Kevin Anderson - The Ghostwriter's Advantage: Buying Time and Expertise

In 3, 2, 1.

Welcome back to Becoming Preferred, the podcast dedicated to helping you reach your highest professional potential.

Today we're talking about the ultimate business credential, the high impact nonfiction book.

Our guest has mastered the art of turning expertise into intellectual property.

He's a number one national best selling author, himself a Harvard trained scholar, and the CEO of a firm that helps public figures and top professionals land deals with major publishers.

He is the person leading literary agents and corporate leaders call when the message must be perfect.

Kevin Anderson is here to reveal the secrets to leveraging your knowledge.

He'll show you why a quality book is the single most effective way to elevate your authority, attract premium clients, and transform your business model.

If you have a powerful message that needs to be heard, Kevin is the bridge between your expertise and the bestseller list.

Let's learn how to make your book the foundation of your legacy.

Join me now for my conversation with Kevin Anderson.

Well, hey, Kevin, welcome to the program.

We're delighted to have you.

Thank you, Michael.

Happy to be here.

Hey, I'm excited about this.

This is a topic we haven't had and we're in season six and we've had writers, we've got lots of authors.

But it's kind of nice to go behind the scenes and share with our audience how some of those things come to be and how people get the books.

And we're going to talk about ghostwriting and services and to create bestsellers and just all about the industry and inform our listeners how that could work and how it can serve them.

But before we get there, Kevin, let's go back in time.

Now.

You and I were talking just prior to starting our show.

You grew up in Alberta, up in Canada for a little while.

You spent a number of years there, went to school before you went over to, I believe it was Harvard.

You went to school and you were teaching English and writing.

And let's go back in those days.

What was Kevin trying to be when he grew up?

Yeah, well, after paleontology wasn't going to work out for me.

I like every other kid, you know, I really started, I loved teaching and I really loved that element of academia where, you know, and honestly, at first I thought I was going to be a, an elementary school teacher and I went to school for that at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta.

But what I didn't expect was that I just actually fell in love, even more so with learning.

And then I loved teaching, but I loved teaching higher level stuff than maybe like a grade six curriculum.

So I Figured I just loved it so much that I wanted to go to grad school.

And I learned that fair early on in my undergrad.

And so the trajectory was going to be to be a professor.

So I wanted to be an English or philosophy professor.

But then, yeah, when I was at Harvard, I started my first company and it took off and I had a choice.

It was already kind of earning six figures even while I was a student.

But the choice was to either go out with my master's or I could continue on five more years of academic, rigorous study and become a professor.

And I'm not sure if you know much about that, but usually that means you're going to have to find some adjunct position in the middle of nowhere to build towards.

Yeah, yeah.

So it could be a really long process.

So I just thought, you know what?

Let's just do this now.

I really enjoyed it.

I really enjoyed the business was serving.

It was a service company.

It was along the lines of tutoring and writing instruction.

And so, yeah, I went out with my master's and have been a business person and entrepreneur ever since.

Well, it's nice to be able to convert that skill and from maybe from thesis papers and research papers to, you know, where it is today.

All right, so you started to see an opportunity for ghostwriting.

And a lot of people, they don't quite understand how ghostwriting works.

I remember when I started my career early, I was getting about 50 articles a year.

I was producing, I was being interviewed by my ghostwriter, and they would get the general concept and then they would write because I was doing an issue every week in a newsletter.

So we use ghostwriters because they were good at doing that and we get the credit for it.

Presidents use ghostwriters, prime ministers, top speakers do.

Is it still kind of a behind the scenes kind of a thing that people don't understand how much is actually written and what's the process?

Let's maybe talk about that, because I think that people have a lot of misconceptions about it.

Yeah, there are a lot of misconceptions.

And, you know, today it's a little different than 10, 15 years ago, when we first started into the industry.

Now it's very common to see a co author, which is usually the ghostwriter, see their name as like a.

With credit on the COVID It's not always the case.

