Welcome back to The COO Solution Podcast! In this episode, host Derek Fredrickson sits down with Ally Machate, publishing strategist, bestselling author, and founder of The Writer’s Ally, to unpack one of the biggest myths in entrepreneurship: that every business owner should write a book.
With over 25 years in the publishing industry, including experience at Simon & Schuster, Ally brings a grounded, strategic perspective to what it really takes for a book to support business growth. This conversation goes far beyond writing advice. It’s about clarity, intention, and using a book as a leveraged business asset rather than a vanity project.
If you’ve ever thought, “I should write a book,” but weren’t sure why, when, or how it fits into your business strategy, this episode will give you the framework to decide before you invest years of time and energy.
In This Episode:
[00:00] The Big Question – Should every entrepreneur write a book, or is that advice outdated?
[02:22] Ally’s Publishing Journey – From traditional publishing to building a trusted author services company.
[03:00] The Myth Explained – Why a book can be powerful but only if it’s the right tool at the right time.
[03:40] Timing Matters – Why writing a book too early can actually stall your growth.
[04:09] The Real Cost of a Book – Time, energy, and resources most founders underestimate.
[05:32] Right Book vs. Wrong Book – Why good writing isn’t enough without a clear business goal.
[07:36] Start With the End in Mind – How to reverse-engineer your book from the outcome you want.
[07:53] Strategy Examples – Speaker books, lead-generation books, credibility books, and where people go wrong.
[08:37] Case Study: The Wrong Format – Why a workbook failed to land keynote speaking opportunities.
[10:39] Memoir vs. Business Book – How personal stories should support the reader’s transformation, not overshadow it.
[13:02] Storytelling That Serves Strategy – Why every book uses story, but the reader’s problem must stay front and center.
[15:41] AI and the Writing Process – The difference between AI-assistive tools and AI-generated books and why it matters.
[18:51] What Readers Really Want – Why the market is rejecting AI-generated creative work.
[25:17] Traditional vs. Self-Publishing – How publishing has come full circle and what entrepreneurs should choose today.
[28:15] Books as Business Tools – Why entrepreneurs shouldn’t aim to sell books but to sell what comes next.
[31:00] The Real Leverage – Why giving away books can be more profitable than selling them.
[32:25] How Ally Helps Authors – From idea clarity to publication and marketing, without writing the wrong book.
📌 Why This Matters
A book is not a rite of passage. It’s a strategic decision.
When aligned correctly, a book can:
- Build authority and trust
- Open doors to speaking and partnerships
- Generate leads for high-ticket offers
- When misaligned, it becomes an expensive distraction.
This episode helps you decide when and what to write, and whether to write at all, so your book supports your business instead of draining it.
✅ Action Steps for Listeners:
- Get clear on what you want a book to do for your business.
- Identify the book’s target audience and the problem it solves.
- Decide whether a book is the right tool right now.
- Use AI as a thinking partner, not a replacement for your voice.
🔗 Resources & Links:
Transcript:
00:03
Derek Fredrickson
Hey there, everybody. It’s Derek Fredrickson here from The COO Solution podcast. And I’m very excited to welcome our guest here for today, Ally Machate of the Writer’s Ally. We are here to talk about all things books and writing a book and publishing a book and authoring a book and whether you should create a book or maybe you should not create a book. I think this is going to be a very interesting and inspiring conversation for our audience because perhaps you’ve thought about writing a book and you’re considering if that’s the next best step in your business growth plan as you’re scaling your business and getting your message out. Is something like writing a book an important part of that strategy. So we’re very excited to have Ally with us for today. Ally, you want to introduce yourself?
00:48
Ally Machate
Yeah. Hi, Derek. Thank you so much for having me. I’m Ally Machate of The Writer’s Ally. I’ve been a publishing strategist and book-leverage expert working in the industry for 25 years. Started off at a tiny regional publisher, moved on to the big five at Simon and Schuster, where I really learned the business and sort of earned my chop, so to speak. And after that, I went freelance for a little while. I was there during a very tumultuous time and I thought it would just be a break. I was finishing up a master’s degree and I thought, well, you know, I’ll go finish that up and I’ll freelance a little and then I’ll come back in a year or two. When things are sort of settled down in New York.
