When Is the Right Time to Write Your Book?

When is the right time to write a book?

This is a question that both of our “Year of Transformation” speakers are grappling with this month.

As you’ll recall, experienced pro speaker Dan Gingiss is working with me to break past a revenue plateau, while newer speaker Michelle Hutchings-Medina is building her first referable speech.

Despite their vast difference in current income and experience, both of these speakers have one thing very much in common…

They are feeling pressure to write, write, write!

This is a common pressure we feel in the speaking world.  

But, let me ask you this… 

How can you fully know what is going to make up the foundation of your book before you’ve had a chance to think deeply about your ideas… test them with audiences… tweak the content… and develop it over time?

That’s a much smarter route for the professional speaker.  To convince you of this fact, let’s do a check-in with our two transformation speakers and see how this past month has been for them…

A Hectic Month, a Huge Stage, and a Surprising Laugh

Dan’s month has definitely been a hectic one with lots to juggle.  

One of his highlights was a trip to Macao, China to give a speech at the Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT) event.  Dan shared, 

“It's one of the biggest stages in the world, and they insist that you send them a script months in advance because they are live translating into nine different languages. They've got a teleprompter and all this stuff. So I actually took an old version of what Andrew and I had worked on and used that as my intro.”

This event gave Dan the chance to test one of the new intros he’s been developing with me to open his existing keynote on customer experience.  It happened to be an older version of the intro, which we’ve since moved on from.  

Still, Dan was pleased with how it was received…

“One of the things that happened that I did not expect, especially because it was being live translated into nine languages, is people laughed at it… I think they responded really well to it. It's interesting because I liked this concept from the beginning. 

I was glad I got a chance to run with it. I would say it's still workable and I would continue to play with it as a potential option because it definitely tees up this Complexity Tax thing really well.”

The Complexity Tax he’s referring to is a deeper idea we’ve been working on to take Dan’s existing speech from expert to visionary.

Lately, Dan and I have spent a significant amount of time discussing whether he should begin developing a new book idea that could eventually evolve into a brand-new keynote.

“I wanted to conduct research early on because my other two books depended on third party research. And for this next book, I really want to have proprietary research. I think it's important, especially as I'm entering a space where I'm not as credible of a thought leader.”

He found a research partner and was just about to embark on finding a sponsor for the $35,000 research to start this five-month process…

Michelle Faces the Pressure to Write

With that, let’s switch gears and look at our newer speaker…