How can you build a scalable business around non-fiction books? How can you turn a book into multiple streams of income? How can you delegate in order to scale? Michael Bungay Stanier shares his thoughts.

In the intro, Bookfunnel's Universal Book Links, and How to Write Non-Fiction Second Edition; ALCS survey results of writers on AI, remuneration, transparency and choice; AI Translation is the Game-Changer’s Game-Changer [The New Publishing Standard]

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Michael Bungay Stanier is the bestselling author of five books, with a million copies sold, including The Coaching Habit, How to Begin, and How to Work with (Almost) Anyone. He's also the founder of training and development company Box of Crayons, a podcaster, speaker, and coach.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

Michael's publishing journey and why he likes the control of hybrid publishing
Creating a business ecosystem beyond the book — multiple streams of income
Tips for successfully delegating in your author business and improving professional relationships
The challenges of creating a premium print journal
How journaling can help you figure out what you really want

You can find Michael at MBS.works or BoxofCrayons.com. You can get the journal at DoSomethingJournal.com.

Transript of Interview with Michael Bungay Stanier

Joanna: Michael Bungay Stanier is the bestselling author of five books, with a million copies sold, including The Coaching Habit, How to Begin, and How to Work with (Almost) Anyone. He's also the founder of training and development company Box of Crayons, a podcaster, speaker, and coach. Welcome to the show, Michael.

Michael: Jo, I'm so happy to be here. It was earlier this year that you and I were hanging out in a field together, and this is warmer and less damp, amongst other things.

Joanna: Yes, indeed. We were at The DO Lectures in Wales, which we're going to come back to. First up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.

Michael: Well, the seed was planted by having a grandmother who was a writer. So my dad's mum lived in Oxford, England, and she wrote columns for the local newspaper, kind of gossip columns. Her pen name was Culex, which is Latin for mosquito, which I love.

She also wrote kids’ books, and memoirs, and plays, and radio scripts. She was a really prolific writer.

So I think that was probably the early seed, along with my dad being a great storyteller. He would tell stories at night of Sir Michael. I was meeting Sir Nigel, Sir Angus, my two brothers, and we'd head off and have adventures.

So this idea of loving stories and loving writing, I think was planted pretty early on. I found in university and in my first careers after university, I would inevitably end up writing the newsletter. In university, I was part of the law newspaper and the English department newspaper.

Writing and writing and writing has just been part of the practice for a long time.

Which, as you know, is all part of putting in your 10,000 hours, finding your voice, learning how to write a sentence. Starting off copying other people's styles and then trying to find your own style emerging from that.

The first time an actual book idea showed up in my head, and this turned into an actual book that I published called Get Unstuck & Get Going. I had this idea that I thought about coaching, which was a profession I just started in. I was like, you know, there's a way of doing this that can be more efficient than actually having a coach.

I had this idea of like the kids’ flip books, where you have like a ballerina's head and a scuba diver's body and a soccer player's legs, and you kind of combine them into these kind of different combinations. I had this idea that you could create a book with different questions.

So you'd bring a problem to the book, and you'd open it and randomly generate some questions, and voila, you'd have a self-directed coaching practice. So I had this idea, and wrote some stuff up, and went and made some prototypes.

Then I honestly just couldn't figure out how to publish it because no publisher wanted this, and self-publishing felt impossible.

So I kind of put it in a drawer, until my cousin Robert went, “You know that book you were telling me about, this kind of self-coaching book? I noticed you're not doing it, and I was telling my boss about it, and he thought he his company could do it.”

I was like, “Wait, no, what? Ah!” So that was kind of the catalyst to me getting a first book published. After that —

I just realized that writing books and producing books and getting them out in the world is one of the best expressions of the way I try and serve the world.

Joanna: I love that, and it's a really interesting story. Just give us a sense of the timeline because you said there that self-publishing would be difficult. I mean, self-publishing that kind of book would be difficult. You've got five books now with, I presume, different publishers or self-publishing.