01:27
Ally Machate
This was after post, you know, 911 and I never went back because I love working independently so much. And I really felt like I could help authors more directly by working with them in that way and really bring my understanding and my knowledge of the publishing industry to hopeful authors and help them really understand what they were up against and trying to do. And then, of course, we had the self-publishing revolution. We had print-on-demand technology, ebook technology, and all of a sudden, the market really opened up and changed. And I found that it was really important that more and more authors were out there getting scammed or getting bad advice, just really getting preyed on. There’s a lot of predatory companies in this self-publishing space.
02:10
Ally Machate
And I wanted people to have a group of publishing professionals with the right experience that they could trust that they could get everything they needed in one place. And that the Writer’s Ally was born.
02:22
Derek Fredrickson
Oh, wonderful. I love that. Very good. I’m excited to dive into this, because I know you and I had a preliminary conversation Not too long ago, and what I loved about your message is that you have this myth and you like to kind of bust up the myth, which is the myth that every entrepreneur should write a book. It’s like, it’s supposed to be like a rite of passage. If you’re, if you’re an entrepreneur or a thought leader, a business owner, you have to have a book and. And you have a different approach or a different opinion. So I’d love to just kind of start there. What’s your belief about the fact that most entrepreneurs believe that they do need to have a book in order to grow and scale?
03:00
Ally Machate
Yeah, absolutely. So first and foremost, the reason why everyone says that comes from something that’s true, which is that with the right book, a book absolutely can be an incredible power tool for your business. It can open doors, it can bring in leads, it can establish you as a thought leader. I can do all kinds of things. So the people want those benefits. That’s real. But no, I don’t think everybody should write a book. Sometimes it’s about the book not being the right tool for the job. Sometimes it’s about timing. A lot of people believe that when they’re very early in their business, they’re told writing a book will help them to grow the business.
03:40
Ally Machate
But the reality is that if you’ve just started your business, you may not really have the experience, the case studies, you know, you haven’t practiced your thing, whatever it is that you’re expert in enough to create a book that’s really going to move the needle in the way that you want. So sometimes it’s a book is not right now. Sometimes it’s that a book is not right ever. And real truth is that the world does not need more books. It needs better books.
04:09
Derek Fredrickson
I love that. That’s a great point. The world needs better books, not more books. How so? Can you explain a little bit? I think also maybe there’s this misconception that, you know, possible authors believe that they are going to write a book, and then they get into it, and then there’s just this, like, overwhelm of all of the things they need to think about. They kind of go into it with the best heart and mind, and they start kind of pouring their message, their passion, their story. And then there’s this whole other thing that needs to happen in terms of the publishing, the production, the marketing, the sales.
04:40
Derek Fredrickson
Like, what do you think you could give as advice to a potential author to say, make sure that you’re, like, starting with the end goal in mind, like, what is the strategy of the book? What’s the intention of the book? I know you have this belief between there are right books and then there are wrong books. Can you speak to that a little bit?
04:56
Ally Machate
Yeah, absolutely. And that is one of the very important reasons why I say that a book may not always be right. Because it is such a huge investment of time and energy and resources. And a lot of people realize that, because what we see in pop culture and what we see in the news, right, we see the highlights. We have this vision of what it takes to publish a book. We see, okay, you wrote a book, you sent it to a publisher, they published it, okay? Now the book’s not there, right? But that’s like the iceberg. There’s 90% of the work that goes on behind the scenes that they just don’t know until they get into it.
05:32
Ally Machate
And so if that isn’t something your business can accommodate right now, if that’s not the best use of your time and energy and money, then that’s the reason why a book may not be right for you. But to that question about right book versus wrong book, that’s the other piece of that myth. Not only are people told, well, everyone has to have a book, they’re also sort of told, either explicitly or implicitly, that it doesn’t matter almost what the book is, just the fact that you have one and that you call yourself an author, you know, is supposed to be enough. And that’s just not true. It’s really not about just having any book. It’s about having the right book. And when I say right and wrong, it’s really not even about good or bad, because a person can write a perfectly good book.
