There’s a myth out there that people should just be able to sit their butts in a chair and write a book—just pour it out of your head onto the page and you’ll have a book eventually.
Well, if only that were true, more of us would be published authors. However, what I find is that most new authors do better when they get some clarity up front.
I’m Amy Collette of Unleash Your Inner Author, and I love to help impact-driven leaders to leave their legacy in print. What that means is that I start with authors at the very beginning, an idea stage, and help them all the way through the writing process and the publishing process, so they get to hold their beautiful printed book in their hand as published authors at the end.
In our first episode, Megan Dougherty and I had a discussion about what it was going to be like for her to go through the two-day intensive retreat.
What was really fun about that conversation is that it came out that she just really wanted to start writing the book and wasn’t sure why we needed to spend all this time doing the prep work.
When I explained that that was a decision filter for everything that was going to happen later in the book—every decision she needed to make during the process, she could just run it through her filter of, does it meet my mission? Does it serve my reader? Does it serve my own goals as an author and entrepreneur?
When that became clear, you could see on Megan’s face and her whole body, and you could probably hear it in her voice, that she got it. She went, Oh, okay, now that makes sense, and it changed her whole energy into one of excitement.
You’ll get a glimpse into what that process looked like at the end and how we came up with the outline for her book in this episode.
You can listen to the episode below or continue to read the blog post!
You’ll learn about:
- The ups and downs of writing
- Structuring your journey and your book
- Figuring out your differentiator
- Shifting the focus to your reader
- Outlining your book
- Breakthrough’s during the two-day retreat
- Balancing flexibility with structure in book coaching
Don’t forget to grab a copy of our free workbook — your unique story can make a ripple.
Watch the Episode
The Ups and Downs of Writing Your Book
Amy: “Ups and downs of the journey. This is something I like to talk about just to let you know what could potentially happen; it doesn’t happen for everyone.
It’s kind of like hero’s journey, really, if you’re talking about reading and stories and stuff, it’s a natural human process. So you start out, you’re up here in the honeymoon period where—I think yours is a little tempered because you’re you’re not like off the charts excited and like, Oh, culmination of my life.
That’s probably good because you don’t know everything that you don’t know yet. So I see this happen after a few writing sessions, and people are feeling those ups and downs of like, Oh, sometimes it’s going well and sometimes it’s really a struggle. I thought it would come more easily.
Now, they kind of know what they’re in for and they hit this sort of bottom point.”
Megan: “I’m a big fan of informed pessimism.”
Amy: “But you just keep going and you’re well familiar with this. You have your coping mechanisms of washing the dishes or feeding the chickens or whatever it is that you do.”
Megan: “The chickens are pretty reliably going to amuse you into a better mood.”
Amy: “Almost any pet is like that, right?”
Megan: “Although right now I’m furious at my cats. They just killed three tomato seedlings. Yeah, I’m going to make them into mittens.”
Amy: “This happens with gardening too.
You plant and you’re all excited and then you got to keep weeding and weeding and weeding and doing all the things and waiting forever and you’re down here [so they can] get ripe and you can eat them and you’re all on the upswing again.
It happens with everything. Do you feel like you’ve experienced this before?”
Megan: “Absolutely. This is the path of doing things.”
Amy: “When you’re down here at the bottom, what’s your best skill or coping mechanism?”
Megan: “Stop whining and get back to work. That’s why God made deadlines.”
Amy: “Exactly. And that’s why we use spreadsheets and all those things to keep track.
You can get unstuck. That’s the important part. You’ve been there before, it’s not a new thing, you can do this.
I often get a call in the middle of the process before I started talking about this more, I’d get the call:
Hey, Amy, I’m just I’m gonna have to postpone for a while because ______________.
Then we have the difficult conversation about Okay, what’s going on? Let’s talk about other things you can do besides just put the book on hold for indefinitely—or maybe ever.
It stops some people and that’s sad to me.”
Megan: “I’m totally comfortable with this. That’s the process. Just like the conference that we run.
