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13 Things to Do or Not to Do When Connecting With Me for the First Time

There used to be a certain etiquette to asking people to connect on LinkedIn. Salespeople trying to sell. Marketers trying to market. Writers who want to get advice from other writers. You asked permission before you did anything. You made connections with people and developed relationships.

But not anymore. Now, everything is just so blatantly commercial and everyone is asking for something without ever offering anything in return.

Social media has made us lazy, AI is making it even worse. And I’m done with it. If you want to connect with me, follow these 13 steps.

7 Things Not to Do When Connecting With Me for the First Time

  1. Don’t misspell my name. I’ve been alive for five decades, and I’ve been hammered with the wrong spelling for all five. You will not endear yourself to me, and this almost guarantees I won’t respond.
  2. Don’t ask me for a meeting to discuss your product. Is this really the first thing you ask your prospects? I don’t even know you. Do you ask people you just met for a date? Did you propose to your spouse on the first date? Why is your first ever email to me an invitation to hear about a product I don’t even know if I want? Nurture the relationships before you try to close anything.
  3. Don’t ask me to pick my brain for free. I believe in helping people and sharing knowledge, but meeting with you takes time. I won’t charge you my hourly rate, but at least offer to buy lunch. Having said that, I would LOVE to meet with you and teach you, so please ask. But I’m getting a cheeseburger. With bacon.
  4. Don’t ask for strategies or campaigns. That falls under consulting, and that gets my hourly rate. ($150/hour, 2 hour minimum.) But if we’re friends, I might let things slip and accidentally give you some advice. Over lunch.
  5. Don’t ask me to read over your stuff right off the bat. I will be happy to later. Later. My TBR pile is so big, it has filled three bookcases. I read 72 books per year, and I have way more than 72 books. When I feel emotionally invested in our relationship, I will be EAGER to read your stuff. If you just ask me first thing, it’s going to the bottom of the third bookcase.
  6. Don’t not read my bio. I’m a professional writer and a content marketer. I get paid to write books and do content marketing campaigns. You’d be amazed at the number of people who offer to write a book for me or want to sell me their generative AI services. That’s like selling self-driving cars to chauffeurs.
  7. Use an AI bot to connect with me. There are Chrome plugins that will send the same formulaic emails. I can spot those. I will absolutely refuse to connect with you at all if that’s what you’re doing. You literally have the easiest job in the world: You sit at a computer and move your fingers. Don’t get lazier at that.

6 Things to Do When Connecting With Me for the First Time

  1. Do some basic research beyond my LinkedIn profile. I’ve written several books and numerous articles. Want to catch my attention? Show me that you read them. Better yet, send me a photo of you holding one of my books. You immediately go to the front of the line on everything.
  2. Have a conversation with me. Leave comments on my blog or on my LinkedIn posts. Several comments, not just one-and-done. Show me that you’re paying attention and get on my radar. I’ll notice it and think, “Hmm, that person might be worth talking to.”
  3. Share something about yourself. I like building relationships. I don’t buy from businesses, I buy from people I like. If your very first communication with me is a pitch, I will not be interested. But when friends ask me to help, I may not buy, but I’ll make introductions and referrals.
  4. Add value to our relationship. The thing you sell does not add value, YOU do. Share an article you wrote. Recommend a book or a restaurant. Post a link to a band or a song you think I’d like. Tell me a story about something cool or funny you did.
  5. Read my blogs (like my work blog or my humor blog) A lot of writing and content marketing advice you want help with is probably on my work blog. It’s not that I don’t want to give you the advice, but rather, I wrote the articles because I kept answering the same questions. Read them, and then we’ll talk. Over lunch.
  6. Ask real questions that you would ask someone if you met in person. Again, I believe in relationships. Start a relationship with me. If you were at a networking event, you wouldn’t ask someone you just met for a sales meeting as the very first question, right? You’d make small talk and get to know that person. Make small talk! Ask questions. Not the pre-programmed AI-generated questions you asked the LinkedIn bots to ask. Try to find out things about me, and base those questions on the research you did.