06:21
Ally Machate
It can be well-written, well-conceived, a nice cover. They can do everything right. Right? And if they weren’t strategic in thinking about what they wanted that one to do for their business and they can backwards engineer the book from that place, then what they end up with is a really good book that doesn’t sell because it’s not profitable or because it’s not tuned into whatever that goal was that they hope to achieve. So “right book, wrong book” isn’t about good and bad. It’s about what do you want to do with the book? And is the right book? You know, are you clear on what you want the book to achieve for you in the world? Who are the people that need to you know, find out about the work for you to get that goal? Achieved. And how do you reach those people? What do they want from a book?
07:07
Ally Machate
What do they need? What needs to be in the book for those people to come to you.
07:11
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah, it’s like what you said, it’s. It’s like starting with the end in mind and saying, okay, this is my goal, this is my intention, this is what I want to kind of future state of what you want your book to be and then say, okay, now that I’m clear on that, I can reverse engineer to come back to the creation of what is the idea of this book in order to accomplish. It’s what we do with our clients. Like start with the end goal in mind and let’s reverse engineer and go back to what we need to do today.
07:36
Derek Fredrickson
I know there’s different strategies for different types of books that you can give, you know, books for kind of credibility or authorship or for those that are used for like networking and getting your foot in the door, for lead gen or building your business. Can you speak to some of the different types of strategies for the right book for the right potential author?
07:53
Ally Machate
Yeah, like I’ll just try to give you a couple of quick examples. I think that’ll really illustrate the point. So one really great example, we had clients some years back who had been doing workshops, weekend workshops, these sort of intensives, retreats, treats, very successful, had great content, really great feedback and built a nice business. But she wanted to get on bigger stages. She wanted to be a professional speaker as opposed to a workshop leader. So she wanted to get paid to be speaking. She thought, you know, I’ll write a book. Which absolutely, in that particular case, that’s a great, getting on more stages, getting on bigger stages, being out there as a speaker. That is absolutely one goal that a book can really support very well. So great idea to write the book.
08:37
Ally Machate
But what she wrote was essentially a workbook based out of the workshops that she had been teaching. So she had this incredibly rich, really prescriptive, hands-on kind of a workbook that mimicked the work people did in her workshops. But when she was sending it out to event leaders, she wasn’t really getting any response. So when she came to us, I thought what she needed was marketing. But unfortunately through the conversation I had to explain to her that in fact she had written the wrong book for her goal.
09:06
Derek Fredrickson
Had you written the wrong book?
09:08
Ally Machate
Because what was happening was she was sending to event hosts, trying to present herself as a keynote speaker, right. Which is usually that person who’s up on the stage for like 30-40 minutes at the beginning or end of the event, giving some kind of inspirational talk. And she was giving them a book that was a nuts-and-bolt workbook.
09:25
Derek Fredrickson
Like a how-to.
09:26
Ally Machate
Yeah, exactly. And the people she was sending it to just couldn’t, they couldn’t bridge those two things. They couldn’t see how what she was seeing, doing in the book was going to play out on a big stage. There was a disconnect. So we helped her to understand that. And then she went back and she took some of the stuff from that book and she changed it and she turned it into a slightly different kind of book, published that immediately saw much better results.
09:50
Derek Fredrickson
Okay, got it.
09:51
Ally Machate
One really good example. Similar example. We have a gentleman again many years ago who was very well credentialed in the corporate space, had been an entrepreneur, had been a venture capitalist, had been different C-suite positions, had now switched, wanted to do executive coaching. He had left all that behind to do his own thing, decided to write a book. Again, everyone says you’re launching a business. So he went and wrote a book. So he came to us to talk about his book. And in his case, what he had done was he had written a memoir and his thinking was, and again, not crazy. His thinking was, well, if people are going to work with me, they should know my history and they should know my background, they should know who I am and what I have to offer. And so he wrote a memoir.
