Transcript

Approximate read time: 85 minutes

Orren: Hi Miriam, thank you for making the time to talk today.

Miriam: Thanks so much Orren, I’m really pleased you asked me.

Orren: So we’ve crossed paths numerous times over the last two or three years in various context but today I want to talk to you about the process behind writing, launching and selling your international best-selling book called “Today’s Woman” and congrats on the achievement by the way.

Miriam: Thank you very much I’m very proud of it.

Orren: Can you give me a bit of explanation of who you are and your background?

Miriam: Yep, sure I’ll give you the very brief version of my life story. So I started out in life in a corporate career like many people. I actually completed an Engineering Degree, wound up working as a Petroleum Engineer and then from there I kind of transitioned into a more corporate development role which was all about growing the company and reporting directly to the board and looking at opportunities and I came at that from a technical perspective and eventually I realized that I really hated corporate life; took me a while to work it out and at that time my husband was building a small business. So I chose to leave my corporate world and help him and had my children and long story short I wound up divorced, broke, out of my career for 8 years with two young kids and from there really had to kind of start all over again, work out who I am, who I want to be and really dig deep for some self-esteem and  self-belief and I tapped into  a lot of personal development, started a business in a whole new industry which ticked the boxes with what I wanted and eventually once that was up and running I decided that I really wanted to go back to what helped me get there and kind of pay if forward and help other women. Writing the book was kind of the first and important step on that journey and transitioning what for me is now my new career.

Orren: Perfect that’s very clear. Can you give me a bit of a timeline of when that transition point happened?

Miriam: It’s interesting because when I started writing my book I actually looked back at some notes I made at a workshop I went to almost 10 prior and I wrote my little wish list of what I’d really love to be doing if money and everything else circumstances were no object and it was doing exactly what I’m now doing. So it’s kind of a 10 year journey. But I only got brave enough to pass on and I think I’m the person for the job about probably 2 years prior to actually releasing the book. So it was a 2 year journey from say “okay I’m actually going to do this” to walking into a shop and seeing my book on the shelf.

Orren: Right, so over that two year journey what was that very first starting point? Was it approaching a publisher and getting a publishing contract first?

Miriam: Yes and no. So my first step was to get really clear on what I actually wanted to write about and then deciding whether I thought there was a market for it. So I interviewed a lot of women who I either admired or who I thought would be interested in what I have to say and I found that there was a lot of overlapping in our thinking and where we came from. So I found that there was actually a lot of head nodding as I was starting to speak to people and I knew I was on the right track and then I had to decide what angle I really wanted to take out of all the possible angles you can take and I put a book proposal together mainly for my own benefit initially just to get really clear on what do I actually want to write about and what’s my angle and then I had to decide how I wanted to go about publishing it. So there are pros and cons to traditional publishing versus self-publishing and I did a lot of research into both and decided that it was really important to me to have a traditional publisher because there are so many self-published books out there and its becoming a crowded market and they don’t really get the kudos that they maybe should.

Orren: Sure.

Miriam: Because there’s so many and a lot of them are not very high quality. So I really did want a traditional published but I also wanted to retain the rights to my book so that I could do what I wanted with is and not be limited because a lot of people don’t understand that when you sign up with a publisher most of the time you get handed a cheque and you’re the person who wrote the book but then they do what they like. From there on they can change your cover, your title, your colours and you kind of loose control and I really wanted to retain that control because it was part of a bigger picture for me. So in answer to your question once I decided that I wanted the best of both worlds so I had to find a publisher who could give me that and when I found them I started hounding them and harassing them until I basically got to sign up with them and that was probably 6 months process in starting to talk to them to finally signing a contract with them.

Orren: You mentioned that you interviewed so people that you admired. How else, was there anything that you did to help identify a target audience? Were there other people that you spoke to in a similar situation that you’re in say 10 year prior to help shape what that book would be or make a compelling product for that audience?

Miriam: It’s really important that you do have a target market when you produce any product but I also allow myself to be guided a lot by my gut and what I knew was really an important message to get out there so it was a bit of a blend of both and I spoke to a lot of women’s networking groups and a group that I tend to talk to a lot is women who are sole traders, who are just starting their business or they’re just wanting to start their business and they’re really at that turning point in their life. So it was really just about having lots of conversations and finding that they were the common problems and the common obstacles that everybody’s faced and then deciding that I wanted to address those and a lot of it also came from people looking at what I was doing in just the finance business I had built and having two kids and I started mentoring at Venture Dorm at Flinders Uni and I was writing a column for weekly online publication and I was doing lots and lots of different things and people would just go ‘how the hell do you do it?’ and I thought I don’t know this is kind of how I operate. But I realized that overwhelmed was starting to become the really big problem that was starting to surface from all my conversations. So out of finding your way and figuring out how to do what you want to do and making it happen. The big continued word that kept cropping up was just oh overwhelmed and we don’t even know where to begin so that’s where I ended up choosing to focus on. But it was a whole conversation of a whole lot of things but a lot of conversation, a lot of one-on-one conversations rather than doing surveys and Facebook polls. I did a little bit of that but it was mainly just conversations with people.