Marketing is hard — well, not that hard. You could be an ironmonger — and it’s being done poorly by people who are looking for shortcuts to avoid the hard work. AI is only making it worse.

Stop looking for shortcuts, stop relying on AI, and start making connections. If you want to connect with me, do it with an eye toward developing a relationship, not booking a sales call with me on your very first communication with me. That’s never going to happen.

Photo credit: Jrouse5 (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 4.0)
Photo credit: The Carol M. Highsmith collection, Library of Congress

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Conduct Informational Interviews to Land Your Next Job

One of my favorite podcasts is Jeff Pearlman’s Two Writers Slinging Yang, a podcast about writing and journalism. Jeff also writes a Substack called The Yang Slinger.

Sorry I didn’t upgrade to the paid version, Jeff.

In it, he usually dives deep into a particular question or issue he’s wrestling with, getting input from his friends and former colleagues in the sportswriting biz.

This week, he wasn’t wrestling with an issue so much as he was looking for help from those same colleagues. (Read it here.) He asked:

This week’s substack topic is a doozie: a friend of mine, just 23 (former student of mine, actually) just got laid off. He called asking me for advice … and I’m honestly running out of answers. So I’m collecting advice for this week’s substack. What would YOU tell him?

Although Jeff didn’t ask for my advice, I’m going to give it, mostly because I like to hear myself talk. It’s the same advice I have given to aspiring entrepreneurs, college students, and job seekers for the last 14 years. I’ve written about it elsewhere in the past, but I think it’s time I plant this flag on my own blog.

Here goes:

The power of Informational Interviews

If you’re looking for a job, stop looking on the job boards. Frankly, the job boards suck. They are literally bad at what they do.

That’s because roughly 85% of jobs come through networking, although 50% of all job applications come through the job boards.

That means 15% of all jobs are filled through job boards. If you batted .150 in baseball, you would have a very short career.

The rest of the jobs — the EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT — come from professional connections.

  • You meet someone at a conference.
  • A friend tells you about an opening at their company.
  • Your old boss or colleague calls you from their new company.
  • A friend of a friend of a friend introduces you to someone they know.
  • You had coffee or lunch with someone in the same profession.

It’s these last two that we’re going to focus on. You’re going to interview your way to your next job, and you’re going to do it by having coffee with someone and then with someone else, and then they’ll introduce you to someone else, and on and on.

I learned this from a friend who used this tactic in the 1980s after he moved to Indianapolis from New York. Within three months of informational interviews, he had three job offers and requests for 40 hours/week of freelance work.*

* This is notable because most freelancers usually only hope to work 20 hours a week; the other 20 hours are spent chasing up more work. So set your prices according to a 1,000 hour work year. (Your salary needs ÷ 1,000 = your hourly rate.)

And I’ve used it many times myself, as well as told other people about it. This advice has helped get people job interviews, internships, and brand-new jobs that they never heard about because they never showed up on any job boards.

That’s because 70% of all jobs are never published publicly.

Your job is not to apply for jobs.

Fourteen years ago, I spoke to a job seekers’ support group about informational interviews. Many of them had been searching for a job for many months without luck.

After my talk, one guy stood up and proudly declared, “My current job is to find my next job. I spend 8 hours a day applying on the job boards.” He even seemed a little smug about it.

I did that in 2005 and it was soul killing. After one week of spending four hours a day on the job boards, I was so damn depressed I could barely get out of bed. But the guy was undeterred. He wasn’t going to let the world get him down, he was going to apply and apply and apply.

A year later, I was asked to come back and give the same talk.

You’ll never guess who was still attending the weekly meetings.

When you lose your job, our temptation is to hit the job boards, like our parents, teachers, and guidance counselors all told us to do.

But it’s all bullshit. I mean, sure you can do the job application jitterbug, but the odds are stacked against you.

Our world has changed so much. We communicate differently, we connect differently, we consume media differently, we learn differently. So why the hell would we look jobs the way our parents and grandparents did?

