How to Become a USA Today and WSJ Best-Selling Author – In Just 7 Minutes with Alinka Rutkowska

MP3: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Email

• Understand the importance of doing the bookshelf exercise before deciding on what type of book it is that you’re going to write
• Find out tips and resources that will help you determine which book is the best for you
• Find out how to turn your book ideas into best-sellers – the type that serves as door openers for more opportunities in the future

Resources/Links:

• Take a one-minute quiz that will tell you which type of book is the best for you. Go to http://www.leaderspress.com/discover

Summary

Are you an entrepreneur who wants to turn your book ideas into legacy pieces and best-sellers? Do you want to grow your business through a lead generation book?

To build authority and credibility, you cannot just do it by yourself. If you really want those extra clients, it makes a lot of sense to hire an expert to get that result for you.

Alinka Rutkowska is the CEO of Leaders Press, who got 172 authors on the USA Today and Wall Street Journal best-seller lists.

In this episode, Alinka shares insights on how you can become a USA Today and Wall Street Journal best-seller author. If you want to achieve this but you don’t know Alinka, then it’s a must that you dive right in and get to know her now.

Check out these episode highlights:

• 01:19 – Alinka’s ideal client: Our ideal client is somebody who either wants to grow their business and they’re looking to have a lead generation book, or somebody who’s looking to leave a legacy piece.
• 01:53 – The problem she helps solve: The problem we solve is we help entrepreneurs turn their book ideas into best-sellers.
• 02:40 – The symptom of the problem: You would reach a spot in your business or a time in your business where you say, “Okay, we’ve done so many things. We’ve done ads. We’ve done this type of ads. We’ve done this type of PR. We don’t have anything tangible. When people talk to me, they talk to five, 10 others like me. So how am I going to stand out?”
• 04:36 – Clients’ common mistakes when they want to write a book or market it: Very often, people just write whatever is on their minds. They want to get it out. They feel like they have a story to share. They don’t really think about whether the reader wants to read it.
• 05:03 – Alinka’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): First thing you should do is do the bookshelf exercise. You go to a bookstore, you find a shelf, and you say, “Okay, my book belongs to this shelf.” And then you’d want to think about your unique selling proposition. How does your book stand out from the other books on that shelf? And once you have the answer to this question, then you want to get started on your outline, and really cleverly come up with potential calls to action. And once you have that, then you write. And if you’re going to do it yourself, you’d want to be really disciplined and say, “Okay, I’m going to write this book in a month or two months. And in order to do that, this is the number of words I need to write every day. This is how much time it takes me.” Stick to it.
• 06:36 – Alinka’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Take a one-minute quiz that will tell you which type of book is the best for you. Go to http://www.leaderspress.com/discover. Also, discover the 17 steps to get your book done. Go to https://leaderspress.com/self-publishing-on-amazon-20-pros-and-cons/ and get your copy of the “Outsource Your Book”.
• 07:40 – Q: Is the world not already full with enough books? A: No. The world needs your perspective. Some people will only be able to resonate with yours.

Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland 00:10
Greetings, everyone, and a very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing The Invisible. I’m Tom Poland, beaming out to you from Sunshine Coast in Australia, joined today by Alinka Rutkowska.
Alinka, good day to you. A very warm welcome from Down Under. Where are you based?

Alinka Rutkowska 00:24
Thank you so much, Tom. I’m in Italy, so I think we can compete here by the sea.

Tom Poland 00:29
Alright. Folks, this is the second time now for this interview. Alinka and I tried to do this on February 8, which was some four or five months ago now, and I had a glimpse outside of your window on your apartment. My God, you live in paradise there. I’m very, very jealous. Let’s get on with the interview, though. We’ll stop the sightseeing tour.
Folks, if you don’t know Alinka and you want to become a USA Today or Wall Street Journal best-selling author, then you need to know her. She is the CEO of Leaders Press. She’s got 172 authors on the USA Today and Wall Street Journal best-seller lists, which is frickin’ phenomenal. So that, Alinka, is the title of our little interview today. “How To Become a USA Today and Wall Street Journal Best-selling Author”. Our seven minute starts now.
Question number one is who’s your ideal client?

Alinka Rutkowska 01:21
Our ideal client is somebody who either wants to grow their business and they’re looking to have a lead generation book, because Amazon is the search engine so when anybody’s looking for an answer and you can provide that with a book, then that’s the book that you want to do, or somebody who’s looking to leave a legacy piece, such as, for example, the founder of DHL International wanted to tell his story of how he built his billion-dollar empire, and we did that for him. So those are the two types.

Tom Poland 01:51
Could be incredibly satisfying for folks.
So, question two is what’s the problem you solve? How would you sum that up? Six and a half minutes left.

Alinka Rutkowska 01:58
The problem we solve is we help entrepreneurs turn their book ideas into best-sellers. And why would they want that? That’s for several reasons: to build their authority, build their credibility, have the big business cards, because nobody is going to throw out a book that you give them; they will throw out a business card, though. And a little book or even a full-size book that you can get on the USA Today or Wall Street Journal best-seller list and into bookstores does that perfectly.

