What Kind of Author Will You Be?
Everyone has at least one book inside of them. I’ve worked with hundreds of nonfiction authors as a ghostwriter, editor and publisher, and I’ve noticed that most of those I encounter fall into a few buckets. In this series of seven postsI’ll describe them—maybe you’ll recognize yourself.
Here’s the first one.
#1: The Business Storyteller
Your professional experience has been a central part of your life.
It is a part of you. Your book shares what you’ve learned and also who you are because they are tangled together. Your readers gather your wisdom and lessons through your story, which is entertaining, inspiring and educational all at once.
Cliff Lerner is a great business storyteller. He launched an early dating app, grew it to 100 million users, earned $78 million on paper—and then lost it. But he kept what he learned: a lot of lessons and some pretty crazy stories, like learning how to “newsjack,” riding the coattails of a newsworthy event to promote his app, IAmFreeTonight.
He felt compelled to tell his tale and share how he found such wild success.
About half of the authors I have helped over the years are Business Storytellers. Their journey may not have been as spectacular as Cliff’s, but it was a profoundly significant journey for them, one that left them not only with lessons but also with a strong desire to share those lessons. I call these authors “entrepreneurs” in a general sense, for they may work in nonprofits or even large corporations.
Wherever they are, though, they had a deeply formative experience building something.
The books they write are often a combination of their personal story and their business experience, what I call “business memoirs.” Their readers often are other business professionals, aspiring entrepreneurs, and those interested in personal development.
I like working on these books because they have the potential to bring a reader inside a world they might not understand and connect powerfully to the author’s experience in ways that can change lives.
Business Storytellers think about success several ways. Chris Hunter, author of Blackout Punch, wanted to complete the act of telling the world what happened when the FDA tried to shutter his company. Ashley Welch and Justin Jones wanted to attract new clients (and did) when they wrote Naked Sales. Craig Perkins was looking to reboot his career to become a coach, and also to give his daughter “my words to help guide her throughout life” when he wrote Against the Grain.
All of those currencies of success are valid.
And, of course, they want to sell books. Cliff’s book, Explosive Growth, has been a steady seller in the five years since he published it, earning an average 4.4 star rating from almost 600 Amazon reviews, and was called the “top growth hacking book” by Entrepreneur magazine.
