{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Behind the Book Cover","title":"I'm Becoming Your Book Strategist (Brenda Asked First)","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1101,"description":"I'm trying something entirely new on the podcast. I asked you to send me your book questions and I'd answer them like the brass tacks book strategist I am, and the first person who took me up on it was Brenda. Brenda has three different book ideas in her head, a 100-page version of each, an abandoned memoir and a new instinct to pivot into the longevity market. I'm going to tell her to scrap most of it and write one big book instead. Here's the case.\nBrenda is a personal development coach with sharp instincts—the kind of practitioner who saves clients years of therapy in a few sessions. Her ideal client is smart, entrepreneurial and allergic to anyone who can't keep up. She has a framework for personal development in the wings, multiple levels of teaching groups, a memoir she's already concluded isn't publishable, three short-book ideas across different topic areas and a fresh instinct to chase the biohacking-for-longevity market. Which is exactly the kind of fork where an outline appointment can save you a decade of writing in circles.\nBut my answer really goes into the case against multiple short books, because Brenda is leaning that direction. I've published eight books and trust me—by the third one, even the people who love you stop caring. You don't get to compound enthusiasm by stacking projects—you compound diminishing returns. The people doing it well are doing the opposite. Yes, Dan Sullivan has a whole shelf of helpful little Strategic Coach books, but the big books he started doing with Ben Hardy for Hay House made a much bigger difference in his business. The little books are useful. The big books are what made him known.\nWe also get into why I always ask what tax bracket your ideal clients are in, the case for niching down to \"how to all pretend we're ants in a colony\"-level specificity (every weird Facebook group has hundreds of thousands of members) and the sign-two-copies move that has turned more cold prospects into clients than any other...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/Xb3KmOvREtDe2gC76u6FvR351DxBU4X6pzMVALw3Snk/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9lYWIx/MGM4YTQxNjY2ODgx/YmY4YmY1YTM0NzBm/NWNhZi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}