Tell us a bit about that publishing journey and the timeline.

Michael: So, let's see. Get Unstuck & Get Going would have been around about 2006, so before Amazon and others kind of made self-publishing a regular book normal.

Then I self-published another book called Find Your Great Work, and did a print run of like a couple of thousand copies. I was super excited about it. A friend of mine went, “Oh, this is good,” and he sent it to his editor at Workman, which is a New York publishing house. They came back and said they'd like to publish this.

I was like, well, I've already published 2000. They're like, well, soon as those are done, we'll redo this book for you. So in 2010, I think, I published a book with Workman in New York. So that was a regular publishing experience.

Then 2011, I partnered with Seth Godin, who is a marketing blogger, author, general kind of guru guy. He had a year where he partnered with Amazon and produced a book a year through them, only created through Amazon.

I created an anthology called End Malaria. It was pretty exciting, actually. We had like 60 people. They all wrote articles around how to do more great work.

All the money raised from that book, not just the profit, but all the money, all the revenue, went to Malaria No More. We raised $400,000, and we hit number two overall on Amazon.com with that.

Joanna: I should just say on that, I think, well, one, I'm a fan of Seth Godin. I've talked about him a lot on the show, so my listeners know of him.

Also, that's how I think I first heard of you for the first time.

I bought that book, and lots of people bought that book, regardless, but to support that as a charitable work.

Michael: Yes, it was a project I'm very proud of because I was like, oh, this is using what I can do, which is write books which I know a bit about, and connect with people which I know a bit about. With having the partnership with Seth, I'm like maybe we can make something cool happen here.

So the next book wasn't until 2016, but it was my big breakthrough book. It was called The Coaching Habit. It was because I spent four years trying to pitch this book to Workman who published Do More Great Work, as it became called.

They kept turning me down. I kept writing the book and designing the book and writing proposal. I went through probably six or seven iterations of the book. I did a lot of writing, and they kept saying, “Ah, no, it's not quite right. We don't like it. Go back and have another go.”

At a certain point, Jo, I went, “Okay, this is it. This is the book. Take it or leave it.” I was pretty sure that they would take it because by this stage, Do More Great Work had sold maybe 70,000 copies. So that's a pretty good performance, and I was thinking they would bet on the author, but they didn't.

They turned me down. I was affronted and depressed, but at a certain point I was like, there is something here in this book.

I explored what I thought was going to be self-publishing, but emerged into kind of hybrid publishing.

I work with a company called Page Two, and they have this hybrid publishing model which we can dig into.

That came out February 29th, 2016. So February 29th, because I could pick my pub date, and I'm like if this book doesn't sell very many copies, I can say on its first birthday, it sold X number of copies, even though that's a four year stretch. You know, always thinking.

That book just took off. So it sold almost 200,000 copies in its first year. It's sold now probably a million and a half copies. Maybe not quite that much, but kind of getting close to that number.

Four years later, I published a sister book to that, called The Advice Trap, which is a kind of deeper dive into how do you tame your advice monster. So now I was on a roll. I'm like, I've got this thing.

So a book that followed that is called How to Begin, which is about what you do when you hit midlife and you're trying to figure out what you do next. It's how do you find a worthy goal.

Then my most recent book is called How to Work with (Almost) Anyone, which came out, I've lost track now, maybe a year ago, bit over a year ago.

Somewhere in there, there was one other little book that I published, which was like a daily provocation. It's one of those books with 366 pages, each page is a date with a question or a provocation in there.

Joanna: I love that because you've done so many different ways of publishing. Have you done all of the books—the rest of them, the recent ones—with the hybrid publishing?

Michael: I have, yes. Ever since The Coaching Habit, I've just loved this partnership with hybrid publishing. It's a really good model, particularly if there's more to your business than selling books. If your book is often a doorway into other stuff that you do, they're a particularly powerful partnership.