Orren: Excellent, you started off with some of these conversations with people you admired and other people that were in your situation on the context that you were involved with to kind of develop that concept for the book then you mentioned that you wrote a proposal more so for yourself to get clarity on what you were writing on, then you moved on to approaching a publisher. How did that process with the publisher go? What was the conversation you were having particularly with them and what where the negotiation points that you had?

Miriam: Well the publisher I ended up choosing to go with is a really non-traditional publisher and it took me a while to find them because I wanted somebody who could give me that best of both worlds that I was looking for where I could retain my rights but still be distributed so that my book could end up in bookstores. If you’re self-published you actually cannot end up in a bookstore in Australia. In the US it’s a bit different or you can end up in small independent stores but not in your big chains. So once I’ve found the publisher and I kind of stalked him, I really needed to just check out that his model was just right for me. So once I got sold on yes I do want to work this person I sent him a book proposal, I had a phone conversation with him and then he has a really particular process that he puts people through. So he actually starts with a 3 day workshop to kind of set the ground work of how he works because he take 20 authors and puts them through a 6 months program, sorry it’s actually a 12 month program but really you get the work done in the first 6 months. So it was really a matter of going along to that first workshop, deciding that yes I understand and I’m happy work in how he works and it’s a good fit then applying then being accepted as one of the 20 people to do the next intake and then it was quite a good rigid process that they put us through where we were on a timeline and you know there was accountability and we got lots of training and even lots of ideas on how to get your book written and how to gather your thoughts because that’s definitely not something you tend to get with traditional publishers they’re kind of here’s a great book proposal and here’s a contract and we need a manuscript from you in 6 months, thanks anyway and you don’t have that relationship where you’re constantly back and forth with them which I did. So it was a bit of a matter of checking each other out deciding that it was a good fit and then interviewing for this particular program that I wanted to be a part of and being accepted.

Orren: So how did you find this publisher? Was it recommendation, word of mouth, were you doing a search and you just discovered them?

Miriam: No I actually heard him speak at a seminar I went to and initially he was talking about marketing because he’s very big on outside the square marketing ideas and he’s worked in lots of different industries and done franchising and so on. So that’s kind of something else he does in his business and then I thought oh okay that’s really interesting. It’s simple stuff but outside the box stuff and then I heard him speak again somewhere else and realize oh he actually has this publishing company and this is how he operates and it’s all about knowing that your book is actually a positioning tool and how do you leverage that and how do you make the most of it and he talked about there are certain strategies you can follow to get best-seller status and really I just wanted to get as much I guess authority behind my book as possible. So I thought I don’t want to be a self-published author and best-seller sounds pretty good so I think you would pay a little bit more attention if you’ve got that sticker on there. And so that’s how I found him I just happen to stumble across him a couple of times and realized no I didn’t just Google him.

Orren: Sure, so then next once you found that publisher what was the next step in the process? Were you then going and writing a first draft of the book?

Miriam: Well before I actually found the publisher when I decided I did want to write a book and I was trying to figure out exactly what my message was and what was the problem I was going to address and how was I going to go about solving it in my book because it is a ‘How to book’ and I applied it that I really needed to start writing and just finding my voice. So I started blogging and that was great because it also gave me that reinforcement that my message resonated with people and I was getting great feedback and it really let me know what women which is who I mainly talk to wanted to hear, wanted more help with, you know what were the main issues and it help me really find my very genuine voice because when you first start writing you’re a bit worried about how you’re gonna come across, you want to make sure you sound intelligent, you don’t want to be too casual, is it okay to swear. All these kinds of things. So my blogging had really helped me find my voice and get really comfortable with how I wanted to write and what actually happened out of that is by the time I had signed the publishing contract I had so many blogs which then fitted in really well into the chapters of my book. So for probably a third of my book it was really a case of just letting out blogs I had written and re-writing them a little bit and obviously expanding on them but I had  a lot of content already and I had already found my voice.

Orren: Perfect, that’s very smart.

Miriam: It worked out very well.

Orren: Of course and it sounds like a very good process to follow at least testing some of those ideas and also testing how your write and seeing what resonates and what doesn’t and then majority of the ideas of the book have been created.

Miriam: And I was just going to say in an answer to your question from there in terms of writing a first draft, I hadn’t actually written anything other than a proposal and blogs by the time I signed up with a publisher where as other people would write their book first and then go knocking on doors trying to find somebody who will publish it but I thought well that seems counter-productive to me because if you don’t know you’re going to publish it why bother writing it? So once I had found a publishing deal then I was already comfortable with my voice, I knew the publisher agreed that it was great idea and there was a market for it, I knew that my audience was already there and were resonating with my idea so then I sat down and wrote my first draft and that actually took me only 6 weeks but it was a real boot camp style. So I was up at 5 o clock every morning and I would just spend the first two hours of the day writing, using a few techniques that my publisher had taught us in workshop situations where we’ll start with meditation, focus on what the chapter was about and then just do it like a subconscious, you know just a brain dump and letting things pour out and because they say the best first draft to write is a bad one – meaning you just need to get something down on paper and then you can massage and work it from there. So it actually took me 6 weeks to write my first draft which sounds like it was a really quick process but I think it was another 8 months before the book was actually published after that so there’s still a lot to do.

