Most of them are in a garage.
BOOK YOUR BUSINESS · MMXXVI
The author bought two hundred copies himself, because two hundred was where the printer stopped punishing him on price. Those books are now stacked by the water heater, still in their shrink wrap. One box has been holding the garage door open since the clocks changed.
He knew his subject, probably better than anyone who will ever read the book. He hired an excellent ghostwriter and got clean chapters, delivered on time, with prose he felt proud to put his name on. And at no point did anybody in the process ask him the simple yet essential question:
When this book is finished, what changes in your business because it exists?
That’s one way a business book disappears. Another is face down beside a lamp, forty pages in.
My way into business books started in places where attention had a price tag. I wrote fiction for readers with stacks of other books nearby and screenplays for people with another twenty scripts beneath mine. Before that came sales letters and email, where you could see exactly how long somebody stayed with you before they disappeared. You get sensitive to boredom when the reader always has an exit within reach.
I’ve also built businesses where the book had a job after the reader put it down. We decide what that job is first, then we outline the book around getting the reader there.
The business model always comes before the outline because the outline has to know what the book is there to make happen. We decide who needs to read it, what should change after they do, and how the book fits into the business around it.
A fire truck and an ice cream truck are both trucks, but the shared noun stops being useful fast. The same is true of business books. A book built to create speaking demand takes a different shape from one meant to bring in consulting clients, and that difference is born in the outline.
Story gives that outline forward motion. It opens questions at the right moment, delays the answers long enough to create curiosity, and gives the reader a reason to keep moving while the phone is sitting six inches away. It’s where our background gives us an advantage that’s hard to find anywhere else.
You’ve felt what happens when the machinery is missing. Page forty of something somebody swore you had to read. Your eyes are still moving, but nothing is landing.
So you set it face down on the nightstand to answer one message. Eight months later it’s still there, under a charging cable.
That reader was your buyer.
One problem leaves inventory in the garage. The other leaves the reader somewhere around page forty. By the time either one shows up, the decisions that caused it were made months earlier.
Everything you know, in the order it came out of your mouth. It reads like a transcript because that’s what it is.
Forty posts and a cover. Every one was written to stand alone, so together they mostly stand around.
Fast, clean, entirely plausible. A machine trained on the whole shelf is very good at making one more book that belongs there. It knows the shelf too well to leave it.
Aimed at nobody in particular, so that’s exactly who picks it up.
None of those is a writing problem. Each one is a framing decision that got made before chapter one by not being made at all. And by the time a draft starts sagging in chapter four, the walls are up and everybody’s emotionally attached to the kitchen.
So we start with the decisions that give the book its shape.
WHICH BOOK · iv ·
James Clear wrote an Authority Builder. When the subject is habits, his name comes out of people’s mouths whether he’s in the room or not.
Phil Knight wrote a Journey Illuminator. He barely stops to give advice. He tells you what happened. By the last page, a generation wanted to go build something.
Brené Brown wrote a book that changed the question event organizers asked. It went from would she be interested to how soon can she come.
Jay Abraham wrote a Client Magnet. People reached the end already halfway to hiring him, usually convinced they had gotten there on their own.
Shelve all four side by side and the shelf hides the only difference that matters. Those books are on different payrolls.
Ten questions will tell you which one yours is.
I’m Sean Platt. I wrote sales letters that had ninety seconds to earn the next ninety. Email sequences where every send handed somebody a fresh chance to leave. Fiction that generated millions of dollars in a saturated market. And screenplays that sold in a town where rejection is the default setting. I’ve also ghostwritten for #1 New York Times authors, Fortune 500 executives, and international celebrities.
I’ve written enough pages to know what happens when attention breaks: the explanation waiting farther down never gets heard.
I’ve built books for founders whose companies are worth a billion dollars, and for people running a practice out of a spare bedroom. The pages don’t get more obedient when the company gets bigger.
HEAD WRITER · SUE WEEMS
MA in English from UC Irvine. She teaches at the University of South Carolina. A decade of ghostwriting nonfiction, most of it sold to Big 5 imprints, for bestselling authors, Fortune 500 VPs, doctors, and founders who’d never written anything longer than an email.
You can ramble at Sue for an hour, contradict yourself twice, lose your own thread, and she’ll hand you back the three stories and two principles your book was trying to be the whole time.
There’s a fair chance you’ve read one of our books. Better than fair if you fly much.
— Sean
FOUNDER · BOOK YOUR BUSINESS
· vi ·
If you’re still deciding what you want to be known for, wait. A book turns a temporary answer into a permanent name tag.
A book can’t make you credible. If the work isn’t there yet, the book puts the empty room under brighter lights.
If the bestseller badge matters more to you than what the book does inside the business, plenty of people sell that. I’m not one of them.
The person this works for has a framework that keeps ending up on other people’s whiteboards. Client results people ask about. A story she’s told a hundred times and can still feel exactly where the room goes quiet.
The book is already there, waiting for its spine.
From hand me the method to please make my book appear.
START HERE
The whole method while the ink is still wet. We’re spending the next year running our Book Your Business OS on real businesses, keeping what works, crossing out what doesn’t, and publishing every revision as the evidence comes in. You get the Galley as it stands today, every revision as it lands, and the errata that show what we crossed out and why.
READ THE GALLEY →DO IT YOURSELF
The Book Business Blueprint: the book’s job, its reader, its shape, and its line to the money, settled before anybody writes a word. Build it yourself for $50, add my review for $500, or have us build it with you in the Blueprint Intensive. The full $2,500 credits toward Breakthrough or Byline for ninety days.
SEE THE THREE EDITIONS →DO IT WITH US
Twelve weeks, and you leave with a finished draft you wrote. In a room of seventeen, in a smaller studio, or one-on-one with a senior writer. The Book Business Blueprint is included before week one.
SEE THE THREE WAYS IN →HAVE US DO IT
We work out what the book has to earn back, build the Blueprint around it, disappear into your material, and write the manuscript for you. Three increasingly senior editions. At the top, the hands are mine.
WHAT IT COSTS AND WHAT HAPPENS →Somewhere around page 120 there’s more book than one head can hold. Book Your Brain keeps the whole project in the room, and it remembers the manuscript has a job.
JOIN THE BETA →START WITH WHICH · viii ·
The book has probably been leaving clues the whole time. One keeps showing up on the whiteboard. Another is buried in the client story that always makes the room lean forward. Then somebody repeats one of your ideas back to you months later, using almost the same language, and suddenly that belongs in the pile too.
The important decision is what kind of book those pieces are trying to become. That choice reaches into the reader, the opening, the budget, the structure, and the role the finished book can play in the business once it starts moving through the world.
Give the book six minutes before you give it a year.