I know that 90% of ticket sales are going to happen in the last week. That’s how it goes. Every time, 46 weeks, it’s like, Oh my God, no, one’s going to come. It’s going to be terrible. But you said you were going to do it so you do it anyway.
Then a bunch of people buy on the last day.”
Structuring Your Journey
Amy: “Creating your roadmap. We’re not going to be looking at strain too much for this because this is an activity.
I think for you, let me take a deep breath here first and think about this, because I want to do this in a way that works for you. So I have a process that I use and you’ll let me know if it’s working for you.
You like structure, like you’re not resisting structure. This is refreshing for me because I know how important the structure is. I see people be more successful if they have structure and they don’t fight it.
Some people think that structure is going to box them in or whatever, but structure is there to help you and it’s not written in stone.
Megan: “Ultimate creativity comes from restriction.”
Amy: “Yes. Having some constraints because this book isn’t just everything. It’s a certain path.
I use that metaphor a lot path, a journey and adventure. If you’re taking a trip need to know where you’re going first and then you kind of need to know where you’re going second so you’re not constantly in that decision-making mode.
You’ve already plotted it out for yourself; that’s what we’re going to be doing.
You have a terrific start with your five elements. Now those are those are absolutely essential. I don’t know if those are five separate chapters or if those are—I don’t know how that looks.
I think that’s probably the place to start: writing down the five elements and then you can flush those out, then we’ll talk about what else is important.”
Megan: “Why am I doing this?”
Amy: “Part of it is to get a little out of your head about how it must be, if you have that.
It’s what I call brain flow, just to get the ideas down on paper on computer or whatever, so that you know what you want to do, and then you can play with the order—the setup, the flow of how that wants to look.
Like I said, I don’t know if those five elements are; is each one a chapter?”
Megan: “That’s what we need to figure out. I understand the concept of putting different ideas on different things and moving them around, but I don’t understand how that helps create an outline for a book.”
Amy: “This is a movable way to do it. Do you have an idea, a pretty solid idea of what your outline should be?”
Megan: “No. So I don’t know what is going to be the best way to achieve the goal of convincing people that this is a good idea and they should hire us to do it.”
Amy: “I don’t know that either, it’s your book but you already have a flow with your customers.
The convincing them part probably starts long before they talk to you because they’ve been referred to you for the most part. Someone else has done a little bit of the selling for you already.
They’ve been educated that, you know, they need something. They’re looking for something.
I usually do this in an unstructured way, just fit and then put the structure together, but you really like your structure and you think that way.”
Megan: “I can’t really work without it.”
Crafting the Book Structure
Amy: “Maybe we start higher level and talk about where do you start with somebody? What are the main bits that are important for someone to know?
I assume you’re showing your process of how to do it but there are pieces before and after that.”
Megan: “I never actually thought about that. I don’t know what should be in it.”
Amy: “Let me get that. So I just wrote a book, I think fairly similar to what you structure to what you want to do and it’s in three parts.
This is a great way to start it. Yours may or may not be in three sections—Amy Simpkins is in three sections because there’s the middle part of it of the showing how things are done.”
The first part is understanding what’s going on.
Amy: “In my book, it’s about how to write a book I say the things that I think authors need before they start writing the book and that’s what we’ve been doing in the last two days. They need to know their mission, their readers, themselves as an author, and they need to have some structure.
I throw in a couple other things that are a bonus, like community. Some people really like to have community, and you have that, you have that with your team, that sort of thing. So that’s what I talk about.
These are the things I think that are important and are going to set you up for success.”
The second part is case studies; that’s why I was talking a lot about case studies.
Amy: “They’re stories, interviews that I’ve done with my authors who have struggled with different things and some of those are perfectionism, managing their time, procrastination, afraid they won’t get it done, they won’t finish it, they won’t complete it, afraid it won’t be good enough—those kinds of things.
So I have eight author interviews and each of those chapters is organized in the same way and has a certain flow.”
The third part is, OK, how do you actually do it? How do you actually start doing this yourself?
Amy: “It’s the implementation and more.
You don’t have to give away all your secret sauce there but you want to give people enough of a glimpse into it so the actual super do-it-yourselfers that are never going to hire a coach or a production company to do it, they could actually at least get going with that.