Orren: Can you just clarify as well that blogging that you were doing, was that on your own platform or were you publishing on someone else’s platform?

Miriam: No I decided that it was a great idea to start getting some SEO and some traction so I started a blog at Miriam Castilla dot com which I still write on today and started also looking for some opportunities to guest blog but it was really just my sandpit training ground where I just found my own voice.

Orren: And at that time what were the numbers of readers on the blog when you were starting just out in this process a couple years back?

Miriam: I wasn’t even tracking them. I’m really lazy with all that sort of stuff.

Orren: Of course I see it’s an important point just to see where you’re at and it was just more of a process for you rather than anything else.

Miriam: Yeah, look I was getting sign ups and after a while I said oh I should have a mailing list sign up and here that’s what we meant to do isn’t it? And I started getting sign ups and followers and so on but I tend to be a little bit lazy with watching numbers. I actually find that it’s a personality thing I think that when I watch my numbers really closely I get too bogged down in the numbers and it stilts my creativity and my flow and I find that when I didn’t worry about the numbers and I just pour out content and get really creative and just write whatever comes along the numbers just start climbing so I tend to do a stock take every few months and go oh look at that the subscribers have really increased and I know I’m on the right track but I’m not one who sits there with Google Analytics and I probably should, I know I probably should but I just don’t like it so I don’t do it.

Orren: Absolutely that makes sense. So you’ve written your draft and that took you about 6 weeks or so. What was the process from putting the last full stop on that manuscript what happened next?

Miriam: It’s quite painful really from there. So what happens from there is you send that first draft to the editor and the editor’s brief from my publisher was we don’t change the author’s voice and so really it’s about making sure that the content flows in  a logical manner, ironing out grammatical inconsistencies and errors and typos and all that kinds of thing but it wasn’t a major re-write so I’m quite grateful for that because even so it was quite a painful process so things come back from the editor and apparently mine was the lightest edit they’ve done in several months but then I actually have to go through and actually approve each one because with my contract in a way its set up I did get the final say and that kinds of suits my personality as well. So then you actually have to go through and it’s got track changes in a word document and you’re just sitting there trying to follow each one and make a decision whether you keep and edit or you drop it and then it goes back for another final edit. You again have to go through all of their changes and decide whether you want to keep them. So that process was actually much more because it wasn’t a creative process it was just a mechanical process I found it really annoyingly painful and it took me quite a long time to go through it all because track changes; I don’t know if you use it much but some things they’ve made a change here but I cannot for the life of me find it so you actually spend a lot of time looking for something that changed. So once that was all finally done then the book actually have to get typed set. So then you have to set up instructions as to how I want my pages to lay, be laid out. You know this is where I want diagrams and pictures and things like that and then that gets done and comes back to you and then you have to make edits and approve that. So there’s a lot of toing and froing and that’s not even taken into account the audio book which was another whole project in itself.

Orren: Sounds like that process was quite frustrating for you as being a creative person.

Miriam: Yeah absolutely, you know those first 6 weeks I spent writing my book I was just loving it and even though it was early mornings and often all weekend long where I was just writing it was just a creative outpouring and just getting it all out of me and onto paper but the towing and froing and knit-picking over commas and apostrophes and semicolons did my head in.

Orren: What happened next after that process? Was it a matter of your publishers going to your distributors and the distributors going to book sellers? Where did the printing happen, where were you at that stage?

Miriam: So a lot of people think that your book is released into stores and then you start marketing, that’s not quite how it works. In fact, the smart thing to do is to even start marketing your book before you even go to print because otherwise you become an author who has a garage full of books and I do have a lot of books in my garage because going to print is expensive and I speak around workshops and so the book is kind of part of that and I need enough to keep me going for the next few years but I did a lot of my sales before going to print. So I did set a goal that I wanted to reach best-seller and one of the things that Global Publishing Group, my publisher taught us was you need to get really creative with your marketing and your pre-sales. So once I had my first draft sent off and that job was done I got busy on marketing my book and finding partners to work with who had a similar audience or wanted to use the message of my book and then putting partnerships together so that’s how I did a lot of my pre-sales quite a significant number of them were actually to corporates and that’s great because if someone takes 350 copies or 500 copies of your book that’s a nice hit towards your target and pre-selling to public in my readership and so on but obviously that’s one book at a time. So having those corporate partnerships were really, really great and it also meant that we would put packages together where it would be okay I’d come and speak to your audience or your membership and they’ll each get a copy of my book and then I’ll run a free workshop for you and I sort of package the book in really creative ways with other offerings to add value to those partners. So those sorts of strategies are the reason I chose to work with a publisher I worked with because he gave me a lot of those ideas. So I spent quite a few months making a lot of phone calls and the key metrics were, it was a real basic selling 101 it was how many calls can I make today? I had a short list of people that I thought were appropriate partners but it’s still all about making those phone calls.

Orren: Right, that sounds perfect and this whole process of preselling by the sounds if I’m following the timeline correctly was happening in parallel to the editing and type setting process.