If you’re going to take that path, you might as well apprentice yourself out to a blacksmith or cobbler.

Here’s how to do informational interviews

An old coffee shop in Central Florida that is no longer in existence.

(First, let me apologize for taking so long to get here. I did not mean to pull that same recipe website bullshit, writing a 4,000-word murder mystery before sharing their Memaw’s tomato sandwich recipe. I’m very sorry!)

So here’s how you do informational interviews.

Step 1: Reach out to someone in your industry, field, or company you want to work for.

Ask them to meet you for coffee or lunch because you want to learn more about their career and how they got there. A Zoom call or phone call will also work.

There is a very good chance these people will want to talk to you because they want to talk about themselves.

If you were to call them and ask about a possible job, I can almost guarantee they will not talk to you.

If you asked if you could do some freelance work for them, they probably won’t want to talk to you.

But if you say, “Can you talk about yourself for an hour and I’ll totally listen to everything you say?” they will scramble to meet you because everyone loves to talk about themselves.

Step 2: Ask them questions.

What did they major in? How did they get their first job? What do they like about it? What do they dislike?

Let them do all the talking. You can intersperse little comments like, “Oh, I hate that, too,” or “I did that once.” But this is not your time to do a lot of talking; this is not your interview, it’s theirs.

If they ask you questions, you can answer. But make sure they do most of the talking.

There’s an old adage that the more someone else talks, the smarter you look. So you want to come away from this looking like a genius.

Step 3: Mute your phone!

And put it in your pocket.

Don’t turn it off because you may need to share something with your interviewee. But don’t keep it out where it can be a distraction. And never, ever take a call.

Step 4: Take careful notes.

Get a notebook and a good pen and take as many notes as you can. Make this your interview notebook and fill it up with people’s great advice, ideas, and stories.

Even if you never look at your notebook again, this makes you look like you’re listening and that this is so important, you don’t want to forget it.

Now, you not only look like a genius, you look like a good listener.

Step 5: When it’s all over, ask these two critical questions.

This is the really important part, so pay attention!

When you’re nearly finished, ask them two questions:

  1. Do you know anyone else I should talk to?
  2. Great, can you introduce me to them?

Because you’ve been such a good listener and you seem really smart, they’re going to be happy to introduce you to other people. They’ll say, “Yes, you should talk to my friend, Danielle.”

And then you’re going to ask them to do an email introduction between you and Danielle. (Click here to see how to do a proper email introduction between two people.)

Do NOT let them say, “Just tell Danielle I told you to contact her.”

Because Danielle is not necessarily convinced that your new friend really did tell you to contact her. You could be lying. This could be a trick. Maybe you’re just dropping the friend’s name in the hopes that you can meet with her.

You want to avoid even the slightest appearance of that, which is why you need their introduction.

Step 6: You follow-up first.

Don’t wait for Danielle (or whomever) to contact you first. Once you get that email introduction, follow up with Danielle. Ask them the same questions — “I wanted to learn more about you and your career. Can we meet for coffee?” — and go through the same process: listening, note taking, two critical questions.

Your meeting with Danielle will lead to a meeting with Rosario, which will lead to one with Curt, which will lead to one with Javier, and so on and so on.

Maybe you’ll get lucky and one of them will make two introductions, and now you’ve doubled your productivity.

Along the way, something will happen. Someone will know someone with a job opening. Or they’ll be looking for someone who does what you do. Or they’ll put your résumé on the hiring manager’s desk.

Whatever it is, you will have networked your way into a new job without filling out a single application. You’ll have avoided the job boards, skipped the HR gantlet, or put up with the months of rejections that comes with slogging it out on the job boards and classified ads like our parents and grandparents.

GIVE informational interviews, too

One day, many years from now, you’re going to be sitting at your desk and your email is going to ping (or your intra-cranial implant is going to buzz — I don’t know what the future’s going to bring), some 23-year-old kid is going to ask you to sit down with them over a cup of coffee or Soylent Green or whatever the hell we’re drinking in 2038.

