogging away, running in the rain, occasionally you might have to cancel plans and be a little miserable on a Sunday getting those last couple of pages in. The most important thing is, once you start, you mustn't allow yourself to miss a week's total. Perhaps it's just my way of thinking, but once you let your mind get away with justifying failure, the next failure becomes infinitely easier to accept and justify.

With every new book I write, and I've written six, I strategically buy an old-school calendar. Once the project begins, almost ceremoniously on Sunday night I write in my page total for the week. Ten pages a week is my goal, but I almost always try to get a couple of extra pages in. This allows me a little cushion in case I have a week of rain. It also introduces a little bit of mystery. After a month or two, I don't really know how many pages I've written in total, and I like it that way. That is a reward I allow myself at the end of each month. At that time I add that month up and the other month or two that precedes it to the total. It's a terrific feeling when the number crosses over the first 100-page barrier.

Allow me one last suggestion that will help you to get to that first 10-page barrier. Don't micromanage your writing. That means don't edit your work. That's for another stage, but not right now. Your job is to write. There will be a time and a place to edit and fix. That's not happening until you bring this writing project in for a landing. That “landing” used to be around 215 pages, but this too has changed over the years. Most business publishers are looking for books in the 150- to 175-page range, with many looking for even fewer pages.

Step 4. Editing Your Book

Want to know one of the best feelings in the world? It's the first time you print out your manuscript and actually hold it in your hands. I'm not much of a cigar smoker, but I usually keep a cigar somewhere near my computer while the typing is going on. Once I hold that manuscript (and I mean the whole thing), I usually light up that cigar. Often it's a bit dried out from sitting by my computer for so long, but it tastes great to me.

There are two editing options now for you to consider. The first is to edit the manuscript yourself, and if you can do that, you are a better person than I. I have a real problem reading my own words for any significant length of time. What's more, I'm a bit sloppy because I know what I'm trying to say and will assume anyone can follow me. You'll save some money here by doing the editing yourself, but personally I don't think it's worth the possible savings.

The editing option I recommend is to find a third party to do this for you. I usually find a retired English teacher or someone who edits material for a living. The costs are usually around $500 and well worth it. You'll have to train your editor, but most of them know what to do. Their job is not to agree or disagree with what you've written. You are the expert, and that's why you've written the book. Their job is to concentrate on grammar and syntax. I know for me, my editor needs to look for a repeated story here or there. Remember, this project may well have been written over a four- or five-month period of time. It's very easy to tell the same story or to use the same analogy two or three times.

Keep in mind that whoever decides to publish your book will have their own editor look over your book and suggest changes. The goal here is to have not only a great book but a well-written book as well. With a small investment in an editor, that's just what you'll have.

Step 5. Getting Published

With manuscript in hand, it's time to get a publisher. Once again, there are two ways to go here. You can try to find a publisher or publish yourself. There are books written on this subject alone, but allow me to cut through the rhetoric a bit and lay out both sides of this equation for you. If you want to avoid self-publishing your book, you can lay out the ideas you have for your book, write a sample chapter, get that proposal together, and see what happens. Not me.

Many speakers – and by many I've heard numbers as high as 95 percent of professional speakers – self-publish their books. Self-publishing means the authors pay the publisher to publish their work. Their books are printed and bound beautifully. The publishers they use leave no trace of the fact they were paid to do the work. Companies like Amazon now self-publish for no charge, and e-books obviously require no binding.

You can spare yourself the time and trouble of creating a proposal because the self-publishing companies will be selling you to allow them to do the work. Why not? They are not taking any risk whatsoever. It is purely business. Most print on demand, and some will save you a few extra dollars and print as many as you would like.

Wait. There's more. For each book you sell, you now stand to make five to six times more money. More money per sale, no begging a publisher, not detectable by your average reader, and quicker to market are some pretty powerful selling points for self-publishing. So, what's the catch?

The catch has to do with distribution. With conventional publishers, you become partners with their marketing team. By self-publishing you are your own marketing team. Some self-publishing companies offer a marketing program, copyediting, graphics, and other options, but if you avail yourself of these services, your costs will rise dramatically.

There are wonderful stories of authors who could not get published, self-published their manuscripts, sold a lot of books, and then got picked up by publishers. Those are wonderful stories. Unfortunately, they are few and far between.

If your goal is simply to make money and gain credibility within your seminars, self-publishing may be the way to go. However, if you want to tough it out and take a shot at creating a book that can find its way into anyone's hands, the traditional publishing route may be for you.

Whatever decision you make, my suggestion is to write the book – now. The sample chapter and proposal idea is a good one. I just think it's the primary reason why 99 percent of the people who want to write a book never do. Once you write that sample chapter and send off that proposal, guess what usually happens? The publishing business chews it up, and you never write the book.

Write the book. In fairness to the publishing industry to which I personally owe so much, it's not all its fault. Imagine being an editor sitting in an office and having dozens of book proposals land on your desk on a daily basis. Tunneling through, here comes another proposal. It looks interesting, and then you get to the experience part: “Never written a book before and has 18 pages written for a 200-page book. Next.”

Write the book. When I wrote my first book, I decided to treat the book proposal much like a real estate proposal. It's not the price that holds up so many of these contracts. In fact, it's the contingencies. Sometimes it's a home inspection. Sometimes it's a contingency on the sale of the buyer's house, but one thing is for sure. The more contingencies that are attached to the contract, the worse your chances are of closing the deal.

Write the book. My theory is a simple one. When it comes to writing and selling your book, get rid of the contingencies. The first one to get rid of is the contingency that dogs both you and your publisher. “This person has never written a book before, and I've got to try to believe that with no track record, this person can hit every writing deadline and get me another 125 pages. Hmm…”

Write the book. If you do this, you get rid of the biggest objection and contingency your publisher may have. It's easier for you to sell and easier for your publisher to buy. The only negative might be that your publisher will want the book but will want you to change certain things. It might mean more rewrites than you would like. However, if you have a publisher that wants your book, nothing else really matters.