Miriam: Yes and just as well I decided to do that early because in the end I had sort of a set deadline for myself of when I wanted to give the go ahead to go to print and I still missed that by two months because people were needing to get back to me and wait till the CEO was back from overseas to kind of fine tune stuff because it was more about selling some books, it was about building partnerships. There was a lot of detail behind some of it and it just dragged on and on. And I have had moments when I said is that best seller stamp really that important on there because its stopped the launch of my business and my business was launched when my book was launched but I’m still glad I did it because you know in the scheme of things what’s an extra two three months. So yeah, it was quite a long process. I think it was probably realistically 4 moths that I spent marketing and doing my pre-sales before I gave the go ahead to go to print. So in terms of what happens with the distributor and getting into book stores which is then when your standard sales come in what actually happens is just because you have a publishing deal does not mean you get a distribution deal. So each publisher actually needs to sit with their distributor and they will go through the list of all the authors and all the upcoming books they have and the distributor will chose whether or not to take them on which is something I didn’t know before I got into this. What do you mean? I have a publishing deal aren’t I guaranteed a ticket to walk into Dymocks and see my book on the shelf? Well no, if the distributor thinks well no, it doesn’t match with what we’ve got or we’ve got too many books in this area then they won’t necessarily take it on. So you need to get the distributor to take your book on which is the publisher’s job and then the distributor’s job is to get the book stores to take it on and actually stock it on their shelves and to order the copies in so yeah there’s quite a lot of hoops to jump through and a lot of people who need to agree it’s a good idea.

Orren: So did the bookstores add any significant version to your pre-sales?

Miriam: Not a single one because the bookstores don’t get my book until after it’s printed.

Orren: And you didn’t print until you got your pre-sale threshold.

Miriam: Correct, I wanted to know that I had met my target which is 5,000 pre-sales which in Australia, I think even globally best seller is a little bit, it’s up to your publisher and they’re sort of accepted numbers of what it should be. For example New York’s Times Best Seller list I think is the strictest, you know it has to be through certain outlets and so son but in Australia some people will slap a best-seller label on a book that has just had a really good day on Amazon in the kindle version and the publisher will still slap a best seller sticker on it. So it’s not very strictly guided but the most common one is 5,000 hard copies is the Australian is the most commonly accepted standard. So that’s the one I guided myself by and that’s the one my publisher said at that point I’m happy to put a best-selling sticker on your book because obviously that gets printed like that.

Orren: 5, 000 is decent number as well.

Miriam: It’s quite a lot of books as I found out it takes a lot of phone calls to sell 5, 000 books. So then the bookstores only gets the books after its gone to print and then really it’s up to no publisher anywhere in the world really market books per say I mean they have PR Departments and so on but they have a whole lot of books and authors that they need to move so it’s really still up to the author to market themselves. So I actually know a lot of the local bookstores in Adelaide, you know I know the owners quite well and I’d go in and out of there and what I actually do which is a good little trick I learnt is I just go in and autograph whichever books they have because then they actually put a sign by the author sticker on it and place it near the counter or face up on the shelf rather than just side on. So it’s all these little extra tricks.

Orren: Interesting. You mentioned quite a few things I just want to go back and get some clarity on. One of them was around the pre-sales. How did you track those was it through purchase orders and what evidence did you want to show your publisher that you’d hit that mark?

Miriam: Yes so I did have to have purchase orders and invoice, tax invoices for those and I had to cc them into a lot of emails so that it wasn’t just me stock piling books in my garage which I heard some amazing stories of authors doing that and bind their own books to make them go best-seller and the selling them afterwards and actually going best seller. There’s all sorts of stories out there but yeah I did I had to have the purchase orders, the tax invoices and confirmation emails and all the rest of it.

Orren: Right. How did the conversation go of pre-selling when you didn’t have a physical product – it was just an idea?

Miriam: That was something I had to get my head around or I’ trying to sell something that I don’t actually have yet. So I have in hind sight thought you know what it wouldn’t be a bad strategy to do a small local print run of just 100 or so books and actually post them out to these people with your proposal and then follow up with the phone calls and so on actually if I did it again and should I decide after all to write another book I think I’d actually go that way because it gets their attention. So I had to do an email and phone call and I had a very slick looking PDF, you know that put the proposal for them but what really helped is obviously I had my cover design already so they got to see a 3-D mock-up of what the book would look like. I had the contents, I had a sample chapter, the fact that I had a publishing deal and that my publisher has a 100% strike rate with distribution pick up and we make it quite clear that our target is not to go to print unless we have the best-seller target met and that the opportunity is that by pre-purchasing we can obviously with a bigger print run the cost goes down and presales or obviously wholesale as well so that made the cost of it cheaper so that allowed us to then package it up with other value ads for them so they; the book was basically a marketing tool for them who are reaching the same audiences as my book reaches. So it was just about putting a really clear proposal together that showed the value in it and why free ordering is the only way you could achieve that but yes in hind sight you can small print runs done locally they’re very expensive obviously but it would have probably shortened my time frame and meant that I talked to a few more people who maybe didn’t want to respond or be interested in an email and a phone call.

Orren: Sure. In contacting these corporates who are you initially targeting within those partners and how did the initial contact go: Was it a phone call? Was it an email? How did you navigate that?