Take that interview. Sit down with that kid. Answer their questions and talk about yourself because this is your moment to shine and share all the cool shit you’ve been doing. They’re going to take notes and they’re not going to talk much, which means they must be really smart.

And when they ask you, you’re going to introduce them to two or three of your colleagues, because you kick ass. And you’re going to help this kid get started on their own career path.

Because someone did it for you and that’s how you ended up having your own awesome career.

Photo credit: Jeff Pearlman’s Substack
Photo credit: Erik Deckers (Hey, that’s me!)

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Questions About Personal Branding for the Writing Workshop of Chicago

A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Writing Workshop of Chicago about personal branding secrets for authors. We had a great question-and-answer period at the end, but we ran out of time before we ran out of questions.

So the organizer and fellow humor writer, Brian Klems, forwarded the questions to me and I decided to answer them in a blog post. This way, he can refer all the attendees to this page and there’s a permanent location for the questions. But more importantly, I’ll get a bump in web traffic.

First, Yvonne asked, “Are Facebook author pages useful?”

Yes, they are, for a couple of reasons. One, a lot of your readers are on Facebook and it’s easy to point them to that page. Second, it gives you more privacy because you don’t have to be Facebook friends with your readers. You don’t necessarily want them to see your personal stuff, so an author’s page is a great way to do that.

However, keep in mind that Facebook limits the reach of its pages in the hopes that you’ll pay to boost your different posts. Depending on what you write, you might be better off creating a group about your books or topic. Groups updates are not throttled the way a page’s updates are, plus you can encourage more discussion among your readers.

But don’t let the Facebook page/group be your main hub of activity. Try to have a writer’s blog/website as your central hub and treat Facebook and other networks as the spokes.

Maria asked, “I’d always heard you should not post the same things on your various social media channels, so you give people an incentive to follow you in different areas. Your thoughts?”

That’s mostly true. One thing to keep in mind is that people will not see all your social messages. That is, my readers don’t see what I post on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at the same time. People have their preferred social networks and probably won’t go to the others just to find you.

Having said that, you can take advantage of each network’s format to post your best message. You get 280 characters on Twitter, but you get 2,200 on Instagram. You may want to cram several #hashtags into a tweet, but stick them in the first comment on Instagram.

If you want to do simple things like sharing Instagram photos to Twitter and Facebook, you can automate that with Zapier or If This Then That. You can set it up so when you post a photo to Instagram, it will automatically be shared to Twitter and Facebook. That’s a real time saver. But if you want to have separate and distinct messages, you can either do it one at a time, or you can use a service like Loomly to post from a single dashboard. You can also use HootSuite, but it costs nearly $50 per month, compared to Loomly’s $26 per month. Which makes me think doing it one network at a time is ideal for most writers.

David wanted to know, “How important in LinkedIn for authors?”

That depends. It’s critical for business/non-fiction authors, not so much for fiction writers. You can find readers on LinkedIn, even if you’re a scifi/romance/mystery writer, but it’s going to be difficult to find them since most people go there looking for work-related content.

If you only have a limited amount of time and energy to focus on one or two social networks, stick with the ones that are going to do you the most good. LinkedIn won’t be that unless you’re writing business-related books.

Howard wondered, “What do you think about #BookTok on TikTok?”

Honestly, I haven’t watched it enough to have a strong opinion about it, but I will say that anyone who’s talking about books is doing important work, and they’re finding thousands of fans.

There are several channels/creators who have gotten very popular on TikTok talking about writing and books. So if you want to join their ranks, go for it. TikTok has become an important platform for a lot of people, mostly Gen Z, so you should take advantage of that.

Clare asked, “How does your intended audience shape how you brand yourself? For example, I write middle grade fantasy.”

That’s a great question, Clare, and almost worth its own blog article, if not an entire book!

Remember, a brand is an emotional response people have to our face and our name. (Or if you’re a company, the emotional response to your name and logo.) When you think about brands like McDonald’s, Nike, BP, or the Chicago Cubs, people have an emotional response to them. They love them or hate them.