And a lot of our clients, it's completely confidential or the name will appear in the acknowledgments as like, you know, thanks to Kevin Anderson and associates for all their help with my book.

But it doesn't say that we actually were ghostwriting it.

But the other misconception that a lot of people have with ghostwriting is they think that the author just says, hey, you know, I've got this great business or this great idea.

Here's one or two sentences about it.

Go back and bring me back a book, and then I'm going to stamp my name on it and put it out there as my own.

Which is just not the way that we work at all with our clients.

We really believe that the author is the author and all of the information is coming from them.

We're just a very sophisticated pen that helps them deliver that message in a way that's readable and that really targets their audience.

And the ghostwriting process is really just a matter of getting exactly what's already in their head and getting it out in a way that's articulate.

Because, let's face it, you don't do your own taxes.

You don't do your own dentistry work.

If you're not a professional writer, there's no reason why you should be trying to be one.

Some people like, such as yourself, are natural writers, but a lot of business owners and CEOs and thought leaders are not.

They might even be a really great speaker, but they really struggle with writing.

So that's where we come in to just help draw that out of them and make sure that it's really in their authentic voice.

But all the material, all the words, all the ideas, it's all coming from the author.

So none of it is being stolen or plagiarized.

It's really coming from the client.

You've seen a lot of success.

I think You've had over 600 bestsellers within your organization, which speaks for itself.

Is it formulaic in the process?

It's almost like when you go to your website and you look at that process, there's a good investment.

But is it one of those things where you can make it a bestseller?

Or, hey, we cross our fingers, we hope it's the best seller.

Or did you get pretty confident once you start diving into the content?

Yeah, great question.

You know, we authors, wherever they're at, right?

So some authors come to us with no writing skills.

They want us to handle everything.

Others have a fully written manuscript and they just need it edited or rewritten and help with figuring out how to get it published and hit a bestseller list.

One of your questions there was about whether we know in advance whether it might be a bestseller or not.

You can tell sometimes just by somebody's platform, meaning the number of followers they have, the access they have.

If they're doing a lot of big events that are getting good attendance, we can kind of see how many books they might be able to sell and gauge that.

But you know, a dirty little secret is anyone with the right budget and the right angle can hit a bestseller list, even the legit ones like the USA Today bestseller list, which make you a national bestselling author.

With the right strategy, anyone is able to hit these lists.

You have to do certain things.

You have to have a good quality book.

So it's not something you can just push a button.

But there is a strategy for that, however, hitting like the New York Times bestseller list.

This book here, the Owen Perlman.

Yeah, I just got that book.

Yeah, it's a great book.

It's been on the New York Times bestseller list for the last several weeks.

This is one of our clients that we worked with from the very beginning.

We knew, I mean he had a huge audience, he had a great book idea, a lot of application for the reader.

We knew well in advance that had a really great shot of hitting the list.

But even then he did a lot to just, you know, a lot of pre promotion leading up to pub day is really important that you're getting as many pre orders as possible for multiple reasons.

For one, you'll run out of stock if Amazon doesn't realize how much books are going to sell once you publish.

But his book, he did a lot of preparation to make sure that people really knew about the book in advance.

And the New York Times bestseller list is the most difficult one to hit.

And it's also the one that gives a lot of the, maybe the most credibility, I suppose.

Sure.

So what you're saying is if you go through the process and you go through the different process, you can get your book as a bestseller.

It's a means to an end.

Like it's not having a bestseller for bestseller sake.

It's what's this book going to serve you?

Some of your authors are billionaires, some are millionaires, and some are just guys who are working right date 9 to 5 and they have their book.

So you've got a full range of people there and the investments can be significant.

What kind of reasons, what kind of outcomes do you see from people who've actually had the book?

And then typically how long does that process take?

Is it like a four to six month window typically to get your book out there on the bookshelves in today's world.

What about doing it yourself and printing it yourself versus going the traditional.

It's like in music, you've got Taylor Swift who kind of said screw you to the music industry and created her own vertical channels for distribution, concerts, promotion, of course, rewrote the book, so to speak.