Miriam: So I spent a bit of time just researching who has the same target market which is busy women experiencing overwhelm who might be just starting a business. So there was a bit of research into who’s actually advertising to this demographic and then the obvious ones like women’s networking groups that kind of thing and also home-based business groups you know with the network marketing industry they’re always huge on personal development and they tend to have a lot of women within their ranks. I think it’s a really heavily female dominated area. So I identified all those groups and obviously put my proposal together and had a few different options on how we could work together and then I called them all, found out who is the right person to speak to was said I’d be sending an email, this is who I am, this is what this is about, I am sending you an email and I’ll follow up in a couple of days. So I really had to come out of my comfort zone and go into kind of direct selling mode. So it was a phone call to find out who was the right person to speak to was, send them an email with the proposal, follow up with a phone call and follow up often enough without making a nuisance of myself to be sure that they had gotten the message and knew what it was all about and I believe they were ‘Yeah that’s great’ and a lot of people were really enthusiastic and the wheels fell off a couple unfortunately because there were really big businesses with so much bureaucracy to jump through and it just doesn’t work out I had a few disappointments and then others would say “Yeah great, let’s do it ” and a few were like ” Go away who are you”. It’s sales but it’s how I decided to do it and meanwhile I had the blog readership who knew the book was on its way and they were really encouraging and supportive and they were grabbing some pre-sale orders as well so that was really nice positive re-enforcement that I was on the right track.

Orren: How much cold-selling have you done previous to this exercise?

Miriam: Pretty much none to be honest. I’m just trying to think no , cold calling is something I hate, I’m really uncomfortable with it and even when I built the business in the finance area , you know there’s opportunities where you can make cold calls or luke warm calls I guess to people and for example people will approach business owners in the area and say let me do a review of you or your business lending but I still never did it I always relied on the people I knew who trusted me and knew how I operated to give me a go and then recommend me and that’s how I built my business in the past. It was always very much on trust and recommendation and excellent service. So with this I had to really go out of my comfort zone but what I actually found is when I look back on the pre-sales I did do most of them were somehow by I spoke to every man and his dog about it and let them know what I was doing. It was often by referral, recommendation; hey Miriam’s writing this book and so you can kind of follow that train and that’s how a lot of the sales actually ended up coming about but I still made lots and lots of cold calls and I think what got me over the fear of it is that I really believed in my product and I really believed that kind of offerings we put together to work with all these corporates were just a no brainer for them. They were already spending money advertising and trying to get this demographic on board and I actually had a really great product that added great value where I could help with workshops as part of it and so on. So there was just so much value in it that it was just a no-brainer and what helped me get over it straight away was the belief in what I had to sell.

Orren: Yeah great. And do you think you can break down the percentage between individual consumers who bought pre-sale or partners that bought pre-sale?

Miriam: I would say that about 20% were individuals. So people who knew of me had been reading my blogs, followed me on Facebook that kind of thing and then larger corporate was actually probably only about another 20% then a lot of women’s networking groups, women’s business groups, you know that kind of area where they’re all about supporting and encouraging women, that was a really huge part of it – that was probably 40 -50% and the rest was just smaller businesses, various different ways.

Orren: Great you mentioned previously that one of the stats that you’re monitoring during this presale period were the amount of phone calls that you’re making. I imagine that the amount of pre-sale that you also make was another stat that you were monitoring. Was there anything else that was a big thing that you just said If I put my finger on this pulse this is gonna give me an indication of where I’m going?

Miriam: In terms of my pre-sales no, I really I made a list which was a really exhaustive list also I’m not going to sell to people that have nothing to benefit from here and who aren’t a good fit and who don’t fit with my demographic so I made a really exhaustive list and  it was really just about working through it and doing the best I could with it and because I didn’t have to go best-seller we’ve gotten to the end of the list and I hadn’t made my target well I would have just gotten to print without it so there wasn’t really another step it was really just a factor of okay we’ve got whatever 200 names on the list and I really want to get this job in 2 months  and it end up being 4 months and it was just this is the list and a few sort persons let to that person but I did my research first and then made my list and then just work through it.

Orren: One of the other things that I’ve noticed is that you spend a lot of personal time pre-selling the book and getting through the process. Were there any financial resources that you also invested in it or was that something that you said no I’m not gonna invest any capital in this process?

Miriam: The only capital I invested was that I chose to buy the rights to my book which you still have to because normally with a traditional publishing contract like I said they pay you as the author but they own the rights and you are quite limited in what you can and can’t do with your book. So I chose to invest in that and by that my rights out front because I didn’t want any nasty surprises but other than that no I kept it very much on a shoe string you know I built a word press blog myself, I didn’t spend money on advertising or marketing it was really, really organic and just making sure my message resonated and the people would pass it on because I think at the end of the day I’m wanting to build a business on the back of it which will be largely based online it’s the nature of our world and so if people don’t resonate with your message and do the marketing for you it’s not going to work so I purposely chose not to.

Orren: That’s a great segue. How did you or how will you in the future capitalize on the book’s success of the 5,000 pre-sales? Are you gonna build on tour existing fan base? Are you gonna launch new products or are you just gonna stick to your events, speaking, consulting?