So the emotional responses our readers have become our brand. We can shape and hone that brand ourselves, but ultimately, we’re not responsible for how people perceive us. We can do all sorts of great work and people’s emotional response can be “Yay!” “Ugh!” or “Meh.”

Having said all that, you should treat your personal brand almost like a persona or a character you play. That’s not to say you should lie about who you are. Rather, your personal branding efforts should match what your readers and fans expect of you.

If you’re a middle-grade fantasy writer, the kinds of things you share on social media should be about middle-grade fantasy subjects: swords, dragons, wizards, etc. It’s not really the place to write at length about the supply chain crisis or your thoughts on the January 6 hearings. You can do that elsewhere, but not on your author profiles because it doesn’t match what your readers want.

On the other hand, if you’re a political/current events writer, you don’t necessarily want to share your cosplay photos from Dragon Con.

So, in that sense, your audience shapes your personal branding efforts because you should give them what they want.

Cindi wanted to know, “Do you use some of the new social media platforms, Locals, Rumble, Spotify, and Truth Social?”

Not really. For one thing, there are thousands of social networks these days, compared to the few dozen there were when I first started doing all this in 2007. So I can’t even keep up if I wanted to.

Having said that, I’m not against using a new social network, and I’ve joined a few but I never stick with them. However, I’m always on the lookout for new alternatives to the ones I use now. Is there a new Twitter alternative? Where should I go if Facebook collapses? Is there something better than LinkedIn?

Ultimately, if I can find a network that looks like it won’t fail, doesn’t depend on rocket-like growth just to survive, and lets me quickly and easily post updates (this is one reason I haven’t gotten into TikTok yet), I’ll use it.

And finally, Mandy put a smile on my face when she said, “@erik awesome stuff (no question) :-)”

Thank you, Mandy! I appreciate it. I always have a great time speaking to the Writing Workshop classes.

If you have any other personal branding questions, just drop them in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer them. Thank you to everyone who came to the event, and I look forward to seeing you soon.

Taken from “10 Personal Branding Secrets for Authors” by Erik Deckers”

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Should I Create Multiple Twitter Accounts?

A personal branding question I’m regularly asked by authors, artists, and other creative types is whether someone should have multiple Twitter accounts. In fact, someone posted that very question to an audio theater Facebook group I belong to:

Looking for opinions regarding Twitter: Is it better to have separate accounts for each show you’re creating, or just one main company account that posts on behalf of all shows? I’ve seen it both ways so I was interested in seeing which way people like more.

Well, to start with, you may have seen it both ways, but those “more than one account” people are probably wrong. I’ve seen people run red lights, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us should do it.

I’ve seen people create Twitter accounts for movies, TV shows, books, plays, and any other creative venture you could name. People get excited about a project, and they want to build some buzz around it, so they create social media accounts around that one project.

That’s not the best way to go about things, because those projects typically have a short life, which means the Twitter accounts do, too. Then, the creators are off onto another creative venture, creating yet another social media account.

So let me just say this: Create a single account for yourself or your creative group as the brand. Focus all your energy into building that account.

Think of your favorite actor. Don’t you follow them through their variety of performances? Wouldn’t it be a pain in the ass if you had to re-find them for each character they played? Every time a show or movie ends, you have to wait to find out what their next role is, follow them, and soak in all the goodness, until that role ends. And then you repeat the process.

Think of how painful that would be if your favorite musician launched a new Twitter account every time they recorded a new album.

Can you imagine how much of a time waster it would be if your favorite painter created a Twitter account for every new painting they did? Bob Ross would have created 403 Twitter accounts just for his show paintings, although the actual number may be closer to 30,000.

It’s About Your Personal Brand

You’re better off focusing your energy and efforts on building your personal brand, or your troupe’s brand because that’s the thing people are interested in. Just like you have your favorite performer that you follow from project to project, people will follow you along your creative journey as well. They don’t start and stop with each project, they’re with you every step of the way.

Spend your time building an audience for your group, getting people emotionally invested in that account, and coming to rely on it for news and information about what you’re doing. Have conversations with people with that account, so people are more likely to like and trust it.