You and I both make a good living through selling books, Jo, but we're in the minority.

Most people don't make a living selling books, so it has to be a book-plus.

What that business model does is give me much more control over my book, without me needing to worry about all the minutiae detail stuff that I'm not good at and not interested in.

It gives me freedom to distribute my books out in the world in a way that can generate bigger returns through my speaking or through my training or through other stuff that I do.

Joanna: I think this is a really important point. I mean, you mentioned there the business beyond the book. So give people a sort of clue as to the other ways that you make money, but also that you have made money, because you're a multi-passionate creative.

You do things that maybe they're kind of project based, and then you move on. I think it's really interesting because a lot of people say, well, you just start doing one thing and that's it, but—

You seem to pivot quite often.

Michael: Yes, some would say multi-passionate creator, other people would say easily distracted.

So I started a training company called Box of Crayons, you mentioned it in the introduction. It sells and licenses the IP that's from The Coaching Habit book and The Advice Trap to big companies. So their clients are people like Microsoft and Salesforce and Gucci, kind of these big name brands.

It's trying to get thousands of people to change their behavior so that when they're leading people, they can be more coach-like and ask better questions.

So I started that company. I still own it with my wife, but luckily, I don't run it anymore.

Four or five years ago, one of the team stepped up to become the CEO. She's so much better at being a CEO than I am. I'm a terrible, terrible CEO.

So that's a multi-million dollar a year company, like $5 million or $6 million in revenue. The profit of that company gets shared a bit with me, and a bit with the people in the company, and a bit reinvested back into the company.

How to Begin, which is the book on setting a worthy goal, a goal that's thrilling, important, and daunting, there's a business model on the back of that which is an online training course for about 50 bucks, I think, or 100 bucks. It's a kind of a deeper dive into that work.

The real economic engine behind there is a membership group called The Conspiracy.

So The Conspiracy is where people come together to do the work and actually make progress on their worthy goal.

Many of us feel that call to do something bigger and braver and bolder than ourselves, but it can be pretty daunting to do it by yourself. So this is a community, an encouragement, and some structure to keep making progress. That's mostly run by a small team of one full-time person and a couple of part-time people.

There's a theme here, Jo, which is that—

I try to start things, and then I try to get out of the way.

Because if I'm running a business, we're in trouble. If other people are running businesses, we've got a chance.

I give speeches, so sometimes webinars from my office, but sometimes I get on a plane and I fly different places to give a speech. The success of The Coaching Habit book means that I am ridiculously well paid for doing that.

Keynote speaking, if you can crack it, is ridiculously lucrative.

If you're Brene Brown, you're charging a quarter of a million dollars to give a talk.

Joanna: Wow.

Michael: Yes, exactly. If you're me, my rack rate, as we call it, is $50,000 to give a speech. Now, that's an enormous number, and it's partly there to have most people go, “That's ridiculous. Why would we pay you that much money?”

That means that I can stay focused on the stuff that I really want to do, which is to create and to write and to build new stuff, rather than be on the road giving speeches. So partly it's to try and make myself inaccessible.

Let's say I give about 10 to 15 speeches a year, and definitely not everybody pays that sort of amount of money, but that's the start of the conversation around that.

Then there's book sales, and working through the hybrid model, you can expect somewhere in the 30% to 40% royalty rate. It's not really a royalty, but in terms of money generated for a book sold, 30% to 40%.

That is roughly three to four times more than you would on a traditional publishing deal, where your royalty rate's more likely to be in and around 10%. It's less than if you just did a straight publishing, uploaded a PDF to the Amazon enterprise and sold ebooks through them.

Joanna: I love this. This is so useful for people, for me and for people listening, because, like we've said, it's about building an ecosystem around your personal brand. This is basically what you have built. Your name is the thing that is, I want to say famous. Your name is what people recognize, and then there's all these other things.