Tom Poland 02:28
Brilliant credibility builders folks, but they are also great door openers. My first book ended up being a very good doorstop. But once you get a best seller with Alinka, then they become a door opener.
Question three; five and a half minutes left. We’ve got these authors or budding authors, and how would they know they need to work with you? What’s going on? What are the symptoms that would give them heads up and go “I need to reach out to Alinka and find out more about how she does this”?

Alinka Rutkowska 02:57
You would reach a spot in your business or a time in your business where you say, “Okay, we’ve done so many things. We’ve done ads. We’ve done this type of ads. We’ve done this type of PR. We don’t have anything tangible. When people talk to me, they talk to five, 10 others like me. So how am I going to stand out?”
When you’re an author, you stand out. When you’re a best-selling author, you stand out. When you’re a USA Today or Wall Street Journal best-selling author, you stand up. And now, you potentially want to do it all by yourself, or you probably don’t want to learn creative writing right now in the whole publishing industry and how to create a marketing campaign to hit the list and fell out of it ten times and then succeed maybe the 11th time. But you probably have a business to run.
So, if you want that authority, you want those extra clients that will find you through searches, you want to be the authority in your field, and you don’t want to have a second job or project manage the whole thing, like you value the work of professionals and the whole idea of outsourcing and knowing that you should be in your genius zone, running your business, then it makes a lot of sense to hire somebody like me at Leaders Press to get that result for you.

Tom Poland 04:07
Yes. I mean, this is a specialty and most of us don’t have that specialty. We have something else which we make our money with. And I think a lot of people fail to realize that it’s not just about writing the book. It’s actually marketing the thing, getting out of the best-seller books. Otherwise, it just becomes like, I don’t know. A lot of people say their website is like a billboard in the middle of the Sahara Desert. No one notices that you can write a book. I had the same experience. So that’s your expertise.
You already mentioned one of the mistakes, I think, in a roundabout way, which is doing it yourself, saying, “Well, I can just write a book and I’ll do all the marketing.” Question four is what are some of the common mistakes people make when they want to write a book or they want to market it? What else would you add to that list? Three and a half minutes left.

Alinka Rutkowska 04:53
Very often, people just write whatever is on their minds. So, they want to get it out. They feel like they have a story to share. They don’t really think about whether the reader wants to read it.
So, the first thing you should do is do the bookshelf exercise, I call it. It really is market research. So you go to a bookstore, you find a shelf, and you say, “Okay, my book belongs to this shelf.” So, let’s say that’s leadership. You found it in the bookstore. Great. And then you’d want to think about your unique selling proposition. How does your book stand out from the other books on that shelf? And once you have the answer to this question, then you want to get started on your outline, and really cleverly come up with potential calls to action. Where are you going to send people in which place in the book? How are you going to weave it in seamlessly so that it doesn’t look like one big commercial? And once you have that, then you write. And if you’re going to do it yourself, you’d want to be really disciplined and say, “Okay, I’m going to write this book in a month or two months. And in order to do that, this is the number of words I need to write every day. This is how much time it takes me.” Stick to it. We’ve had people who’ve been writing their book for ten years and never actually finished; worked with coaches, spent tens of thousands of dollars on coaches, who happily took their money.

Tom Poland 06:08
Yeah.

Alinka Rutkowska 06:08
The best clients are the committed slow learners, right? And then finally, they came to us and we got it out in less than a year.

Tom Poland 06:18
I have not heard that before. The best clients are committed slow learners. Disguised me pretty well. You just laid out a great roadmap to move forward, and there’s a series of steps there, folks. You’d want to press rewind and play that again several times and take copious notes.
Let’s go to question six, because you covered the last two questions very well. Thanks. But then you’ve got 90 seconds left. Where do people go to find out more about what you do? A landing page where they can get some more good information or even make contact with you.

Alinka Rutkowska 06:53
The best place is http://www.leaderspress.com/discover where you’ll be able to go through a one-minute quiz that will tell you which type of book is the best for you – if it’s the lead generator, the legacy piece, or maybe a chapter in an anthology that will hit the USA Today list. And also, since they’re your listener, you’re going to get an audiobook of Outsource Your Book, which will help you discover the 17 steps to get your book done.

Tom Poland 07:23
Fantastic. Folks, getting your book out there is one of the most worthwhile marketing pieces of assets you can develop. It’s not going to change the world for you, but it’s going to make a really big dent in your marketing efforts. It’s worthwhile. So, it’s http://www.leaderspress.com/discover.
Alinka, we’ve got 20 seconds left. What’s the one question I should have asked you but didn’t?

Alinka Rutkowska 07:44
Is the world not already full with enough books?

Tom Poland 07:50
And ten seconds for the answer.

Alinka Rutkowska 07:51
And the answer is no.

Tom Poland 07:52
Right.

Alinka Rutkowska 07:53
The answer is no. The world needs your perspective. Some people will only be able to resonate with yours. Plus, there are all the benefits you’ll get.

Tom Poland 08:01
Alinka, thanks so much for your time.

Tom Poland 08:03
Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we’re doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.