The most important thing to do is to write! Nothing else matters if you don't write! That's why when I work with new authors, I always have them print out this quote and place it where they intend to do most of their writing. It reads like this:

Planning to write is not writing. Thinking about writing is not writing. Talking about writing is not writing.

Researching to write, outlining to write – none of this is writing.

Writing is writing.

– E. L. Doctorow

What happens if you write a great book and can't find a publisher to take it on? Simple, you publish it yourself. There are those in the seminar business who swear by this approach to publishing. Their arguments are good.

Royalties

Publishing a book yourself can allow you to move from a 7.5 to 15 percent royalty, to a 90 to 100 percent royalty. Remember, you are paying to publish your own book, so most of the sales belong to you.

Distribution

To me, distribution is the biggest downfall of publishing a book yourself. You will be able to get your book on a bunch of Internet sites, including Amazon.com, but the rest of your distribution is up to you. Self-publishers are working their way through this problem by offering their marketing services to you…for a price. It's not inexpensive, but the larger self-publishing companies have effective marketing departments. If I were to go the self-publishing route, I would engage their marketing programs. Remember, if you write a book and no one sees it, the book is not doing you any good other than establishing a perceived sense of credibility.

Pride

Funny that I should include the word “pride” as a factor to consider, but in fact I have a lot of pride surrounding the publishing of my books. I sold them myself and affectionately refer to them as my children. In theory, anyone can have a book self-published, but not everyone can find a publisher.

I have gotten into some pretty interesting debates with others in the industry over this publishing argument, so let's settle it this way. If you think you can sell more than 1,000 books a year yourself within your seminars, it might be cost effective to self-publish your book. You will certainly make more money that way. Of course, remember this: If within your proposal you can commit to selling more than 1,000 books a year by yourself, plenty of conventional publishers will sit up and listen.

Step 6. Selling Books

So how do you go about selling 1,000 books a year? Well, there are two schools of thought. The first is to deliver seminars and to offer books at the back of the room at the end of your seminar. That's the conventional approach, and, boy, do I dislike it!

To me this says to your audience, “I hope you enjoyed our work together. Now, if you really liked what I had to say, for a few dollars more, I'll help you learn it.” If you are conducting general sessions, it might make sense to do this. Personally, I'd add the cost of your book to the tuition and make it a part of their seminar package.

If you are conducting closed-session seminars, it's a little tougher but well worth your effort to make the sale of books a part of your training routine as well. In seminars that are a half day or longer, it should not even be a topic of discussion. Any client who wants a half-day program or longer is saying to you, “Help us to make the cultural change you are teaching us.” That means the client needs participant guides and books – period.

For keynote deliveries, it's a little bit tougher. When you are speaking to 500 people for an hour, it's tough to add the cost of 500 books to the proposal without the client protesting. However, let me tell you a quick story of how I recently sold 650 books for a one-hour keynote presentation.

When I first approached the client with the idea, they immediately said, “No.” I mentioned I never charge a client more than the cost that I pay for the book. Even at $9.10 a book, the answer was still “No.”

My contracts typically allow me to fly business class. My next move was to offer to bump that $2,000 ticket down to an $800 coach ticket. I now had the books down to about $7.25 each, but the answer was still “No.” Finally, I offered to pick up the airline ticket myself. When you are in the seminar business, you accumulate airline miles. With more than 1 million miles in my United Airlines account alone, this was an easy thing to do. This brought the cost to about $6.00 a book. Most companies that bring in large groups of clients to meetings often put gifts in the hotel rooms each night. One of those nights became Rob Jolles Night, and the attendees found an autographed book of mine waiting for them in their room.

Six other professional speakers spoke at the meeting I'm writing about. Each set up a little table in the back of the room and hawked books at the end of their seminar. From what I could see, each sold five or six books.

One last comment on buying books and selling them to clients. I strongly recommend that you find a distributor you like, develop a relationship, and set up a distribution channel. The reason for this is a simple one but often is overlooked by those who conduct seminars.

It's wonderful to be published but even more wonderful to make your book a best seller. If you buy your books directly from your publisher, your discount will be deep. Depending on quantity, it could be as large as 50 percent. However, every single book that you buy will not be counted toward any best-seller list.

If you buy your books from a distributor, your discount usually will not go higher than 45 percent. So why use a distributor? Use a distributor because book sales can count toward these best-seller lists. Let me tell you how these lists work. When a book makes a best-seller list, it doesn't necessarily mean it has sold more than any book of its kind. It means it has sold more than any book of its kind from the major book chains that make up the count. It's almost like watching television from a TV with a Nielsen box on top of it. Those ratings don't track how many TVs are watching a certain program. They track how many TVs with Nielsen boxes on them are watching a certain program.

What you potentially give up in book sales, you make up in seminar fees. When a book hits the Business Best-Seller List or the New York Times Best-Seller List, it is the equivalent of receiving an Academy Award. When an actor is nominated, the cost of hiring that actor goes up. When an actor wins the award, the cost goes up even higher. You do the math. When you are marketing your services, which sounds better, “Please welcome author Glenn Faulkner” or “Please welcome best-selling author Glenn Faulkner”?

Write the book. Ultimately, it's your decision whom to sell your book to and whom you buy your books from. For me it's an easy decision. I strongly recommend you try to sell your book to a publisher. If your selling is unsuccessful, you can always move to self-publishing. There are plenty of stories of those who self-published their book, had it sell well, and then had a publisher offer to publish and distribute their book.

Most important, write the book.