What are you seeing in your world?

Yeah, and you can do that.

When you're Taylor Swift and you already have millions and millions of fans, you can start to do your own thing a little bit.

A lot of our clients are not, you know, we do have a lot of billionaire clients.

I think we're almost at two dozen now.

And they're in a different category and how they are approaching it and what their goals are.

A lot of our clients are just are aspiring business owners.

They've not even made it yet as a business owner or they're looking to do speaking or they're looking to just get some authority around them and their business.

And so that when people are looking them up online or they're showing up their office, they can show them this book that shows that they have expertise and authority and it's that that's the real ROI for them and it really separates them from the rest.

And it also is a great asset that they can keep reusing.

If they are doing social media or if they're doing things like that, they can keep drawing from the book and show that authorship and that authority that comes with being a published author.

So yeah, a lot of our clients, when they're looking at the book and trying to invest and thinking about what their ROI is, it's really what it does for their business long term and what it does for them in terms of elevating their speaking fee or elevating their business or their brand compared to their direct competition.

And with those kinds of projects, sometimes their goal is just that.

It's just they just want to have that book show up.

When people look them up others, they really want a bestseller status.

They want to be able to put bestselling author or when they're trying to get speaking gigs, they want to be able to say, you know, national best selling author.

And that has a big value add for them.

So with authors where they really want to target and hit the bestseller list, we will take a little bit of a different strategy than if they just want to have a book.

And that changes the investment, but it also just changes the timeline.

There's certain publishers in certain ways to publish that are going to elevate your chances of hitting a national bestseller list.

Whereas if you really just want to have a book and that's the main goal.

And you're not really interested in what a best selling label will do for you.

You might want to just self publish or do something that's much smaller scale and not invest quite so much because you can achieve that with much less in terms of monetary investment.

Well, like I said, I think there's a means to an end to it.

Is it going to be an ego piece?

Is it going to be a.

Is this about me that I want to help promote the stock of the company and leadership.

I can speak to it as a professional speaker.

I remember was publisher Parish and some people write forward like they write as it unveils to them.

I was right in the past, meaning I've been doing it and talking about it for months and years.

Then I'll write about it because I know it works and I got the sound bites down right.

So I can bring those into the book.

Right.

So that's my creative process.

But I know when I show up for a meeting with a VP or a CEO and let's say you and I both show up and we're both selling the same service or positioning it, I hand them a couple of copies of my books and you don't have them, I win.

And if price is equal, I win.

So from a credibility point of view for consultants, for coaches, entrepreneurs, it's a great lead in for that.

And so I can attest to it.

You talked about ROI and there's obviously different investment levels that can go into it based on the quality of the riders.

And if you're wanting top shelf versus if you're Branson or Michael Dell and you're wanting a.

Or Bill Gates and you want your autobiography.

Is it, is there so many books where you have to sell this many?

What's respectable, like 50,000 copies, 20,000 copies, 100,000.

Where does it start to make sense from how many we've sold point of view?

Yeah, yeah, it's a great question.

And usually with our clients the book sales is just not even a factor other than making sure that they hit the list if that's part of their goal to kind of have that moniker.

Actually selling books is not the goal, it's more what it does to leverage them and their visibility of the brand.

And, and that's really the roi because we don't advise too many clients to write books as investment.

You might as well put your money into an index fund and it's going to be a better bet for sure than writing a Book and trying to get money based off of sales.

Yeah, but if the return on investment is more what it does for your business and the clients that you're going to get, you know, you think about it in the next 10 years and remember, book lasts a long time.

If you Google somebody, their book might have been 20 years old and that book is still going to come up really high on Google on the ranked search.

And so a book lasts a very long time.

And so you got think about if I have this book, if I have a book and I can use that as a marketing asset for the next 20 years, how many clients am I going to get?

How many new deals am I going to be able to get?

How is it going to help me build my business?

Is there going to be an roi?

And of course, the earlier you start, the better.