There's a couple of follow up questions. So one is, way back when, did you design this? Like coming out the gate, did you go—I am going to design this ecosystem business around a personal brand?

Or was it just you took opportunities, followed ideas, and there was no potential planning around it?

Michael: Well, ironically, the planning that was there was trying not to build a personal brand.

Joanna: That's really funny.

Michael: The thing is, I would say that my name is largely unknown, as much as it might be.

I mean, for a book that sold a million and a half copies, lots of people who've got their hands on that don't know or haven't really registered the name Michael Bungay Stanier.

Not in the way that like a Dan Pink, or a Susan Cain, or a Brene Brown, or any of these folks are known. In part, that's because when I was building Box of Crayons—and that's the business I spent most of my time building, I spent 17 years working in that business directly.

I was like, the business is called Box of Crayons. It's not called Michael's Training Business because I wanted to make myself redundant as fast as possible. The reason for this, Jo, is kind of a philosophical one and a practical one.

The philosophical one is at the heart of the work I do, it's to invite people to step into the best version of themselves, to kind of take responsibility for their own freedom, to unlock their greatness. Part of the act of doing that is for me to create space for them to do that.

As somebody who got dealt lots of the great cards: straight, white, over educated, English speaking man, blah, blah, blah, I've got a lot to give away. So my job is to get out of the spotlight as much as possible so that other people have an opportunity to step into that space.

Practically, I want to do that because I'm a fundamentally lazy person. It's like things work better when I'm not involved.

I'm trying to build a life where I'm doing the stuff that I'm best at and I love most.

Some version of podcasting, some version of creating, some version of writing, all of those projects get me most excited. So partly, this is trying to find other people to do the work.

Joanna: This is also interesting to me because there are a lot of us who are independent authors who are ‘doers.' You know, we like doing the work, as such.

So you used the word ‘lazy' there. I know other people who use that word, but actually what you are good at is delegating and trusting other people and helping other people be the best they can to run your business for you, or to be your publisher, or whatever. I actually think this is a real trick.

So how can people who are overly doing, and I include myself in that—

How can we delegate more and better, so that we really focus on the things that we are best at or should be doing?

Michael: That's a wonderful question, and honestly, I wish I was a much better delegator than I am. I'm still too much of a meddler, but you're right, I've been practicing for quite a long time to try and make myself better at that.

Partly, it's I'm lucky enough to have a wiring that has me kind of wired to think about what the next thing is, rather than kind of obsessing about what's happening at the moment. So I'm kind of wired to be able to let some stuff go, which helps for sure.

When I stepped aside from being the CEO at Box of Crayons, and Shannon was coming in to take on that role, honestly, she was totally freaking out about it. I wasn't. I was freaking out a little bit, but not really like she was.

She was freaking out because I had hired her from behind the bar of my local pizzeria four years earlier. This is her first job. Now, it's her first job, but I hired her as she was in the tail end of her completing her PhD in literature. She's incredibly smart, and I just went, you have a ton of potential.

Really quickly, it just became obvious to me and the person who was coaching me that maybe this person could be a CEO. So we're like, okay, how do we set you up?

We hired somebody for two years to help us in this transition, a year leading up to Shannon becoming the CEO in a year after it. That was very helpful because that just helped somebody look at the two of us and make sure that we didn't collude in our own destruction.

That's something that can definitely happen because founders are terrible at handing over control, for the most part. The other thing we did, Jo, which was really helpful, is we used the tool that comes from Susan Scott's book called Fierce Conversations.

It's based on a tree metaphor, and it sets out four different levels of decision making. Twig, Branch, Trunk, and Root.

Shannon and I went back and forth to figure out what the decisions were for Box of Crayons.

Now, Twig decisions are decisions that I will never hear of, just never know about. It's just not in my future life will I ever come across what that conversation was about.

