Wedding bells — or alarm bells?
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By Allan Janssen |May 27, 2024
4 min read
News and resources for Canada's top financial advisors
What follows are six of the most important concepts to have in place to complete your best seller:
1. Why are you writing? The first step to writing a book is to ask yourself why you are writing it – that is, what business purpose does the book serve? What will it do to raise the benchmark for your practice?
Our clients often use a book as a gateway to a new era of business growth. For example, one client used a book to quickly establish himself as an expert in the high-net-worth market. Another advisor has decided to use a book as a way to filter opportunities. In other words, he "floated" his ideas about wealth management and client service to his ideal clients — and found more than enough readers ended up as clients.
Both strategies were wildly successful, largely because they fit with the advisor’s overall business plan and long-term strategy for his practice. If you’re serious about writing a book, you must have a similar sense of purpose, right from the start.
If you want to clearly articulate the reason why you need to write a book, imagine yourself as a financial journalist from a national newspaper. Then write yourself a one-page review of your as-yet unwritten book. What’s the most important thing that the book covers? Why should people read it? What does the book communicate about its author? What principles or beliefs does it espouse? Go back and refine this review as you continue through the process. It is an excellent way to keep your end goal in mind.
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Recent colums from Jeff Thorsteinson |
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2. Who are you writing for? In the publishing business, there are a number of people the writer must please: the publisher, the editor, the reviewer, and of course, the end reader. Lucky you, you’re not in the publishing business. The purpose of your book is to market your financial practice to your ideal client, period. To do that, you must write for one person and one person only: your ideal client.
If you’re been in business for awhile, you probably have a good idea of who your ideal client is. But you probably haven’t thought too much about what kind of writing that ideal client would find most appealling. You need to do so now. Ask yourself: what kind of tone or style would be most effective in reaching this person? Formal, informal, or a blend of the two? Will your ideal client understand financial jargon? Does he or she have preconceived expectations about what a financial book should or should not be? What about the structure of your book — will short chapters work best for your ideal client? Should there be graphs, charts, or other materials to complement the writing?
3. What are you rescuing your readers from? Once you have an idea of who your book is for, you’ll need to think about the content. At this stage, don’t bother with a detailed breakdown of topics, subtopics, and sub-subtopics — what you’re looking for is a broad topic area or general theme. This theme will help you weed out content and structure the flow of your book.
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Probably the most effective way to think about content is to ask yourself what kinds of financial behaviours or dangers your reader needs to be rescued from. That’s a dramatic way to look at content, but when you think about it, that’s what all financial books are: an attempt to empower readers with the knowledge needed to protect themselves from hidden dangers.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you want to write a book about hedge funds. That’s a little too broad, so you ask yourself what you can "rescue" your readers from. The answer is clear: misinformation. As it stands now, there is a deluge of misinformation about hedge funds, misinformation that is putting your readers in financial jeopardy. This theme leads to some interesting topic ideas: debunking the myths about hedge fund risks, the real story behind hedge fund blowups, etc. You now have a viable theme for your book, and have instilled a sense of urgency about why your readers need to pay attention to it.
4. How can you "hook" readers? The best financial books I’ve read have a theme or "hook" that flows throughout the entire publication. Given the often-dry nature of financial topics, this is a particularly important step, one you should spend some time thinking about. It’s often the difference between a book that gets read and one that’s used as a doorstop.
The classic example here is David Chilton’s The Wealthy Barber. The information in the book is very straightforward, very simple. By today’s standards, perhaps even a little boring. But what sets the book apart is the way it’s told — by way of a conversation — and that makes all the difference. That makes the simplistic into the interesting, and is a particularly attractive way to hook the audience of novice, never-invested-before readers that Chilton was targetting. No wonder the title has sold more than two million copies.
5. Write a chapter-by-chapter "roadmap" This is probably the most important part of the process, and one that I’ve seen a lot of advisors stumble over. Before you put pen to paper, take the time to write down a detailed "roadmap" of the entire book. This should be carefully articulated, with every chapter containing several bullet points that describe the topics you’ll explain in every chapter.
I can’t stress the importance of the roadmap enough. One book we wrote was roadmapped down to the paragraph. The roadmap ended up being over 30 pages long, and took over four months to complete. That might sound like overkill, but actually, it was the best investment we could have made at that time. Because of the planning effort, the actual writing went remarkably smoothly, and took less time than the planning! In fact, we actually saved time on the overall project by spending more time on the roadmap.
Bottom line: don’t be in a rush to put pen to paper. Inevitably, you’ll end up with a shoddy, confused writing that rambles from topic to topic without a clear sense of direction. Instead, invest in the roadmap, and know where you’re heading.
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Recent colums from Jeff Thorsteinson |
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6. Get it done In our experience, this is the biggest stumbling block our clients have: getting the book done. In fact, this part is probably the easiest part of the book production process.
If you plan on writing your book yourself, my suggestion is to treat it as a serious marketing effort rather than a hobby or "rainy day" project. Help yourself get into a groove by setting aside at least two solid hours every day to work on your book. These should be your most productive hours, whatever those happen to be for you (for me, it’s early in the morning — before the phones start ringing). When you’ve completed a chapter, put it on the shelf for a week, then go back and edit it through once. Then put your edited copy in a draft binder and start the next chapter. Once all chapters have been written, go back and edit the book in its entirety. This system will help keep you moving forward to get the job done, rather than writing and re-writing the same chapter without getting any closer to the end goal.
If you have the resources, the best scenario is to hire an expert to co-write your book. This isn’t as strange as it may first seem. Most celebrity authors have co-written books with established authors. Leveraging your time makes a lot of sense. Once you’ve completed the planning, editorial strategy, and vision, you can outsource an expert to execute the technical work.
Take the same approach to the design and printing. Use professionals. I see advisors do much of the same thing every day with the outsourcing of estate planning, insurance, stock selection, or other parts of wealth management that are not their primary expertise.
No doubt about it: writing a book is the most challenging, most time-consuming marketing project of them all. However, as you’ve read above, you can get in the way of your success if you allow it. The secret: turn obstacle into opportunity and you’ll succeed beyond your wildest expectation.
(11/21/05)
Jeff Thorsteinson is the creator of the YouFoundation, an organization that helps investment advisors advisors build world-class practices through innovative concepts, tools, and systems since 1993. With over 3,000 investment advisor marketing projects and business cases behind him, Jeff has become a well respected speaker in the industry and over the last 3 years, delivered his practice-building programs to thousands of financial advisors throughout Canada. Contact strategicadvisor@youfoundation.com or 1 800-223-9332, ext. 1, for more information about YouFoundation, or visit the website at www.youfoundation.com.
