The Truth About Writing a Book & Getting High Net Worth Clients | 954

Welcome to the Inside BS show. It's January 2nd, the second show in our new iteration, the new series. So today I thought I would share with you what I'm working on and talk about how it's relevant to you. And it's all about getting a book published, writing a book, publishing a book.

My formula of writing a book and then getting speaking engagements, that's great for attracting this audience. I've written three books. The first book I wrote, for those of you who are watching on Instagram, I'm holding it up, I actually still have copies of it here, was titled Career Intensity, the subtitle is Business Strategy for Workplace Warriors and Entrepreneurs. I sold it basically out of the trunk of my car and everywhere I went and it did really well for me.

The second book I wrote, and I wrote this in 2012, is Client Attraction Secrets for Lawyers, and this was published by James Publishing. James Publishing is a legal publishing house. They publish mostly law books, but this book is a paperback book. It's 138 pages and it was a great lead generation tool for me.

Again, another really good book. I was thrilled to write it and publish it. Then the third book I did was titled The 60 Second Sale, The 60 Second Sale, and this was commercially published by Wiley, arguably the biggest business book publisher definitely in the United States, very reputable, and that was in 2017, I want to say, the copyright date on this, 2018, copyright date is 2018. I wrote it in 2017.

Copyright date is 2018, so I keep hitting the mic. I'm sorry for that. Those of you who are listening, you're hearing a thump. I keep hitting the mic with this.

Career Intensity 2006, six years later, 2012, Client Attraction Secrets for Lawyers, six years later, The 60 Second Sale, and now I'm doing my fourth book. This book is going to be titled The High Net Worth Advisor. It's all about attracting high net worth clients, and this will be published in 2026, so eight years since my last book. I'm going to take you behind the scenes.

Here in the podcast, I'm going to take you behind the scenes and share with you what it's like from start to finish to write a book because as I'm recording this today in January, I'm three months into the process, so let me give you the whole process up to this point. Let me catch you up. Here's how writing a book really works. You have an idea for a book.

You create what's called a book proposal, which essentially outlines your thoughts for the book. You put together a rough outline for chapters, not a table of contents, but an outline for what the chapters will look like. You write a sample chapter or a summary of a sample chapter even, and then you put together a comprehensive marketing plan, which details how many books you think you can sell yourself and how you're going to sell them. You package this all up nicely, and it is a book proposal.

If you're a first-time author, you then market that book proposal to agents, literary agents. The agents, in exchange for about 20%, will pitch your book to publishers they have a relationship with, and they will negotiate on your behalf. For Client Attraction Secrets for Lawyers, I did not have an agent. The publisher and I negotiated directly.

It was very straightforward. For the 60 Second Sale, I had an agent. The agent negotiated the deal for me with Wiley. An acquisitions editor is looking for an author who has a platform, who will get the books sold, who will move the books.

So your business proposal, your book proposal, is all about how you're going to help get that book sold. Then once the agent pitches your book and the acquisitions editor buys your book, you then talk about the title. You talk about the content. I started talking to my existing clients, and I thought, you know what my thing is?

I run a group for people who want to attract high net worth clients. That niche is really powerful. And I pitched that in conjunction with attracting new business. And I said, I'm teaching people how to attract high net worth clients.

And I thought, how can I become the number one authority, the foremost authority in the world on attracting high net worth clients? I said, I know what I'll do. I'll interview people I know who have this market down cold. And I interviewed people who actually were high net worth clients, people who have investable assets of $5 million or more.

I interviewed the people who serve them. I interviewed business owners of businesses with $20 million or more in annual revenue, and I interviewed the people who serve them, the professionals, the advisors to these people. And I realized there are some behaviors that are unique to the people who work with the affluent. High net worth advisors have qualities that are unique to them.

And I compared those qualities to people who work with everybody. And I thought to myself, these seven qualities are really pronounced in the advisors who work with high net worth folks. I was on to something. And I decided the only way to prove this to the world was to do a quantitative survey.

I am in the process today of fielding a study, a study that's out in the field now, where I am endeavoring to connect with over 1,000 professionals and create a study group of people who work with affluent clients, work with high net worth clients, clients who have 5 million or more in investable assets and business owners who have businesses that do 20 million or more in annual revenue. And I can explain why I picked those and I'll do that in a different show. And I'm going to compare those to people who work with those folks who are below that level.

So the bulk of their business is below 5 million in investable assets or above 5 million. And I will contrast the strength of the behaviors in the people who work with the affluent versus the people who don't. This will be the most comprehensive study of its kind, and it will be published in that book, The High Net Worth Advisor. For me, this is the reason why publishing this book through Wiley is so important.

It gives the research additional credibility. So your goal should be, if you want to write a book, to determine whether you need the credibility of a big name publisher like a Wiley, Random House, McGraw-Hill. If you need credibility, maybe for the work that you're doing or for you personally, go with a commercial publisher. You won't make a lot of money on the book.

You probably won't make any money on the book at all. But the credibility you have from having this name, the Wiley name stamped on your book, I have an editor who's going to read this and who's going to look at the research and determine whether it's worthy of them putting their name on it. That's incredibly valuable to me. So if you need credibility, you need to go with a third party, with a big name publisher, and you can follow the process that I follow.

I'm working on this book now. And this podcast, at least for the next year, is going to be focused on helping you attract high net worth clients and also taking you behind the scenes in the work that I'm doing as I publish, as I write and go through the publishing process of publishing this book. So today's Friday. We're not doing shows on the weekends.

So take your weekend and enjoy yourself. When we come back on Monday, I'm going to share with you the specific research process that I'm using in developing this book. I need to remind you that if you're listening and you want to watch the video, you can watch the video on Instagram. I'm trying to keep these to 10 minutes because I know people's attention span is short, but watch the video, the behind the scenes, you can watch it on Instagram.

I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you like this content because I'm sharing what I'm doing, but I'm also sharing the value behind what I'm doing.