10:39
Ally Machate
But what we explained to him was that first of all, the audience for memoirs and the audience for business books are two totally different audiences. Right, there can be overlap, absolutely. But if you really want a book to bring you clients, you want a business book, not a memoir. And the other thing he didn’t really understand was that he could take those stories and yes, absolutely. Someone who wants to work with him wants to know about his expertise. They don’t want to know about his childhood, they don’t want to know about his experiences in high school, they don’t care how he got his first job. Right. They want to understand his experience, but only through the lens of what they really want, which is whatever it was he was going to be coaching them on whatever his signature systems and ideas and principles are going to be.
11:24
Ally Machate
And in fact, some of the best self-help and business books out there do include a lot of stories from the author. So having that aspect of personal stories is a really key part of the book. He just went with the wrong format overall.
11:40
Derek Fredrickson
I see. Got it. That was going to be one of my questions because I know there’s different, like you know how to book or A memoir. And I’m sure there’s others, but sometimes, and maybe this is a myth or my own misunderstanding or belief, I’ve not written a book. Disclosure, I’m thinking about it. That’s why I’m talking to Ally here. But like I sometimes think generally, when people hear book, they think story. But then in the business world, they hear book, they think how-to. Right. More on the nuts and bolts and everything else.
12:09
Derek Fredrickson
But there’s an element that is, I believe, and I’d love to hear your expert opinion that a really well-written content book weaves in stories, weaves in the kind of personal reflections and experiences to make it more real, to make it more come to life as opposed to do this and then do this. It kind of blends the two together. How do you see that combination working? And then another kind of add-on question is, what about a parable? What’s your feeling about that? And I know that for our audience, as an example, business owners, one of the best known books I think is the E Myth, right. Which is a parable. Everybody knows the ebook, right. The baker, the operator, or whatever the different names are.
12:52
Derek Fredrickson
How do you kind of weave in story with content to make it feel like it’s a really nice book to read, but it also kind of checks some of the boxes on the nuts and bolts, if you will.
13:02
Ally Machate
Yeah, absolutely. So this question really goes back to what we’re saying about having the end goal in mind. The kind of book that you write very much needs to be dictated by who you want to reach with it and then beyond them, what it is you want the book to do. Who are you reaching in order to achieve whatever goal it is you want to achieve? So yes, you’re absolutely right. Like I said, some of the best self-help books that have ever been written include stories. And I think I’m going to go out on a limb and say this, “I think any book has some element of storytelling. Every type of book has some element of storytelling because storytelling is how humans communicate. It’s our natural medium for understanding ideas and sharing ideas.”
13:46
Ally Machate
So even a very very prescriptive workbook is probably going to have at least some stories, even if those stories are simply illustrative of a point. Right. Like you see often in a self-help book that the author will try to explain a concept. They’ll tell you, okay, well if you do this thing, then this result happens and then they’ll share a client’s story. Oh, I had this client and I talked to this thing and they went through this and then they got this result. Right. That’s the most basic form of a story that you might see in more prescriptive-type books, business books, self help books. And I think that’s where authors get confused is because they do understand instinctively that their story matters, and it does.
14:26
Ally Machate
But they confuse the story being the primary thrust of the book with what the primary thrust of the book actually needs to be from the reader’s perspective. Right. What is, what are they coming to you to learn? What problem are they coming to you that they believe you have the solution for? And yes, tell your stories. Your stories matter. They’re not coming to you from your stories. They’re coming to you from the thing. So your stories have to serve the thing, not the other way around.
14:53
Derek Fredrickson
I see. Okay, got it. I want to talk a little bit about like publishing and that side, but I want to stay on this aspect of the book writing, if you will. And I’m kind of throwing in a question that I’m sure has been top of mind for you in the last, you know, I’m sure you know where I’m going with this in terms of AI and how that’s maybe shifted the landscape in terms of, you know, wanna-be authors or people that are writing a book and what that means to them. I’d love to get your again, an expert perspective and like, what have you seen shift the book writing landscape as it pertains to AI? Is it a positive, is it a negative? Is it depend on how you use it?
