Hey Revenue Writers,
This week I don’t have a full chapter from Mini Book Flywheel: Become the Person, Brand, and Category People Remember. (collective groan)
I know, I know, I apologize, but it’ll be better for it. I have tons of excuses but I won’t bore you with those. (Although client work is going great. First Revenue Writer’s Event is Tuesday Night and Mini Book Boot Camp right around the corner!)
But I digress.
(If you missed any of the previous chapters from Mini Book Flywheel you can find them HERE.)
Today I want to talk to you about how to create a S.MA.R.T book.
Not a smart sounding book, but a book that you can use to run your entire business.
See I’ve written and published a lot of books. (30+ at this point) What I’ve learned is that not all books can have a business built on the back of them. They may help you and your business gain authority etc. but if you want to use one mini book and build an entire business ecosystem and revenue machine out of it, a creative and belief flywheel, you can’t just write a book.
You must write a S.M.A.R.T Book.
I noticed after I started preaching Mini Books, people started writing short nonfiction books, Mini Books, but their books weren’t the same as what I understood a Mini Book to be.
They were hastily assembled, half baked ideas, in a Mini Book form. Nothing wrong with that, except they’d go do another, and another, but their books didn’t have the elements that would scale their business.
Soon enough… they’d burn out. Several books written, litle to no income.
So I asked… “What was the difference?'“
Why was I able to find way to build a business on the back of a book and more importantly how had I failed my readers and Revenue Writers. What had I unintentionally held back from them that would go from having a Mini Book, to having a Mini Book that drove business?
For the past year I’ve been developing a new idea, new concept, and it revolves around this idea of S.M.A.R.T. Books.
I call it Smart Publishing.
It’s an evolution, the next stage of Mini Books.
So today I’m breaking it down for you. This is me flushing out one point of the final chapter of Mini Book Flywheel, giving you one of the 3 core pieces of that final most important chapter in my “lets sit on the couch and let me ramble” style newsletter.
For your book to be useful at building a business & not take months or years to write, it needs to have these 5 elements.
S - Structured
M - Mini
A - Actionable
R - Repeatable
T - Transformative
If you do all 5 of those things that is a S.M.A.R.T. book and I’ll break down each one and why it’s so important.
S - Structured
Mental scaffolding of a new idea is so important.
If you don’t break down your book in an easy to understand structure, you are done before you hit publish or make a single sale. The reader gets lost in what you are trying to explain. You often lose track of where you were going.
Your book comes out as random thoughts even if in a logical sequence.
M - Mini
If you want your reader to actually finish your book, you better write 5k - 15k words.
Most books are put down at 25% complete. (most nonfiction books are 40k+… coincidence that the reader only reads 10k words…? I think not!) So just write the 25% they actually want. We all remember the nonfiction books that gave you a breakthrough revelation in the first two chapters then prattle on for another 10.
Get to the point and give your reader a quick payoff.
A - Actionable
If your reader can’t apply your book’s ideas to their life, you’ve missed the point.
Only when a reader can solve a problem they face with the book you solve, will a business truly be able to be built on the back of it and a flywheel begin to form. If you can help someone who reads a few thousands words they’ll wonder what you could help them do if they hire you for a few thousand $$$.
So make sure your book is something they can take action with.
R - Repeatable
If you want your ideas and business to be a flywheel, spreading without you, it needs to be memorable.
The best way to make something memorable is to make it repeatable. An easy acronym (hello… S.M.A.R.T. or S.I.M.P.L.E Online Business Model), or visual idea that makes it sticky (flywheels as hurricanes, revenue machines, etc.) are some of the best ways to make your message memorable and therefore repeatable.
I recently worked with a brilliant man who wrote his third book, but his book wasn’t memorable or repeatable. Lots of great information, but it was 13k words of wisdom, but nothing sticky.
I worked with him to flip that around and we rewrote his book together and suddenly he had a new way to talk about his business because we made his 10 steps into memorable and repeatable framework.
T - Transformative
Your readers lives should be transformed in a meaningful JUST by reading your book and 10x so if they apply it.
When people read the Mini book Model or heard about Mini Books for the first time their world transformed into possibility. Possibility that they didn’t have to spend months or years to write a book. When I wrote the Independent Adjuster’s Playbook I laid out a complex industry into 7 simple steps that made getting work in the industry seem simple and inevitable. HOPE, or some other kind of mental shift is the first transformation our book is supposed to give.
When the reader applies it and achieves the outcome promised (writing their first Mini Book as an example) then their lives are 10x improved… but just reading it should bring about a mental, emotional, and possibly physical transformation.
Why Writing a S.M.A.R.T. Book is… SMART
If you write a book that is,
S - Structure
M - Mini
A - Actionable
R - Repeatable
T - Transformative
You know can use that manuscript to create an entire business with it.
Here are a few quick examples,
AI Training - Insert your manusript into ChatGPT and get a social post on voice, on brand, and genuine in seconds. Generate newsletters spinning off from topics in your mini book with AI or just you rambling on a point (like I am now) or any other number of business uses you can leverage AI that will now actually sound like you!
Onboarding - Hand your Mini Book to a new employee and they instantly understand your POV and business and can repeat it to your potential clients.
Courses - Use your outline of your book to create a video course on your topic. (Chapter titles = modules and each major point of the chapter is a video. Your course script is already done… pssssttt it’s called your manuscript 😉)
Presentation - Insert your manuscript and have it turned into a presentation in minutes with AI presentations oftware like Gamma or Beautiful.ai
That’s what makes writing a S.M.A.R.T. Book different than self publishing.
I call it Smart Publishing because once you publish your Mini Book the rest of your business is already at your fingertips. The hard mental work is done. The message is nailed down and you, your customers, employees, and AI can repeat it and repurpose it.
That’s not just self publishing. thats freaking SMART!
- Coach Chris Stanley