Miriam: Okay so one of the main reasons I wanted to okay write the book was as a positioning tool but also as a lovely summary where you could just give somebody that and go here read that and you’ll know what I’m all about and  now it’s really a matter of building on that so I’m still in the process of developing workshops and programs around it and its quite funny I’m entrepreneurial so I come up with lots of great ideas and go off on tangents and I’ve spent a lot of this year just working out exactly what does my business look like, what will I do, what won’t I do because I started doing lots of different things and got a little diluted for a while and I’ve come back full circle and gone okay so I’m going to have this program, that program, that program, it will be offered in different formats; online, in person that kind of thing but it all comes back to the message of my book. The book’s a great positioning tool; it’s great to say you’re an author. It’s actually even better to say hey my book’s not a PDF it’s actually a hardcopy and by the way you can walk into any major chain and buy it. So it’s a great authority tool for that it gives you that credibility which is really important if you want to get a bit of cut through and it’s a lovely little upsell or lovely little cheap intro to what I do and when I am running a workshop. So the book is kind of the central piece of my business I guess.

Orren: Great, one thing you mentioned was doing a small run for some of those partners when you’re pre-selling. What other takeaways or lessons learned would you do differently next time besides that?

Miriam: Okay so yeah that’s a really big one of you’re doing the pre-sales I think doing a small print run that is a small investment that I should have made absolutely. It would have made life so much easier. I think the other thing I thought I was clear on the business I wanted to build on the back of the book but in hindsight I wasn’t as clear as I needed to be because I got really side tracked on writing the book, getting it to print, marketing the book, getting it out in the stores, making sure people knew it was there and really its very rare as an author to be able to make a living just out of selling books you know you have to kind of be a J.K Rowling to get to that level so most authors earn their income on the back of the book, on the things they do on the back of the books. So I have literally spent the best part of this year just working out exactly what that will look like. So I wish I had designed that a little bit better up front; that’s a really big takeaway. I’m not sure if this is a takeaway as much but I think we all have the voice in our head that says “are you sure you can do this and does anybody care and are you good enough?” You really need to get over that very, very quickly and just talk about what you’re doing everywhere you go especially with a book and make sure you always have it with you because people are so busy and they have their own stuff going on and really none is gonna care about your book that much so you better care about your book and about the message that it offers and what it is you have to offer on the back of it and really, really clear about it, you really can’t be shy about it and writing a book and publishing it is the biggest personal development journey I have ever been on because you’re really putting yourself out there publicly for everyone to read, criticize, comment on so as much personal development that I’ve done in the past this eclipse everything.

Orren: And was it a positive experience?

Miriam: Oh huge yeah, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done and just looking back when I started the journey 2 or more years ago to where I am now as a person and as the belief I have in myself and what I’m capable of and what I stand for it’s just huge you know everybody should write a book and get it out there just for that even if they don’t want to do anything else with it, it’s just been incredible.

Orren: Just talk a little bit more about some of those lessons learned around the backend business model and the things that you thought were gonna work that didn’t necessarily pan out.

Miriam: I think that the way I approached writing my book where I started really gently finding my voice, finding who it resonated with and then it has to be a fit too when you’re writing between what’s genuine and authentic about you and how you feel to have people tap into it and relate to it. So you really do have to find your audience and your little tribe so that it’s a two-way street and so that’s how I went about writing my book and I have never had a negative comment about my book. I’ve had nothing but glowing remarks and saying you know it’s changing my life and its changing how I think about things and thank you so much which is incredible. It just blows me away anytime someone says that and I think it’s due to the fact that I really made sure that my message was resonating and hitting the right spots. So going back to your question about the business, what I initially did with my business is I thought great I know what people need, which was a mistake you should never assume; I know what people need and so what I’m going to offer them is addressing all these things that I’m touching on in my book in 12 month mentoring program. It turns out not a lot of people want to commit to a 12 month mentoring program. So I went way too big way too quickly because I assumed that people were where I am. Looking back I wish I’d just worked with someone for 12 months and covered all these different areas of my life that would have, that year spent focusing on all of that would have just made such a difference. Hindsight is not a way to plan a business and it’s not a way to approach your customer. Your customer needs to grow, you need to allow them to grow with you so yeah that’s a big learning that I did so now I’ve gone back to actually doing the opposite taking the pressure right off my customer and letting them pick and choose how they want to work with me and then to progressively grow as they wish and I’m really big on transparency you know like this is everything you can do with me but you can pick and choose. So I have a bit of bug bear about how a lot  of the personal development industry in particular operates and I talk about people being shoved down a sales funnel and being made to feel bad if they don’t go to the next step then the next step, “oh you’ll miss out and you’ll never achieve your goals”. Do you want to back yourself and I hate those sorts of messages, it’s the opposite to what I say. So I’m the opposite I can give people all the information and say this is my top selling most expensive thing you can possibly do with me but you don’t have to do that if you’re not ready. If one day you chose great, but meanwhile would you like a $10 little effectiveness tool that I built? So I give people all the information up front and allow them to pick and choose their own ways through it.

Orren: So what’s the most popular product that you’re offering that customers are utilizing?