Imagine putting all that time and energy into a project account, only to have to repeat the effort several months later. And then doing it again a year after that.

You would have to repeat the brand-building exercise over and over, trying to re-convince your audience from the last show to join you on the new account, and then re-re-convincing them on the one after that. And the next one. And the next one.

By having an account that spans for years, you can even give your new fans a look at your old history as they look back to see what else you have done. As your account grows and ages, people can take a retrospective look at your catalog of work, which they can’t do if you only have a Twitter account that lasts for a year or two.

Photo credit: Mariamichelle (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Building Authority Through Guest Posting

Every so often, I will feature guest posts from writers who actually have important and interesting things to say. And since this is a guest post about guest posting, I liked the whole meta vibe, and decided to publish it, especially since she’s a fellow word nerd.

Ellan Dineen is the Marketing Associate at Design Wizard. When she’s not hard at work in the Marketing Department, Ellan can be found en route to foreign lands with a book in her hand and a podcast in her ear. With a Master’s in English and Diploma in Social Media Marketing, she knows the importance of staying up-to-date with the industry’s latest trends and insights and is keen to pass these tips on to her readers.

Want to establish your online presence? Want to be the “go-to” expert in your niche?

It’s time you finessed this thing called guest posting.

Guest posting allows you to reach a wider audience by posting your articles on related authoritative websites. It strengthens your brand and gives you a massive boost in credibility.

Like with anything when it comes to digital marketing, however, there’s a right and a wrong way to do it.

In this article, we take a look at what you should do, what you should not do, and what kind of quality content you need to be posting.

Identify Your Value

You won’t be able to build authority if you don’t bring any value to the table. The only reason a website will allow you to publish an article on their website is because it offers both them and their audience a massive amount of value.

No value = no guest post.

There’s another reason why value is important. As well as educating audiences, solving their problems and positioning yourself as their go-to expert, the Google algorithm also prefers valuable content.

According to research, long form content gets more traffic than any other type. This is content that contains more than 1,000 words, and which offers in-depth, valuable and actionable information to the reader.

Each time you pitch an article to another website, identify your value first. This will make it so much easier for the blogger to say yes to you.

Don’t focus too much on your ‘tips and tricks.’ Show them how your valuable content is going to benefit their audience.

Ask yourself:

  • How is your content is going to benefit people?
  • What issues are you addressing and solving?
  • Are these issues that people care about?

Solid content by itself won’t work if no one can see where the value is.

Research The Websites You’re Targeting

You can’t build authority if you don’t do your research. Unless you know enough about the websites you’re targeting, as well as their audiences, your content might miss the spot.

Take a look at your target website’s audience and ask yourself some questions:

  1. Will they benefit from a link to my web page?
  2. Will my infographics be of use to this audience?
  3. Will this audience buy from me?

Find out who is engaging with a particular website and whether or not this is an audience who will appreciate your article and advice.

To build authority via guest posting, it’s also a good idea to take a look at the content a website has already published and stick to the format. For example, do they capitalize their subheadings, do they use images in their content and if so, how do they credit the images?

When you follow the format of a website blog you are giving the editor less work, and that is very hard for them to say no to.

A big no-no when it comes to guest posting is to fail to do your research. If you identify 30 blogs and send them generic emails with your pitch before doing any research, you’ll be wasting your time.

Always take your time to learn more about who you’ll be pitching to. Then, you can adjust your content and send out hyper-personalized emails accordingly.

Top tip: Avoid spelling and grammar errors in your emails. Use Grammarly and other tools to catch these mistakes before you click send.

Produce Your Best Content

It goes without saying that if you want to position yourself as an expert, your content has to be brilliant. Each time you produce a guest post, ask yourself “is this my best piece of content?”

To this end, you need to produce long-form content (1,000 words minimum) that offers unique insights to the reader. Your advice needs to be actionable, as different as possible to what has come before, and it needs to be of use to the target audience.