So you’re going to be helping those people. You’re giving them massive value. The other people are going to go, Oh my God, that’s so much work. I’m just going to hire Megan to do it.”
Megan: “That’s really what we go for. We tell absolutely everything because our customer is going to be like, Oh, absolutely not. No way are we doing all of that.”
Amy: “You kind of want to open the Pandora’s box and show all the chaos that it can be if you don’t have somebody helping you with it. So what’s the actual making the sausage look like? That’s an option that might work for you.”
The Business Podcast Blueprints in Three Sections
Amy: “When you think of if you’re coming at it from sort of a three section approach, how would you explain that or what would you put in those sections?”
Megan: “If it’s three sections, then it’s design, refine, create and track.
Designing a show for a particular goal or refining a show for a particular goal, then doing it, and then tracking the results.
So in design refine, that can have a little bit of, should you be podcasting? The answer may surprise you. Then introducing the concept of The Blueprints, the implementations of the actually doing it.
We can talk about the process, three Cs of podcasting, a little of your basics like here’s how to not sound like you’re in a tin can, recording basics. I am not going to assume at all that they’re doing their own editing in house so I’m going to assume here’s how you work, how you find and work with a good producer.
Then tracking. The order that you do it in is design, implement, then track but you need to understand designing, tracking before you can implement effectively.
Maybe that actually needs to go first. What do you think?”
Amy: “What’s more important to your reader?
Do they care upfront about the tracking or do they sort of become a convert to the tracking after?”
Megan: “It’s kind of the tracking that’s the premise that makes this different.”
Amy: “Maybe it does need to come.”
Megan: “Anything that I have to say about implementation process, how to record—literally every podcasting book will have exactly the same details because it’s like math, it just, record in a good space, hire a good editor.
There’s nothing unique or interesting about it. It should be there for hygiene, but it’s not [your differentiator].”
Figuring out your differentiator
Amy: “Well, the design and the tracking, I think are both your differentiators.
So the implementation is—you probably do it a little bit differently than other people because it’s based on the design and the tracking.”
Megan: “You’re right. Cause there is—I wonder if implementation is the wrong thing to have here.
Amy: “This goes back to your decision filters. Is the mission of your book to tell people how to implement?”
Megan: “Yeah, it’s not. Anyone can tell them how to implement.
Amy: “Those five elements go somewhere; is that in the design refine?”
Megan: “Yes, we’ll do that in the opening explaining the theory of here’s the thing that we use, here’s how we do it.
The first half of the book is explaining what this is and why it works and then we’ll go into sort of the choose your own adventure type thing and they can use the rest as a reference for how to actually optimize shows for these individual types of things.
This actually does make room for including more of the implementation type stuff like your recording basics and whatnot. That can just be another reference section at the end so you don’t have to buy another book.
Amy: “I like that and I think it really elevates your expertise because you’re just saying this is a reference section, this is not what you see on the book that everyone else is writing—for us it’s just a reference section.”
Megan: “Exactly. Everyone else’s book is about you do all these things and that’s [our] footnote. I like that positioning of it.”
Shifting the Focus to the Reader
I think you could feel Megan’s excitement and what was really interesting was her process.
It’s something I’ve never really seen before but as she talked through, the big aha moment for both of us was that her differentiator is defined and defining that changed the entire outcome of what the outline was going to be.
What she was going to start with was implementation and then I asked a few questions about what’s most important to the reader and when she switched her perspective from what she had already had in her mind about how the book might look, and she switched it to her reader’s perspective.
She was coming at it from that teaching moment, from that expert teaching that she does with her clients. It came out that the differentiator is not implementation.
Implementation is the same regardless of what kind of podcast you have. Her differentiators are about how she helps decide what kind of podcast you want to have, what kind of metrics you want to track, and how you know if it’s successful, and on and on (I’ll let you read more about that in her book when it comes out.)
It really does distinguish her approach as different, and that’s key. So it changed how she’s approaching the teaching aspect.
An Outline of Megan’s Book
Megan: “We got the theory section, we’ll call it for now, Real Title TBD.
