One of the best things I ever did was write a book.
So I did it twice more.
From Me To We tripled my business with corporate clients. That was the plan.
It’s Who You Know took me global. Also the plan. (It’s still selling, by the way. Orders came in again this week, which never stops making me smile.)
Be Brilliant reshaped how I run my business. That one wasn’t the plan – that one was the pandemic. But it pulled all my IP together in one place, and everything I do now is built on it.
All three put my day rate up. All three changed the clients I got to work with. And all three were built into the business by design, not hope.
None of them did that on their own, though. The book was only ever part of it. What I did next was what made the difference, and it’s the same four things every time: positioning, proposition, pricing and plan.
I think about this every time someone sits across from me and says “I need to write a book.” Because I’ve seen more garages stacked with boxes of unsold books than I’d like to admit. And honestly? Most of them aren’t bad books. They’re good books with no plan around them.
Let’s be real for a second. Writing a book is hard. It takes months. Months where you’re not building your profile, not having coffees, not locking in sales. Your bum is glued to the seat as you think, think and think. Write, write and write. Edit, edit and edit.
For a lot of women I work with, the year they write the book is the year their revenue takes a dent, because you simply can’t do everything.
So if you’re going to pay that price, the book has to earn its keep.
And this isn’t only about books. Maybe yours is a white paper sitting in a Google Drive folder. Or the framework you’ve been teaching clients for years without ever giving it a name. Same rule applies. Creating the thing is step one. The commercial plan around it is where the money is.
Whatever yours is, run it through these four questions:
1. Positioning – who needs to see it, and what do you want to be known for once they have?
2. Proposition – what can someone buy from you once they’ve read it?
3. Pricing – does it give you permission to charge more? And are you?
4. Plan – which doors should it open (stages, boardrooms, podcasts, partnerships), and what’s your rhythm for knocking on them?
If you’ve already got one – a book on the shelf, a paper in a drawer, a framework you love – brilliant. You’ve done the hard bit. Now let’s make it work for you.
(That’s exactly what we’ll be doing in the room at the Elevate Immersion in Sydney on 7 and 8 December: taking what you already know and building the plan that gets you known, chosen and paid properly for it in 2027.)
And if yours is still a “one day” idea, even better. Build the plan first and the book will land so much harder when it comes.
Either way, let’s keep it out of the garage.
Janine x