Here’s a riddle for ya.
Question: How long does it take a marketer to write a book manuscript?
Answer: Too long! (geddit? All kinds of puns in there)
In actuality, it’s taken me 5 months and 3 weeks.
(Not counting the years of wanting to and feeling imposter syndrome – about 4 years + the months of planning and drafting outlines before actually writing – about 6 more months)
So that’s a grand total of 5 years.
It’s taken this marketer 5 years to write a book 🙋♀️
But first.
Thanks for staying with me for 5 months and 3 weeks of learning about ‘The Other EQ’ – Entertainment Quotient and why it matters in your marketing.
Over the past 25 columns we have…
- Explored 12 important lessons for entertaining in your marketing
- Covered over 150 examples of content that cuts clutter and made people smile
- We’ve dissected 10+ entertaining content plays, pulled by giants in B2C, that B2B can easily (and way more cheaply) pull off
- Explored various literary tools for storytelling like metaphors, analogies, dark humour, and more
- And we’ve looked at 5 frameworks for building a practice of showing up in the 2-dimensional world with more personality and authority
Truly, thank you for staying with me.
The open rates for this email column have averaged over a 40%.
Which is pretty dang good in 2021!
(Swift tangent: anything over 30 is very good; anything below 10 is very bad. Unsubscribe rates of over 4% should have you worrying. That’s email stats in a nutshell)
Why was I fanatical about an email marketing schedule 🤷♀️
I kept a deadline (one more to add to our client deadlines and our own publishing schedule which is already prerry intense. I kept at it, every-Monday-for-25-weeks kinda kept at it!!
Why?
Because my book depended on it.
Here’s the back story of the book writing process
In October of 2020, we started to put together an end of year report. Each year instead of a ‘XX trends for the following year’ piece, we used to create a more detailed report on an aspect of marketing that would be most important to learn.
At the end of 2017, our report was about marketers using Kanban online as for agile project management.
At the end of 2018, our report was about the need to update your communication to a much more ‘woke’ world.
At the end of 2019, our report was about embracing podcasting, because the second podcasting gold rush was coming.
In 2020, true to form, we got started and the topic emerged as the need for less boring content if you had any hope at all of cutting the deep clutter.
From it came the idea of ‘entertainment quotient’.
We started, as we advised EVERY SINGLE CLIENT EVER to do, by auditing what we had.
We ran through moments that stood out as being particularly entertaining from our roster of over 75 podcast episodes at the time (brag alert, we have 131 now!)
There were a lot.
Then our writers systematically combed through episodes to create an outline/brain dump of all the fun ideas.
By this point it became pretty clear that the subject at hand and the amount of pattern we’d uncovered in just our content and the content of our client portfolios that this body of work was WAY larger than a report.
Dare we really lean into this and make it a book, I asked.
And the answer was yes.
It needed a lot more research for sure.
And it needed a clear narrative.
But most importantly, it needed testing.
- Would people read it?
- Would people keep reading the column beyond the first couple?
- Will people engage/respond/offer feedback or even just validation?
- Will a majority of those who read it, open more than 10 of the 25 columns I set out to write?
- Will at least 1 person open their purse and put $10 into helping fund the self publishing of the book?
Those were the 5 questions I set out to answer.
Accountability is a strong motivator for me.
If I say I’ll do something every Monday for 25 weeks, there’s a good chance I will.
So that became my strategy.
I’d do my manuscript writing in public, I said.
25 columns (which you’ve read)
+
9 stream of consciousness narratives imagining the headspace of some of the coolest creators of our time that B2B can draw from (only in the book)
+
lots and lots of examples and visuals (this is even an audio visual book in so much as you want to veer down the rabbit hole)
+
frameworks, templates and resources
And I did.
I’m done!
Consistently showing up doth a manuscript make.
Next week I step away from my office to go organize the lot to ship off to be magicked into an actual real book. I’m taking 2 whole days away for it.
And hopefully we’ll still make the late November deadline for print.
I hope you will buy it when it come out! But more on that later.
So today my message for you is 2-fold!
- Thank you. You should know you’re awesome if you opened this and read this far.
- If you have a book on your mind, get it done by editing your current body of work, and committing to writing in public for 25 weeks – whatever that might look like for you. For me it was an email lead (it can also be something like Medium).
That’s it.
May the week treat you kindly
Peace
Susan
Ps: from next week I’ll continue the Monday writing series with a back-to-basic coaching and framework series covering websites, writing, podcasting. It’ll be titled “Un-Pumpkin Spice” and run 3 months. Read on? It’ll be worth it. I promise.