Who should podcast and why? Why podcasting is such a problem for so many businesses and why it doesn’t work so well? (Because the business is the client of the podcast and it must be served and most people aren’t taking that into account when they’re doing their planning.)
We’ll extend that conversation with The Blueprints, what they are, how they solve the problem, how to use them, and that’ll be the definition of here’s what they are—how to use them as a strategic decision-making filter in your high-level goals.
After choosing that, you can pick your individual metrics that are going to bring value to your business, identify, optimize, and track specific value that they create within your business, and then the importance of tracking an accurate value attribution.
Then we get into the choose your own adventure section. It’s how to make these decisions for your business, blueprint first, then exercise restraint about the number of metrics that you’re going to be optimizing for—the how and how many to choose.
This is just a question for me later: Should I organize them according to Blueprint? Maybe, maybe not.
For each individual metric, the type of business it can work well for, Blueprints it works with or doesn’t work with, so that we’ll basically do that strategic decision-making filter for them; give them an example.
How to optimize the show to include it, priorities in recording, production, and promotion to get most of that benefit. Maybe the cost or bandwidth on a team required could be interesting, how to track it and how to evaluate the success or failure.
We’ll do that for each of the metrics that we want to include.
I’m thinking I was getting to something here and it’s in some way in each of these indicate that we can do this for them without any work other than talking on their part, just indicate that in some way.
The reference section will have implementation, the three C’s, recording environment, working with a producer, promotion guidelines, all the every other podcast book.”
Blueprints to Breakthroughs
Megan: “I feel really great about this. How does it strike you as the expert?”
Amy: “This makes me super happy. First of all, glad that you feel good about it. Is it different from what you thought it might be?”
Megan: “Yes it is. I thought it was going to be about the blueprints and each of the blueprints and then within them talking about different things but I think that is not actually the most sensible to go.
It does not most effectively help the reader that we want to help make the decisions for their show because ultimately, the blueprints aren’t the thing they need to choose—it’s the outcome for their business that they want to choose.
The blueprints are just the mechanism by which we help them make that decision. I think this is much better. I’m very excited.”
Amy: “It’s interesting because I was starting to get a clue about that this morning when I was thinking about, Megan, don’t think those the blueprints are each a separate standalone sort of chapter.
I like that they’re really close up to front to the front of the book so that gets highlighted right away.”
Megan: “It’s really just the really quick, *Should I do this thing? Will it help me build relationship? Yes. No—*that’s really their prime function.”
Amy: “Is there any place where you feel: Hmm, not sure how that’s going to work?
Of course you have to figure some of it out but [are there] potential places where you could get stuck or where you might need to talk to Audra to say, Oh, hey, how are we going to do this? or places I can support you to talk you through it?”
Megan: “I’m completely confident that there will be. I am dead sure that there are going to be those moments in time. Right now I’m feeling like I’ve got a book outline and I like that feeling.”
Amy: “I’m feeling like that too. Let’s celebrate!”
Megan: “So I’ve gone from, I should write a book to I have an outline in five hours. Not bad, Amy.”
Amy: “At least a couple other breakthroughs. Along that, really connecting your client to the book, who you can actually help (which is awesome.) That will help you keep grounded in that feeling of service, how are you serving your clients, as well as your own goals.”
Diving In for The Template
Amy: “Is there a place that in the outline, as you look at it, that springs out to say, Oh, my god, I want to write that first?”
Megan: “I want to do the individual metrics. Oh, man, do I love a rubric. I’m the biggest nerd you have ever worked with. I’m super excited to write all of those.”
Amy: “It might be fun to start with one so that you have your template for how you’re going to write those and see if the way you’ve kind of sketched it out works or it needs to be slightly rearranged or whatever.
If that makes you happy and that sounds like fun, then do that first. You won this module too, big time.”
Megan: “Well, you created a really great framework to work in here too. This is your work that you are performing very, very well and it is working excellently.”
How Megan’s resistance turned into excitement
Amy: “Feeling a little bit of resistance on Thursday when we talked, what’s changed for you now?”