But to answer your question just in terms of sales, because for some authors, like fiction authors, we did the Five Nights at Freddy's, which was an adaptation of a video game.

It became a number one New York Times bestseller.

But it's a novel in those cases.

It really is about book sales.

You need to have those book sales to make the project worth it because it's not serving a business or any kind of brand, but just in terms of sales on average on the very bottom of the USA Today bestseller list, usually it's about 4,000 books a week is what they're selling.

That could get you on the very bottom of the USA Today best selling list.

Depending on who your publisher is, your royalties may be not great or if you sell publisher royalties will be really high, which means the percentage of those sales that are actually like what percentage of the book sticker price are you actually getting?

But most, most of our authors in terms of book sales, where they're making their ROI kicks in once they're selling about five to seven thousand book.

Usually you're making some kind of ROI on the service.

But of course it depends on the service too, because sometimes an author just needs a very little.

They just need to kind of elevate what they already got to another level or they're looking for a book coach.

Whereas others, they need to invest a lot more.

But like I said, I never advise clients, especially in the nonfiction space, that the goal should be making money on book sales.

It should really be a bigger picture reason for the investment.

I think you're right.

It's a catalyst really.

I remember when I was getting speaking fees and then once I had the book, it did really well, it sold.

So I always Say there's real writers who are real writers and if I made movies, mine would have a lot of stuff that explodes and blowing up and really pretty beautiful people running around with no redeeming value whatsoever.

Think John Wick, you know, but it sells, right?

And so it's writing to.

If you know your marketplace or you have a captured niche or vertical.

Is there a hybrid version of this?

So let's say you're not so concerned about getting on the bestsellers list, but let's say you're a good entrepreneur, you're a smart business guy, you're busy, you've got the cash flow and hey, I'm going to do a book on this to help support my business and then I want to maybe self publish that book and go through that channel.

Because you can go to the same printers that the big guys go, the big publishing houses, whether it's random Penguin, you can go to those houses, you can get them printed.

But you're right.

And then my fees went and that book, right now if you Google and the topics, the name of the podcast, I'm still getting value out of it 20 years later and all because of that.

So to your point, so if you amortize out your marketing, how much are we spending on doing pieces, blogs, posts and how much time and energy versus putting it into an actual book?

So do you get authors that are that way where maybe they self publish, but they've used your services from a ghostwriting point of view, but then they create their own product that way they control it if they like to look after the control.

And then have they had success as well?

It's very common.

Yeah.

I mean we're agnostic when it comes to the publishing avenue.

We've placed million dollar deals with Penguin Random House and we've done very, very small scale self pub books and had them out within like a month or two.

And it really depends on the author's goal for what they want out of the book, whether they want to do a self pub or there's also hybrid publishers which kind of do a little bit of both.

They do some of the services of marketing and design and things that a traditional publisher does, but yet you retain most or if not all of the rights to the book.

So there's a lot of different options for authors.

It also depends a lot on timing when they really want that book out by.

You can get your book out a lot quicker if you self publish, whereas with traditional publishers it can take easily a year and a half from the time you get the deal done with the publisher, never mind the writing.

Yeah, so there's different reasons you would go different directions.

But yeah, we've had many authors that they have an idea where we get the book together in a very short amount of time.

Self published.

They're in control of everything to do with the book.

We show them how to make sure that it's showing up properly on Amazon, showing up in all the right places and and they get huge value from it and very quickly.

And we've got authors too that do their first book that way and then the second book, once they get some sales built up or they've built an audience, then they go to a traditional publisher to do their There's a lot of different options for authors depending on what their immediate and long term goals are.

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And now back to my conversation with Kevin Anderson.

Lots of our listeners are successful business professionals and entrepreneurs, so why, in a world that's saturated with digital content, is writing and publishing high quality nonfiction book still in your opinion, the most effective way for them to establish themselves as the preferred authority in their industry?

And you've kind of addressed a little of it, but can you unpack that a little bit more?

Nothing says authority or expertise like a book, right?