Branch decisions are ones that probably I hear about afterwards, either in a conversation with Shannon, or maybe her monthly update to the company, which I'm part of. Those are those decisions. Nothing to do with me, but I'll find out about them.

Trunk decisions, and this is where it starts getting interesting, are decisions for Shannon to make, but for her to talk to me before she makes them.

Then Root decisions are decisions that I get to make as the owner of the company.

Those are categories that are useful for whenever you're looking to delegate to figure out where does the power rest in this decision making. Now for Box of Crayons, where we got to pretty quickly was to realize that actually I only had two decisions, two Root decisions that I could make.

One is, do I sell the company or not? The other was, do I fire Shannon or not? Because in this instance, I wanted this to be Shannon's company that she was running that I happened to be a shareholder in. Not Michael's company that Shannon was managing on my behalf.

It just meant that we came up with a hierarchy around what those decisions are. So that's one tool that helped.

The second tool that helps, and I kind of touched on this actually quite a lot in the book How to Work with (Almost) Anyone, is with most of the people with whom I work—

We have a conversation about how we work best together so that we get what we want.

That doesn't normally happen. You think it would, but most of the time when you start working with somebody, you plunge into the “what” of the work. The doing of it, the stuff that needs to get done, the stuff that needs to get delegated. Here's why we're having the meeting, blah, blah, blah.

What I do with the people with whom I work is I'm like, let me tell you the best experience I've had with when I'm working with somebody like you, in the kind of role you have.

Why don't you tell me the best experience you've had when you're working with somebody in my position, in my role? What's the worst experience that we've had?

What will we do when things get broken? Because they will get broken, everything gets broken in time. The fabric always rips.

So setting up those conversations allows us to get a little clearer about how we best work together, which means that both they and I are more comfortable about what's being delegated.

Joanna: Yes, that's super useful. I think often the conversations—and authors, writers, you know, many of us are far more comfortable writing. So, I mean, people can do a sort of first draft of that in writing, get the ideas down and then talk about it. As you say—

A lot of this is relationships, and that always involves a little bit of having to talk to people.

Michael: Exactly, and it's like you also have to understand what your standards are.

Most of us don't know what good enough looks like, and most of us don't know what excellent looks like. If you don't know it, how on earth can somebody who you're delegating to find the right level on which to perform.

So it's doing your own work to kind of go, look, this is what I mean by getting this done. This is what it looks like. This is what it doesn't look like. It's taken me a long time to learn this, Jo, but —

I've just found that the sooner I can make minor adjustments, kind of lightly tap the tiller, the easier it is for everybody.

So I have an assistant, Claudine, and when something isn't quite as I want it to be with Claudine, I don't hoard it. I don't linger over it. I just ping her a quick note, going, “This, I prefer it to be A, not B,” and she's like, cool, got it. Then she builds it into her process.

Joanna: Yes, that's great. So I wanted to return to your book projects because you have a premium Do Something That Matters Journal coming in 2025. Now, many of us people listening, we do premium print editions of our books, and sprayed edges, and foil, and all this.

We can do we can do anything now. Like pretty much as independents or hybrid as you are, we can do anything. I do know that a journal is tough.

Tell us about your journal. Why do it? What have been some of the challenges?

Michael: Doing a journal is tough.

When I talk to my Page Two folks, the hybrid folks, they're like, whoo, there's a journal mafia out there. I mean, it's relatively easy to create a journal, at least it feels easy compared to writing a “proper book” in inverted commas.

So it can be really tempting to all of us to go, “Look a journal, how hard is it?” It's like, throw down a few questions, have a lot of blank pages, add a ribbon, maybe a bit of an elastic thingy to hold it shut, and you're signaling journal.

If you go onto any of the online retailers, there's a gazillion journals for sale, most of them cheap, shoddy, nasty, underwhelming. So I was like why on Earth would I do a journal?

With almost every single book I create, I get to a place where I'm like, screw it. It doesn't matter if this doesn't sell, this just needs to be created by me.