Megan: “I’m feeling like I’ve gone from, Okay, we’re writing a book and that’s the thing that we’re doing this year to write a book.
It feels like this really exciting thing that I get to do and it’s going to be a lot of fun. This is an amazing shift from the beginning to now. I think a lot of it was your flexibility with the process.
I know you’ve got very good reasons for going through all the things that you do with people and especially working on books that are more personal in nature and less reference guide-y—digging into fears and potential roadblocks and just your flexibility and kind of letting me focus on where I am more excited rather than doing this sort of inner work.
I don’t want to say that I don’t need it but that is not effective to me personally at this point in the process. I think you’re being flexible and that was huge in terms of me getting over the resistance to the process.”
Balancing Flexibility with Structure
Megan: “What do you think about that being flexible kind of thing?”
Amy: “First of all, I really appreciate you not feeling like you had to fit into—like square peg into a round hole kind of thing. You saying that that doesn’t really work for me or asking me to re rephrase a question or tell you why it mattered.
As a coach, that helps me tremendously. Just like as an editor, I should be able to explain every change to you. I should be able to say, here’s why I think if you switch these two paragraphs, switch the order of them, why it works better.
If you don’t agree, we’re switching them back; but I should be able to explain everything and be able to tell you why it matters, why you should care, or let’s not use it.
It was a bit of a challenge, honestly because your approach is really different from way I’m used to working and I also know this process works.
I’ve had other people resisted, that’s not that unusual. People just want to get started writing and they’re like, we don’t have to do all this upfront other stuff—but that’s my differentiator. That’s what sets me apart from other writing programs is because I know it matters to spend this time doing this work because it helps all the way through the rest of the process.
As you call it, the decision filter, you have those things to always go back to and it supports, it’s the foundation for everything else; so it’s worth spending two days on.”
Megan: “We talked about this and for those listening in the first episode, you’ll have heard, I was hesitant about devoting two whole days to kind of what at the time I felt like was fluff—but I have come to very much understand that it is not fluff and now I’ve got a tool to use to write my own book.
So, Amy, hats off to your process and knowing that while it is flexible to the individual person, which is amazing, there’s a reason for it and it needs to be done.”
Final Thoughts
I hope you take away with you some of that joy and excitement that Megan had at the end of our two-day intensive retreat. It was a really creative, powerful time for her to bring her story to life.
She also has a more clear definition and understanding of her client than I see in most authors. That’s something that will really help her moving forward, and I think it brings to light her marketing experience. Of course, that’s a place where she would deeply understand her ideal reader.
It’s different every time with every author so it’s really important that just like Megan did, she stayed flexible throughout the process and stayed open to whatever was going to come her way and whatever ideas were going to drop in—and so did I.
As a coach, I need to work with the author where they are and with their unique talents, their perspective, and whatever questions they’re going to throw at me. So the next step for her is to actually start the writing part.
We talked a little bit before about the Valley of Despair, and she may not experience that in her first writing venture. So we’ll catch up with her next time and see how she’s doing after she starts writing the actual book.
During our conversation, Megan asked me about calls to action in the book. Should she make calls to action, which is, Hey, if you want help with any of this stuff, give me a call, contact me, and I say, yes, I think you should.
You’re talking to your target market in your book and those people want to do the thing that you are teaching them to do. Not all of them are going to do it by themselves. Some are going to reach out and want to have some support and guidance along the way.
I will demonstrate one for you right now with my call to action, which is…
Hey, if you’re thinking about writing a book and you don’t know where to start, I want to talk to you! I want to help educate you, answer your questions.
You can start with my book. You can start with some of the free resources on my site or book a call with me here.
Key Quotes
“Ultimate creativity comes from restriction.” – Megan Dougherty
“As a coach, I need to work with the author where they are and with their unique talents, their perspective, and whatever questions they’re going to throw at me.” – Amy Collette
Resources
Unleash Your Inner Author | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook
- Join the UYIA Coaching Program. (Next Session starts soon!)
- Get your book published here.
Thinking of writing a book? Get your copy of Unleash Your Impact
Megan Dougherty | LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
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