There's all kinds of author, there's all kinds of white papers and articles out there.

There's all kinds of website, I think, and a lot of that's AI generated too.

But a book is something that really has a whole other elevated sense to it in terms of just prestige and authority.

That is really unmatched.

Also, as mentioned before, and it's not just SEO, it's also even like, you know, even like a chat search or a AI search.

It recognizes book authorship as something really significant and worthy of a very high credibility asset.

So when you're looking, if you're searching for, hey, I want the three best divorce lawyers in my immediate area, and they see that one has a book published on divorce law that's going to look good to the AI search bots that this is a credible source that you should be looking at.

And also the other thing with the book is the permanence element to it.

Social media posts and articles, they're usually very timely and topical and about some kind of recent trend where a book is really seen and perceived as something that's evergreen and something that is coming from expertise that will last years rather than a moment.

Yeah, I found, like I say, from a personal credibility part that's powerful.

One thing, and I don't know if these stats are accurate or not, but when I'm actually talking to an audience, I'll ask them, show of hands, how many.

I have a one bit where I talk about, and I'll say, how many of you read books?

How many read books, and how many business books would you read in a year?

And the answer is usually 1, 2, 0.

They're really honest.

Now, if I pressed further and said, can you name them and what did you learn from each one?

All right.

And most hands disappear.

And I saw one stat that said people who buy business books, 17% of them finish it.

I don't know if that's true or not or if there's challenges with it.

It does give you the credibility.

I can't tell you the people we've given books to, and I know they haven't even read it.

I'm pretty sure my kids haven't even read them.

The fact that we have them is what's important.

And that's to your point.

It's the diploma on the wall.

It's that PhD.

It's that master's.

It's, hey, the society has recognized you as an expert on this.

I think that seems to be the overall benefit from it.

And then what that leads to.

Is that a fair assessment?

Yeah, absolutely.

No, that's exactly right.

And what about the younger generations?

Like, we've got five generations of book buyers out there.

Are you finding generationally, like, I still like a tactile book.

I still like to hold on to one.

But I also, as we were downsized, got rid of boxes and boxes and boxes of them and I've replaced them all in digital, the ones that I want to keep.

Right.

What are you seeing any trends that we're seeing out there or does it matter?

Yeah, well, I mean, audiobooks are really big, right?

That's been the way the industry five, 10 years ago, they really thought that the digital books were going to take over and that was going to be the way that most people were going to consume books.

But they were wrong.

The digital books, even though they did take a bigger market share, people still prefer tactile books and reading actual physical books.

But what's happened recently is that audiobooks have become extremely popular.

And this is how the younger generation is often consuming books.

They're used to podcasts, they're used to getting information on the go and full disclosure, audiobooks.

That's how I consume most of my.

Yep, me too.

Me too.

I prefer.

If I'm reading something really dense, then I like, like a philosophy text or something like that, I prefer to read it.

But if I'm listening to something that's giving me more general information that's very readable, I prefer to do audiobook.

I can do while I'm in the car, while I'm walking, jogging, whatever makes it so that I can actually digest the content.

And so that's been a big trend recently.

And some publishers like Blackstone, which were basically only audio, have become very successful by really optimizing audiobooks.

So this is a format that's really important if you want to reach the younger generation.

Yeah, no, that makes sense.

I consume most of mine that way.

And if I have books, like I might read a fiction once in a while.

Like I just finished reading a fiction with John Grisham the Widow, and I listened to it, but that's my R and R time and it's rare.

One or two a year, that's it.

Most of the time it's non fiction and then I'll put it on.

I like my philosophy at night, if I can't sleep at 2 in the morning just because one of those things your brain gets going, I'll throw on the Stoics or something and listen to it because Marcus Ray or a Picatus can put me to sleep really quickly.

So it's usually going.

As a successful ghostwriter, you're obviously an invaluable resource.

How should an entrepreneur who is short of time but rich in ideas weigh the cost and time commitment of hiring a professional Ghostwriter versus writing the book themselves.