A huge no-no is to spend most of the article discussing things the reader already knows. The key here is understanding who your target audience is and what stage they are at in their journey. For example, if you’re writing an article about the do’s and don’ts of digital marketing to an advanced reader, don’t waste people’s time discussing what digital marketing is. They already know.

Your content needs to be readable, shareable and it needs to be as up-to-date and relevant as possible. This means understanding the latest trends and including links to recent stats and research (as opposed to information from 2014).

It’s also a good idea to write from personal experience. After all, you’re the expert here. If you’re writing about a subject you know intimately, don’t be afraid to write from your personal experience while making sure that your personal examples are relatable to others.

Your best content will need quality images and graphics, too. If you’re not sure where to source images from, you can use a tool like Pik Wizard. To spice up your graphics so that your content is as professional, engaging and eye-catching as possible, meanwhile, Design Wizard is your friend.

Absolutely do not go into this thinking that you can get away with posting below par content. Impressive content that educates, informs and engages people is the best way to establishing your authority and boosting conversions. The ultimate aim of guest posting is to grab more traffic from other sources and you can only do this by producing your best content.

Don’t hold back on the value factor. Yes, you’re doing this for free in the sense that you don’t get paid for a guest post. But the ROI will be worth it when you start to build your authority.

Moreover, the more awesome content you produce, the more chance you’ll have of securing a guest post with a super high domain website, such as Forbes or the Huffington Post.

Conclusion

All in all, building authority through guest posting comes down to identifying your value, identifying a related website’s audience – before producing as much valuable, usable content as possible that the audience can take action on. Focus on quality, not quantity, do your research and don’t hold back when it comes to value. Educate, inform but also engage.

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Erik’s Rules for Writing Short Books

A few days ago, I had to confront my elitist attitude toward books and whether or not I think a book can be anything less than 50 pages that gets spit out over a weekend.

It’s not.

But I also had to rethink my attitude toward any book that was not traditionally published, shorter than 200 pages, and didn’t take several months to produce.

I realized, thanks to my friend, Jim, that these short books — they’re called “novellas” in the fiction world — can actually serve a very useful purpose in helping someone develop their personal brand.

And that helped me to realize that I just need to get over myself and my attitude and learn to accept the newer definition of what a book is supposed to be.

BUT if you want to write a book, even if it’s a short book, there are a few things you need to do to make your book good, no matter how long it is. Otherwise, you’re just creating junk and you’re watering down what it means to write a book and to be an author.

1. A book does not take a weekend to write.
You might be able to write the first draft in 48 hours, but it’s nowhere near ready. Don’t even think about publishing it. You’ll hear people brag about how they wrote a book in just a weekend or just a couple of days. Good books don’t take this long, so don’t ever be satisfied with the work you produce in a day or two.

This is supposed to be your major marketing tool, your calling card, your social proof that you’re an expert at what you do. You can’t produce that in just one weekend, and whatever it is you produce in that time won’t be good enough to serve that purpose.

2. Make it longer than 50 pages, please.
Expertise is deep and involved, and it has a lot to say. So your book, no matter the topic, should be more than 50 pages long. In fact, the deeper you dive into your topic, the longer it’s going to be. The broader and more general your topic is, the less there is to say about it. The more focused it is, the deeper you can dive.

For example, I could write a book about Marketing in general, and I would run out of things to say in about 30 pages. But I could write a book that focuses on content marketing for enterprise-level companies and come up with volumes of information — wait, I totally did that, and it was 236 pages long.

Dive into a niche, explore every important fact that you can, and add that to your manuscript. If your book is becoming huge and unwieldy, break it up into manageable sections, and flesh out each one thoroughly. Turn them into separate books and sell them as smaller volumes. Your book doesn’t have to be 300 pages, but it should never be shorter than 75. Otherwise that’s just a pamphlet.

3. Revise, revise, revise.
Honest to God, if you publish your first draft, you deserve any and all ridicule and shame because it’s just going to be bad. Ernest Hemingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit.”And I’ll bet that’s what your first draft is. Listen, I’ve been writing for 30 years, and I still write shitty first drafts. So don’t fool yourself into thinking that yours is fine.