Miriam: Its really interesting because when people feel overwhelmed they usually just want to make that go away and they want to work out how to get more done in less time and so I’ve developed a tool called The Effectiveness Quotient and it just allow you to assess everything you have to do and then the value of each item in the scheme of your work or your life, depending which area you using it on and how much time you’re actually spending on it. So it’s a bit of a blend of Pareto’s analysis and Parkinson’s Law and a few other things and I kind of just put it together and I started using for myself and I thought okay if I made this a little more slick people can use it themselves. So most people gravitate towards that because they want to know how to get more done in less time and they think that that will be the salvation but I allow them to go there except that it comes with a little guide lets them know that I really you know yes this will take the pressure off you but you will end up in a vicious cycle if this is all you ever do. if you never get clear on why you’re actually bothering to do any of this stuff in the first place you will just keep filling up the time you freed up with more stuff to do to keep busy because that’s your habit and that’s the patent you’re on. So that’s the one that sells the most. It’s not actually the one I want to sell the most so it comes back to not making the choice for your customer but just allowing them to be where they’re at, at a particular point in time and not judging it or trying to force it to be what it’s not.

Orren: Then where do they move to from there, what style of product?

Miriam: From there they’ll do a workshop and I haven’t launched it yet but I’m developing an online course but with a big difference being that they will still get the personal contact. So what I’ve actually been doing is just coaching one on one just to referring my process and all the different tools that I offer people and take them through but I’m a really big believer in one size never fits all so I’m now wanting to launch that as an online program but still with that personalization so everybody still will get one time and then feedback and then a guide as to okay we’re going to go through this program and you know you’ll be bombarded with 25 different tools and techniques but really these 5 are the ones for where you’re at right now and what you need these are the 5 I really want you to focus on and this is how I want you to use them and the rest you just park them for future reference or do the program again when you’re ready and you you’ll get that personalized instruction again on how to make them work so I sort of spent a lot of time where I’m working out a model where people can get that personal contact which I think we’re so lacking in thins online world and still complete the program and be able to access it at their own when convenience so we have this world of convenience where everything is delivered online but the truth of it is a lot of people pay for stuff that they never even do.

Orren: Sure.

Miriam: And that’s a waste. So I’ve been mainly coaching one on one and I have just started some group coaching in person so I have brought a program back from the US which is Mike Dooley’s Infinite Possibilities Program and so I’ve just been over in the US studying with him and becoming a certified trainer and it just plugs in really perfectly with my book and the messages within it so teaching that as a group program and there’ll be some one day intensives and so on but it will also become an online version. So people can pick and choose how they want to take the content.

Orren: I want to change tangent just slightly. You mentioned in the conversation about the audio book version. Where did that come into play?

Miriam: Okay so I had always intended to do an audio book because particularly with personal development, it’s really great to be able to play stuff in the car but also interestingly I’ve had a lot of people say ” look I’m dyslexic and I really need the audio book which I actually hadn’t considered so a lot of people will gravitate towards that and for the kind of learning, the material that I’m covering it’s great to have it in the car and be able to play it over and over again because each time you listen to it you’re in a different place and you will hear something you didn’t hear the previous time. So I had always intended to do it and basically I waited until the final draft of the book was all signed off and I had to lock myself away for hours and hours and painstaking hours at a time.

Orren: And you did the recording. Did you also do the editing of that recording?

Miriam: God no. The recording itself is really challenging I thought it was really important that it was me reading the book rather than having a narrator and I thought how hard can it be? Well you don’t until you actually have to read a whole chapter a book and try not to hear yourself swallowing in the middle of it or have a car drive pass. So I recorded it all in my home. I found the quietest room in the house I could and got a really high quality microphone that they use on radio stations and so on but it picks up everything. So I remember one time I had read a whole chapter and I learned after a while to only do it in small chunks so that you could read a few paragraphs, stop then read the next few paragraphs and stop so that if you made a mistake you dint have to do the whole thing again. So it was a huge learning curve and I think that took twice as long as writing the actual book. But I do remember one time where this was before I learned to break it down into smaller chunks and I’d gotten towards the end of a longish chapter and my husband flushed the toilet and I never realized how loud our plumbing was until that moment. So yes, the audio book was a long and challenging process but a really good way to get familiar with my material because I had to read it over and over and over again and then I had somebody edit it all together and put a outro and intro to each chapter and make it all lovely and sexy for me the sent it off somewhere else to have it burnt to CD and have the cover made which had to obviously match the book cover and so on. So it’s another whole product and another whole process.

Orren: And that’s a physical product that you now distribute as well?

Miriam: Yes, it is actually we don’t even have it available as the download maybe I should do that in my spare time.

Orren: There you go but it is in physical product right now.

Miriam: Yes it is. It’s a 6 CD set.

Orren: And how long is that CD set?

Miriam: I think each CD is about 30 minutes or so.

Orren: So that’s just over 3 hours’ worth?