So I get kind of clear on what success is. Sometimes it's like, you know, it doesn't have to sell that many, I want to get this thing out in the world, and I want it to be created.

So too with this journal. It was like, do I want to do this journal? I've got this idea, I think I know how it might work, and I've got a way of where it connects. It connects to the How to Begin book. So it's part of that ecosystem. So this comes down to understanding what your business and your business ecosystem is.

So, okay, I've got a little marketing machine that is about trying to find people in midlife, trying to figure out what to do. I can sell them the How to Begin book. I can sell them the Do Something That Matters Journal. I can sell them the How to Begin Course. I can sell them The Conspiracy.

There's different ways of bringing people into this ecosystem through these different products that I've created.

The journal is a whole different price point. It's more expensive to create something like this because you're using nicer paper than you would on a regular print book. You've got ribbons. I've got a cloth bound journal with an indented title. So it's all kind of fancy and lovely.

So what made me go yes is, first of all, this is an outcome from my actual journaling practice. I spent 20 years trying to figure out a journaling practice, and this turned out to be helpful for me, and these questions turned out to be helpful for me.

Secondly, it kind of builds on some brand awareness around me, which is that I'm kind of known for asking good questions. This journal not only has regular daily questions that repeat, but it has unique weekly questions that are different over the 18 weeks of this particular journal.

So first of all, it's like, okay, it'll enhance my brand. It's something I will use. So if I don't sell any of these, I've got a lifetime supply of journals. So that'll be fine.

Thirdly, we did a smaller print run than I would normally do. For me, I would normally do an initial print run of a book of around about 20,000 books because I've got The Coaching Habit that continues to sell really well. It sells a couple of thousand copies per week.

It means that I can bet that the rising tide effect will mean that over a lifetime, I should be able to sell 20,000 copies of most of my books. That's the rule of thumb I have.

With this journal, our first print run is 8000 copies. I'd be delighted if I just sell out this first print run, that would be a success for me. Otherwise, it'll be Christmas gifts to everybody I know for the rest of my life.

Joanna: Can I just ask on the product side, because I've looked at this, one of the things is the lie flat.

Does it lie flat?

This is the thing that costs the money, basically. One of the things.

Michael: So mine doesn't lie flat. I don't totally know.

Joanna: As in, do you have to break the spine to lie it flat? Or is it like the Leuchtturm or the Moleskine, where you just open it and it lies flat, basically?

Michael: It has a like, I don't know what the fancy terms are, but it's a hardback. So the spine is a hard ridge.

Joanna: So it's more like a ‘book' book?

Michael: It's more like a book book, but when you open it, you don't have to do anything fancy to be able to write on both sides of the book.

Joanna: Okay. I think this is the interesting thing because different people like different journals. So, for example, I might buy one of those because I want just to see your products and to get your questions, but I may not journal in it. For example, I journal in just a plain other notebook. I use a Leuchtturm.

Michael: Oh, I love Leuchtturms.

Joanna: Yes, I love them too.

The word ‘journal' is, even in itself, an interesting word.

Michael: Right, because there's the Leuchtturm ones where they're really plain, and that's the ones I've used for 10 years. So now I'm moving away from them now with this new journal, or using them differently, at least.

Then you have kind of the planner style journal, which is: write down what you're doing today, write down your top three things, write down your intentions. I mean, it's kind of a more how do I actually hold my universe together.

Then the ones like mine, which is like, here are ways of checking in with yourself. So a little more structured than Julia Cameron's Morning Pages, where you'll just write for three pages or three minutes or something, free flow.

So I'm like, well, this is what's worked for me. It's got the discipline to check in on a daily basis because getting clear every day on what matters most and what you're grateful for and what you're present to, really helps.

You check in on a weekly basis to kind of help you learn and grow and evolve and see the bigger picture.