15:33
Derek Fredrickson
Like, what have you seen from your perspective and what do you think about how that’s going to continue to be a trend? If it is one in some way?
We’ve got a lot of stuff going on. It’s all kind of messy because we’re all still Trying to figure things out. We just recently had a huge lawsuit. So Anthropic, which I believe is the company behind Claude, had a huge settlement. They were accused of having used a large number of pirated books to program their AI tool. And they admitted to this, that, you know, even other copyright questions aside, they specifically used a site that had pirated books to help program the tool. And so they’ve now decided to reach a settlement and authors can go to this website and put their name or their title in and figure out if they were impacted.
17:16
Ally Machate
And if they were impacted, the settlements are going to go up to I believe as much as $3,000 per person to try to sell having used the rights. So that just happened. We also have people, Amazon publishers are putting things into their contracts about disclosure. Did you use AI? If you did, what did you use it for? How much of it did you use? There was anonymous story some months back about a publisher or an agent who put their client’s book through one of those AI detector tools and discovered that a large portion of it had been plagiarized accidentally because they use AI to help them write the book. So because of things like that Amazon, we had a client who 100% not use AI. She wrote the book entirely herself.
18:08
Ally Machate
In fact, she was a little bit anti-AI and Amazon flagged her book and wouldn’t publish it because they detected what they thought were some flags that made it look like it might have been written by AI. So she had to go through a process and sign basically an affidavit stating that she was in fact the author of the book before they would publish it. So there’s a lot of stuff going on. All of that said, it’s not a trend, it’s here to stay. Right? Nobody’s putting the genie back in the bottle. AI is here.
So really the only question as we move forward becomes how do we use it? What role does it really take in this process? And I think the way people are using AI in different industries is going to vary a lot.
18:51
Ally Machate
But when it comes to a creative process, we have seen a few really interesting things. A friend of mine who studies audiobooks recently did a study of over 100 different books on Audible that have been published using AI voice. Right? It’s been happening now for over a year. We have a good sample size and universally out of 100 books that were published using AI voice, the reviews were terrible. Absolutely terrible. People hated them. We’re also seeing a lot of protests and we’re seeing a lot of things coming up. Like there’s a I don’t know what to call it. Like a badge. You can register for that you can put on your work that says 100 human-created, no AI.
19:36
Derek Fredrickson
Wow.
19:36
Ally Machate
So there are movements happening where we do see that the market, at least when it comes to creative work, so far, consumers are very clear that they do not want creative work produced by AI.
19:50
Derek Fredrickson
Right.
19:51
Ally Machate
So, it may work for some creators who are taking a shortcut, but it’s not working for the marketplace. They do not want them.
19:56
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah, yeah. It’s so interesting. From what you’ve shared with some of the examples, I think just AI in general, like you said, it’s obviously not a trend. It’s here to stay. I love the expression, the genie’s out of the bottle, we can’t put it back. But in terms of its use case in certain scenarios, I think especially on the creative aspect, I mean, we’re talking about writing a book and authorship and content. And also, you know, it’s applicable to musicians. I’ve heard discussions around that as well. And it’s fascinating what’s developing, but at the same time, we don’t really know how it’s going to play out because it’s still all fairly new. Right.
20:29
Derek Fredrickson
And I think that’s the thing to take into consideration that, you know, most of us in some way or another are utilizing AI as a way to help do what you. You might be doing. It might be to help do things more efficiently or more effectively or help you strategize or brainstorm or research. That’s fine. But when it comes to the creative process, honoring that, you know, I firmly believe in this sense, like a book is your, your spoken word on paper, it’s your written word. And even the thing that you mentioned about the audio, that’s. That’s amazing because I know there are some people I’ve listened to. I listen to audiobooks all the time, where the audiobook is maybe not spoken by the author, it might be somebody that’s, you know, reading the book.