What criteria are non negotiable for a successful ghostwriting partnership?

Well, the most important thing is that you have a really great product in the end and that you've done it the right way.

So what we have, what we find a lot is people come to us and they've written half of a book or maybe the whole thing.

And, and we look at it and we shake our heads because if they would have just come to us in the very beginning, we would have saved them so many mistakes, so many wrong directions.

Or the book could just be in such poor shape that just needs a total, you know, redo and, and when you.

And it hurts to see because there's so much time and energy that's going into that time and energy that you could be spending on your business and building other parts of your brand.

So, you know, you talk to any big business owner and we work with a lot of them and I've started and launched multiple seven and eight figure companies.

I can tell you from my own experience as well that you're not going to grow if you don't learn to leverage, right?

If you don't learn to leverage, you're going nowhere.

Because you cannot do everything that needs to be done to launch your business or to grow it.

Will you be making the first mistake of building a business if you tried to do the book all on your own?

If it's not something that you're willing and able to do, or if it's something you really are passionate about?

And even then, even if you are a great writer and you want to do it on your own, having an editor, someone that knows the big picture, that can help you be a sounding board and help you figure out their direction is invaluable, right?

Every single writer, Stephen King, Hemingway, Shakespeare had an editor, right?

Everyone has somebody there to help them to formalize their writing and put them in the right direction so they're not wasting time not seeing the forest through the tree.

So our advice to most of our clients is whether you want a writer, a ghostwriter, a book coach, or whatever, just get the professional on board early so they can at least help you with your planning and strategizing and figuring out what the book is about and also what your publishing goal is, because that could dramatically change how you write your book, depending on what your publishing goal is.

And when you want the book completed by a lot of our clients that come to us too late, they've either wasted a lot of their time or they're gone in the total wrong direction.

That could have been an easy fix early on if we were just advising them from the very beginning.

So that's something to really consider when you're thinking about writing a book.

The first, most important step is to just get a professional on board to help you even figure out what you want.

They might come on board and say, you know what, you're a great writer, you've got some extra time, you don't need a ghostwriter, you just need a book coach to help you along.

Or, or you might think you were a great writer.

They look at your writing sample and they say, look, you're not seeing this clearly.

You're actually really terrible writer and you're going to need some professional help if you really want this to be, to be successful.

Those are some things to consider.

But a good strategist is invaluable, right?

At least that helps you get on the right direction from the very beginning, helps you save a ton of time and mistakes, and also gives you the confidence to move forward.

But not just the confidence, but also the accountability.

There's some studies that show that 80% of Americans have thought about writing a book, but less than 1% ever finish one.

And that's because a lot of people get stuck.

And so having someone that you've hired, even if it's not a big expense, even if you just hired a book coach for a couple thousand bucks, they can help keep you accountable and make sure that you actually finish what you started.

So there's a lot of value in just getting an expert on and getting them on a.

No, that makes sense.

Are there certain genres like in your company you do fiction and non fiction?

Yeah.

Is there some that are easier or harder than others?

Like with the subject matter expertise obviously, versus somebody who has a story like fiction harder than non fiction or what's your experience?

Fiction is hard.

Fiction is really hard.

It's a real creative process and it's so subjective and it's imaginative and you can go any direction you want.

Right.

The easiest books to write are non fiction business books where someone has already kind of thought clearly about a lot of their ideas and what they want to say.

And now it's just a matter of getting those stories, helping string it together into a thematic structure and just getting it all down and written in a really professional style and tone.

So those are definitely the easiest books to write.

Obviously there's a lot of variation even within that genre depending on what kind of back end research might be required.

The hardest books to Write though, are the ones that the author doesn't really quite know what to say.

And sometimes a good ghostwriter, that's really what a big part of their job is to draw out what's not necessarily clearly there or known from the author.

And this is where AI really doesn't come up to the table at all compared to a skilled ghostwriter.

A skilled ghostwriter is like a journalist.