Revise your manuscript, then revise it a second time, and then you’re ready to start thinking about final edits and publication. You’re not there yet, but you’re ready to start thinking about it.

4. Take time between edits.
You need to wait several days between revisions. Reread your manuscript and make sure you’ve covered all the pertinent information and fixed all the errors you can find. That takes time. We all get used to seeing what we’ve created, especially if we try to revise right after we’ve written it, and so we gloss over actual errors. Our mind just fills in what we expect to see, not what’s actually there. But you’ll catch your errors if you can separate yourself from your work for several days.

Your book should get at least two revisions with at least three days between each one. A week would be better, if you can manage it.

5. Get beta readers.
Send out PDF copies to friends and ask them to read it. Ask them to find holes, typos, unanswered questions, and missing information. I know a guy who wrote a short book about college financial planning. After he ordered his first 30 copies from CreateSpace, someone asked whether it included information about 529 Savings Plans.

It did not. So he burned his first 30 copies, made the additions that ended up being another major section of his book, and ordered 30 more copies.

This guy had basically produced his book in a weekend, done some editing, and then uploaded it for printing. No beta readers, no expert input, no major time between revisions, and so he missed a very important part of college financial planning. This is why you need extra eyes on your work. Sure it’s going to add time, but your book will be better for it.

6. Hire a professional editor.
If you’re going to use this as a business card or a brochure, then it had better be great. You can’t have typos, you can’t have mistakes, you can’t have anything that makes it look half-assed and flawed.

There are people who say “perfect is the enemy of good,” but those are people willing to settle for “good enough.” And good enough is terrible. So do everything you can to make your book great.

That means don’t do the editing yourself. No one is good at editing their own work, even copy editors. Hire someone. For a 75 – 100 page book, you can find a decent copyeditor for a couple hundred bucks. Or you can find a great copyeditor for several hundred dollars. Even a recently-graduated creative writing or English major would be delighted to edit your work for $200, and they’ll do a fantastic job of it.

7. Get a professional cover.
CreateSpace has covers available, but you’ll be much better off if you can hire someone to do your cover design for you. If you’re not a graphic designer, this is not the time for you to take a stab at it.

Get someone with some decent design skills to put one together. It doesn’t have to be fancy or be a $5,000 masterpiece.. If you want some ideas, go to the bookstore and study the book covers in your particular field. Note the design trends, font choices, whether they used photos or illustrations and what kind. Get an idea of what you want your book cover to look like, and then ask your designer to create it for you.

8. Do not, do not, DO NOT screw around with font size and margins in order to boost your page count.
This isn’t high school. Those tricks you did when you had to write your papers to meet word and page count — lots of adverbs, squeeze the margins in to 1.5″, line-and-a-half spacing, 14 pt. type — only make your book look like a complete scam and like you’re deliberately trying to be tricky.

Real books are single spaced, 12 pt. type or smaller, and have 1″ margins or less. A few years ago, I met a guy who bragged about turning a 20 page manuscript into a 30 page collection of words — I won’t call it a “book” — and he advocated screwing with the fonts and margins to make the book thicker.

If you have to do that, just delete your work. Delete it and go back to the drawing board or the classroom, because you clearly don’t have what it takes to write a book in the first place. Because that’s not writing, and it doesn’t demonstrate expertise. That’s dishonest garbage. If you have to lie about how long the book is, I won’t trust a single word in it.

I’m learning to change my way of thinking and my elitist attitude about being a book author. But you have to meet me halfway. Anything that’s less than 30 pages, is poorly written, unedited, and is a stinking word turd is not a book.

Slapping a collection of pages between two pieces of card stock doesn’t make it a book anymore than me wearing bread earmuffs makes my head a sandwich.

So do the work, take the time to make it good, produce something of value, and make sure there’s enough in it to actually be proud of. When you look at it five years later, you don’t want to be embarrassed by a comedy of errors and bad writing that you could have easily prevented with just a little more time..