Miriam: Yeah. My book is not particularly long. In fact there is an optimal size for a book which is about 40, 000 words and that’s about 200 pages and if you look at studies done people don’t tend to recommend a book they don’t finish because they feel a sense of failure and 200 pages, 40, 000 words is about what most people can get through without losing interest or being life dragging them off the track so I was really mindful to keep my book to that length and I think mine ended up being 46, 000 words or something like that. But it just means that really the book is very succinct and it’s laid out for easy reading with lots of spacing and so on. So that was a really big part of the whole project making sure that the type setting made it really digestible because what actually happens when somebody walks into a bookstore is you have 7 seconds for them to look at your front cover and decide that they want to pick it up off the shelf. Then you have 14 seconds while they read the back cover where you have to have some bullet points on the key messages from the book and they may or may not open it and actually flick through it before they take it to the counter and buy it. And if they do flick through it to open it it’s actually not necessarily about reading it but does this look like something I can get through.

Orren: Right, that’s where the type setting comes in.

Miriam: And that’s where the type setting comes in. So that’s a really big part of the process and so what it means is that my book is quite succinct, it has a lot of takeaway bullet points at the end of each chapter so I have action cheats at the end of each chapter because I want people to be able to just flick back through it and just go straight to the cracks of what was that chapter about and go away and action it and going deeper into it they get to do in my workshop some programs.

Orren: I understand. So to wrap this up under what circumstances should someone try to write and sell a book and under what circumstances do you think they just publish or even attempt?

Miriam: Well I’m in the how to space so I’ll only take to that I will leave fiction out of it but I think really anyone who has any kind of business should consider writing a book. It makes you get really clear on your message, on your point of difference and it’s a really great positioning tool for your clients. So for example I’ve seen people do really well who have a therapy practice and decided to put a book out on their particular approach to physiotherapy. It can be almost any industry and a book can be a really great way to condense your message for you to get really clear on it because if you’re not clear on it you’ll never be able to translate it across to anyone else and as a lovely introduction and positioning tool with your customers. So I think anyone in business should definitely consider writing it. If you’re somebody who doesn’t commit to completing a project, don’t do it. But I think anyone in business whose managing to stay in business knows that they have to make a commitment if they start any major project and they have to finish it. But it’s not as quick and simple a process as people might think it is but I think it’s still very much a process worth going through and in terms of self-publishing versus traditional publishing looking back I think maybe I was a little bit too ego driven in that like no I want the bookstore, because most people don’t actually care and most people don’t even notice the best-seller sticker on my book. So it was really important to me and then after a while they might notice it and I have to mention it to kind of give it that little bit of extra credibility but a lot of people don’t care all that much. I think there’s nothing wrong in actually writing a book, producing it really well and doing a small print run so that you can give it as a giveaway to your customers or as a marketing tool to your business partners. There’s nothing wrong with that but you want to make sure if you do that you get professionals from the industry to help you with your type setting and your layout because if it’s badly done it just looks wrong. If you’ve ever picked up a published book where it just looks so cheap and nasty and something it doesn’t sit right, it’s because the layout is completely wrong and there are really standard ways that books should be laid out and certain ways the pages should be numbered and placed and what should appear on this page and on the left side versus the right side and it’s just one of these subliminal things that we don’t realize we know it but we’ve seen so many books so we know what a book should look like and so when it doesn’t look right it just look off. So there’s nothing worse than putting a, I’m really big on quality so that was really important to me. Sorry that was a very long answer to your question Orren but in answer to the second part of your question “Who shouldn’t write a book” somebody who can’t commit to completing something.

Orren: And someone that falls in the former category what are the 1-3 potential next action steps that they should take if they want to start this journey regardless if they succeed or not?

Miriam: I think the answer is a little bit what my book teaches people which is number 1 start with ‘why’. Why I’m a huge fan of Simon Sinek so you’re probably familiar with his TED talk on Start With Why but I’ve sort of used to hybrid version of the in what I teach though. If you don’t know why you’re doing it in the first place don’t even bother. SO you need to get really clear on why do you want to write a book what’s it going to do for you? Is it going to help your business? Is it going to allow you to grow your existing business, tap into new markets, get really, really clear on why you want to write that book.

Number 2 – Get your head space right because it does take you by surprise as to how many self- limiting beliefs you’re going to bump into on the journey so make sure you really believe in what you do and you’re passionate about it and you know your stuff and you’ve got that complete and utter self-belief and then really decide at what level you want to do it. So do you want to do just a small cheap print run and just use it as a bit of a value add you know maybe as a free giveaway to your customers or something like that? Do you want to go larger scale? Do you want to go global with it? And I think the bigger scale you want to go to the more important it’s gonna be to go down a more traditional, having a publishing control it making sure it is s top quality product. So the level that you want to get to will determine the route of the book publishing that you’ll chose.

Orren: That’s great advice.

Miriam: Thank you I’m glad you think so.

Orren: No I absolutely do. Where can people find out more about you and how can people get in contact?

Miriam: and the easiest way to find out more about me is to jump on my blog which is at miriamcastilla dom com so just www dot miriamcastilla dot com and I’m also of Facebook and on YouTube. I try to publish just a weekly, just a pit stop video, I call them, which is just a two minute quick and it’s just really whatever is going on in my head at the time that I decide is worth sharing so that always come across well and then my actual business is called “Today’s Woman Events” and that’s where I distribute all my workshops and programs. So that’s at www dot todays woman events dot com.

Orren: Awesome, thank you very much for making time and congratulations on your success.

Miriam: Thank you so much Orren it’s been absolute pleasure talking with you.