The Published Author Podcast

Michelle Tillis Lederman has written four books and with each one she’s discovered that a personalized approach to PR and marketing brings the most success. This makes perfect sense. Michelle is the author of The Connector’s Advantage and The 11 Laws of Likability.  She’s a connector at heart.

Drew McLellan has written seven books. That’s quite an achievement for a man who runs a busy and successful ad agency, as well as the Agency Management Institute (AMI).  But Drew stumbled upon a clever approach which meant that writing books was a collaboration, and therefore less work for him.

Ask innovators how they came up with a great idea and they’ll typically say it just came to them. But probe carefully and you’ll find they invariably followed a step-by-step formula that anyone can follow.

Nonfiction books with stories using the narrative arc are almost guaranteed to be successful. Former publisher and writing coach Allen Arnold says that well-written stories engage readers, draw readers in, and make the content memorable. “In today's world of distraction with so little time to read, you have to compete for a reader’s attention,” says Allen. “It can't be enough just to say, this is something that I thought you might want to read, I've written a book, now buy it.

Writing a book isn’t a solution. It’s just part of the journey to business growth and opportunities to make a lot of money. Tyler Wagner, Founder of Authors Unite, is a book marketing expert, and knows all the tactics entrepreneur-authors can use to grow their income on the back of a book.

Sarah Weise is living proof you can write and publish a successful business book in just a few weeks. Of course, years of research and thinking led to the point where the CEO of the marketing research agency BIXA was ready to write. But the resulting bestselling book, InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z, just flowed onto the page.

After writing his first book last year, speaker and leadership consultant Peter Kozodoy firmly believes in the power of networking to generate awareness and ramp up book sales.  Author of Honest to Greatness: How Today's Greatest Leaders Use Brutal Honesty to Achieve Massive Success, Peter tells Published Author Podcast host Josh Steimle that all of the speaking opportunities he’s received have been either through his book agent or his network.

Unusually for an entrepreneur, Dr. Reyzan Shali wrote her book not to grow her medical practice business or to get speaking gigs. Instead, her motivation was to honor her parents and help her patients.  The physician, who is an internal medicine specialist in California, self-published Teaming Up Against Cancer: Simple, Powerful Ways to Beat the Odds and Take Your Life Back because her mother and father had been such great parents and encouraged her to get an education.

When they launched a Sonoma wine business in their laundry room in 1986, Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan were business consultants with no industry knowledge and no money, just $300,000 worth of bulk wine. Today, they’ve written thousands of articles and two best-selling books—The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle and Heart Built America’s Number One Wine Brand and The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways to Engage and Empower your People.

British entrepreneur Chris Ducker has experienced the power of a book to grow his business not once, but twice.  His first book, Virtual Freedom: How to Work with Virtual Staff to Buy More Time, Become More Productive, and Build Your Dream Business, was published in 2014 and continues to sell well today.  Four years later, Chris wrote and self-published Rise Of The Youpreneur: The Definitive Guide to Becoming the Go-To Leader in Your Industry and Building a Future-Proof Business.