They're looking at your eyes, they can tell when you're holding back, they can tell when you're not telling the full story, they can catch you on your dishonesty.

AI is a very self padding, echo chamber approach to writing.

It does a really great job with, with base level content that has no personality or edge to it.

But what it doesn't do well is it doesn't interview well and it doesn't know when to jump on a sensitive topic or when to leave alone and wait the next moment.

Right, yeah.

And it also doesn't come up with anything original.

Yeah.

Which is something that a ghostwriter can help bring out of an author.

But yeah, there's also a bunch of issues.

There's a lot of legal issues when it comes to using AI to write a book.

It's drawing from content that it doesn't necessarily own or have rights to.

And so in the next couple of years or maybe months, you're going to see a lot of changes when it comes to copyright and just what you can even, you know, what you can even publish.

And publishers are already very on top of AI detection software and rejecting anything that has AI content just because it's drawing on existing copywritten content often and not giving it credit, which is just a legal issue.

Apart from the fact that we've not seen AI develop any really great original book level, book length content yet.

And yeah, on top of all that, how it just like I said, I.

Think it's a good aid.

I think it's interviewer.

Yeah, it's a good aid.

Like I'm just finishing up another book project and I'll submit it into three or four different AI models and say I want you to evaluate this.

Don't be flattering because it likes to go, this is amazing, you're the best ever.

And I'm like, no, be honest, critical assessments and stuff, give me a 1 to 10.

And then what's missing?

And a lot of times it comes back and it goes, there's nothing personal in here.

You've got no personal reference to it.

It's just facts and figures and it doesn't have the experience.

It doesn't think.

We think at the thinks can write a poem that will make you cry, but it's never experienced heartbreak where.

If you have an author who can explain and talk about heartbreak, how to, how can you explain the taste of salt to someone who's never tasted salt?

That's where you need a good ghostwriter.

Right.

Somebody who can do that.

You know, many of our listeners are skilled at generating short form content.

Blog posts, social media, email newsletters, and again, AI I think is good for those low level tiers for just getting content out there and some awareness.

But what is the fundamental difference in structure and strategic thinking between creating effective marketing content and building the cohesive, compelling narrative required for a bestseller?

Right, yeah, so yeah, they're quite different.

Quite different in approach.

A book is real weighty and that's probably what gives it so much credibility.

It's 150 to 250, maybe 300 page piece.

So for it to warrant that kind of length, it has to really say something.

It has to have a lot of layers to it and it has to be important and meaningful for it to warrant that kind of length.

You know, of course there's plenty of books that are written that I'm sure we've all read them that are terrible and they shouldn't probably have been a book that could have been an article.

But perception wise of the reader.

And also just in terms of writing good books, it has to have something to say that's meaningful and something that has depth to it and permanence and something that warrants that kind of process to put it all together.

So when we're looking at writing a book compared to an article, and we don't, as a company, we don't write articles in isolation.

It's not something that we even do.

We will write articles based on a book narrative, something like that.

But when it comes to short form, we only do those as derivatives from the book.

Which is also another great reason to have a book.

You know, you can spin off articles and chapters and publish them in short form.

But yeah, it's a very different.

It's a very different approach to writing a book.

You really have to think about also just who the reader is.

You have to think about the fact that it's something that's going to last longer than a couple of months of a trending topic.

So there's a.

So it's a different scope in terms of both the size of it as well as what it's going to do for you as an author long term.

Makes sense for the entrepreneur who's attempting to write their own book.

What's the single most common yet critical editing mistake you see?

And what is one simple technique that they can maybe use to self correct their work?

Well, my advice would be never self correct your work because you can never edit yourself.

I would not edit myself.

You always have to have an objective outside perspective.

Actually a good one.

A good one that is.

The biggest mistake that I often see is having Uncle Tom or Aunt Lily.

I have a friend being your editor.

Oh, they're an English major.

Oh, they wrote a couple books.

So I'd rather just have them do it for free than pay an editor.

If you can't afford professional services or have a limited budget.