Joanna: Is that through Page Two? Also, where can people get that?

Michael: It's through Page Two, so that's my hybrid publisher. As you can tell, I love Page Two. I love the expertise of around publishing that they bring, and I love that they understand authors who have a back end.

I love that I get to be in control and make the final decisions on the look and the feel of all the stuff I create because that matters to me.

Joanna: I think it is on Amazon for pre-order. I think that is how I found it.

Michael: It is on Amazon. It's at DoSomethingJournal.com.

Joanna: Fantastic. Okay, so we're almost out of time.

I want to just return to The DO Lectures in Wales, which I'll link to in the show notes. It's very interesting. Let's call it a festival, but it was mostly a festival of ideas. It was full of people looking for a new direction or the next pivot.

You and I were there for different reasons, and I was feeling a need for a pivot. There were lots of people wanting to reinvent themselves.

Now, this is going to come out towards the end of 2024. People moving into 2025, we've got lots of changes in the political things, in AI, and there's so much going on.

If people listening are feeling like a new direction or a new pivot in the new year, what are some of your tips for people?

Michael: I have three suggestions. The first is, a really great question to try and answer every single morning for a period of time is, “what do I want?” It's such a hard question. Oh, man.

It is actually one of the three morning check-in questions that I use as part of this new journal, but you don't need to buy the journal to just use this question. So sitting down with, “what do I want?”

Often when people are at that kind of restlessness, what's becoming clear is what they don't want. I need something to be different, but they haven't yet got a clearer reading, or even started picking up some faint signals around what they do want.

Sit with that. “What do I want? What do I want? What do I want? What do I really want?”

It is hard, but the more you can spend time with that, the greater you're going to find solid earth underneath your feet that will enable you to move and act.

The second question that I think can be really powerful is —

“If I'm going to say yes to this, what must I say no to?”

Most of us, and I include me in this, for sure, we underestimate just how powerful the status quo is. It has a really heavy gravity, and shrugging off the status quo is always harder than you think it is.

When you say no to something, you're actually saying no, most of the time, to someone. Whatever you're thinking as your reinvention, somebody's going to be a bit disappointed in you. They were hoping for more of the same.

So try to figure out what you're going to say yes to, and therefore what you have to say no to. So much of this reinvention process, we add yeses, but we're not brave enough to say no. Your yeses mean nothing unless they come with a no.

The third thing I might suggest is find some people to perhaps do this with, have this conversation with, walk this path with. It can be a coach. It can be an informal gathering of people.

I mean, tomorrow I'm going to a day-long gathering of a brand new mastermind that we're starting up with me and four other people to support each other as we figure out who do we want to be when we grow up. So you don't have to fork out money for this. You can just find your people.

This is an existential question. It's hard to wrestle with existential questions just by yourself, so go find somebody else to walk the path with.

Joanna: That's great advice. I'm definitely thinking about all those things too.

Where can people find you, and your books, and everything you do online?

Michael: The best place to go is probably MBS.works. That is the umbrella website. It points you to social media if you're into that sort of stuff. It points you to all of the books. All of the books have free stuff associated with it, so you can get in there and pillage the free stuff from the books if you'd like to do that as well.

If you have a multi-million dollar budget for corporate training, then you should also go and look at BoxOfCrayons.com, but I suspect there aren't that many of those people listening in here.

Joanna: No, but certainly some people might buy your journal! So that's more the level of us.

Michael: I would be thrilled. As an author, and everybody who's listening knows this already, which is it's nothing but a treat when somebody has the generosity to buy a copy of your book.

I saw a thing on LinkedIn, I think, of somebody going, “The Coaching Habit is my most dog-eared book.” I'm like, oh, my god, that is just the best compliment an author can get.

Joanna: Oh, brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Michael. That was fantastic.

Michael: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Jo.

The post Building A Business Ecosystem Around Non-Fiction Books With Michael Bungay Stanier first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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