If there's one thing you can spend money on an editor, someone that is totally objective, that doesn't care what your sister in law might think of her after it, whatever it is, just have an objective editor, that's a professional editor review the book because they will bring things out.

Even if they did a good job.

The fact that they know you and have some kind of bias just because of their affiliation with you is going to affect the objectivity of that.

Yeah.

So it's really important to just make sure that you're getting a professional, objective look.

And the fact is you're going to have to pay for that.

Don't try to get it from some college student or whatever, just do it right.

Get a professional editor that's looked at hundreds and hundreds of books and that has a real reputation, that can give you some real honest feedback stuff that you can trust and that could help you elevate your book.

Because once you publish that book book, there's no going back.

Once it's published, someone buys that book, those errors that are in it or the embarrassing story that you said, there's no going back on that.

So it's important to make sure that you're taking care of that before you, before you publish it.

Do you still have that happen where like my editor, she'll find errors in everybody's website.

Different things have you gone through.

You put all the rigor to it.

You got a beautiful book that's out there and all of a sudden you open it up and you see a typo?

Well, yeah.

So let's just be clear.

Every single book published has some kind of error or typo in it.

There's no clean good disclaimer.

There is no clean book out there.

A little typo that's going to happen in dictionaries there isn't a book out there that is 100% clean and perfectly written.

Of course, there's different levels of that.

You shouldn't have too many.

But the bigger question, the bigger issue is whether it's.

Do you have a whole repeated section that's essentially saying the same thing and wasting the reader's time.

Those are the bigger questions that you really want to make sure you have edited out.

You know what happens with some authors too is they'll.

I won't name any names.

Let's just say that we had a very famous person that did a foreword for our book.

We wrote the forward and they had their name on the book.

And this very famous person ended up in some very problematic legal trouble.

And essentially we didn't want any affiliation with them anymore and neither did the author.

And so in those cases, you might have to do a reprint of the book just to disassociate yourself.

The Subway guy was a perfect example.

Right.

A lot of people were.

Jared from Subway was everybody's favorite.

And then pretty soon you have to go, go back and take them out of your examples because it's.

Yeah, would you.

Something gets debunked.

It happens in our world.

We speakers, we tell stories and sometimes it's like, no, that didn't happen or it wasn't quite like that.

And that's where fact checking and some of the tools like AI can help perplexity or you get onto some of them.

No.

This has been very, very insightful, Kevin.

The website's ka-writing.com Kevin Anderson Associates Ghostwriting Services they got a great website.

They'll recognize a bunch of titles when they get there there if they want to get hold of you or they've got ideas that they want to explore.

We'll have all that information in the content notes.

But I'm assuming they can contact you.

There's a big green button on your website where they can find you and you'll definitely recognize a lot of the titles that are there.

Congratulations on building something so exciting.

It's interesting because I know you have a.

Outside of your professional life, you got a wide range of interests from Belgian style beer to composing music to debating philosophy.

So how did those just as the last question in Rapa, how do those non writing creative pursuits influence your writing and, and does it translate those creative insights?

Well, you know, I think creativity in general has been a guiding principle for me.

Just exploration, trying everything, not being like never being afraid to try something new, never being afraid to fail.

I think that's been a guiding principle through my entrepreneurial journeys in general, and also has helped with a critical eye when it comes to literature.

I'm not really a writer.

I'm too slow to be a ghostwriter.

My background is more editorial and critique.

Critique and just that kind of passion for discovery and also truth.

Right?

What's real, what's accurate, what's not?

Is this sentence making sense or not on a base level, but that whole creative energy and that and just, just the drive for knowledge and experience I think is all part of creating this company and making a good service that's really honest about what it does and and just helping people express themselves in the best way they can and empowering them to be an author.

Well said, Kevin Anderson.

Thank you.

K-writing.com we'll have everything in the show notes Kevin, thanks so much for being our guest today.

My pleasure.

Thanks Michael.

As you are listening to this episode, what is one idea that you've heard that has caught your attention and why does it matter so much to you?

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