21:09
Derek Fredrickson
And now, like, we have to make sure, like, who’s that person? Is that AI? Is that a real person? I mean, it just, it gets a little. It’s probably tricky to navigate. So listener and watcher, beware as this space continues to unfold.
21:20
Ally Machate
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, some of it has to do with the technology. Right. Like, can I envision a future in which AI is so good that the voice does perfectly mimic a human voice and we don’t have that situation where people can tell anymore?
21:35
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah.
21:36
Ally Machate
We’re heading towards that. We’re not there yet, but sure that’s going to happen. But right now, I think the most important thing for authors to understand when it comes to AI is the difference between AI-assistive tools and AI-generative tools. Nobody has a problem with AI-assistive tools, right? So that could be anything from a tool like Grammarly that helps you to clean up things all the way to sitting down with ChatGPT and using it as a brainstorming partner. Or help you outline chapters or outline a book, having it, you know, giving it a paragraph of yours and saying, I need to say this in half as many lines, you know, help me turn this down. Nobody really has a problem with that.
22:17
Ally Machate
And in fact I think that’s the most interesting place is how people are learning to use it so that they can create better content and create it faster. That’s really cool to me and I think we’re going to see more and more training around that. It’s important for authors to understand that piece. But the people who are going in and saying, you know, write me a 40,000 word book on marketing. Right? Like, and I promise you it’s happening because I’ve talked to these folks, yeah, that’s not working. It’s not only are we running into all of these potential legal problems like I was just describing, but also, at least again right now, those books are not good. They can fool you if you look at them very quickly because the writing itself is polished.
23:03
Ally Machate
But when you actually read the drafts, you very quickly understand that they fall apart. There’s no connective tissue, there’s no cohesion, there’s no thought put into the reader’s journey. Right. A non fiction book almost always has some kind of transformative journey for the reader whether it’s changing your mind about something or literally teaching you to do something. None of that is happening in a draft that’s written by AI. It’s just not capable of it. So don’t do that. Use it to help you. Don’t let it do the work for you.
23:34
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah, I love the distinction between assisted-AI to help develop thoughts or to wordsmith or you know, I use Grammarly all the time. I love it as an example. But the generative-AI to say write me this book or you know, here’s my website and write a book for me, like that’s, I think the message that I’m getting is that the human reader is going to be able to read through that and distinguish between the two. And so author beware as we continue to navigate this space. I want to shift gears, just talk a little bit about the publishing realm. So I really appreciate your background because as you said, you know, you started out in the traditional publishing world, right? Simon-Schuster, the big five, etc.
24:17
Derek Fredrickson
And you know, for many of us, you know, the idea of writing the book was like writing it on the, I almost forgot the word. Write it on the typewriter, then write it on the computer and then you take this thing and then your job is to shop it around to publishers. That was the avenue to get a book published and then they would do the necessary work to market and sell the book and do everything else. It’s completely different now. I think especially for entrepreneurs, to some extent, business owners, the pendulum switch has shifted because there’s the self publishing route. And then I think through the self publishing route, it opens up this whole other avenue in terms of marketing and visibility and lead generation. And how does it fit into my sales funnel as an extent?
24:58
Derek Fredrickson
So what have you seen that has been the transition from old to the new? And what do you think is working now? Or what are some things that our audience could keep in mind as they are considering self-published, traditional publishing? Does it come back to the right book, the right idea? But what’s your thought with that?
25:17
Ally Machate
Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing is I can’t take credit for this, but someone else pointed it out to me recently. I can’t even remember who it was, but somebody who’s a thought leader in the space recently made the comment that it’s like we’ve gone full circle. Right. In the very early days of book publishing, all there was self publishing. Right. Charles Dickens famously self-funded his own novels because that’s what you did back then.
25:44
Derek Fredrickson
I mean, if you think about that. And back in the day. Yeah, you’re right.
25:47
Ally Machate
Yeah, We’ve kind of come full circle. We started off in this world where if you had something that you really believed was of value to enough people, you invested in yourself, you printed up the book and you went and you tried to sell it. Then we evolved and publishers grew and publishers got bigger and smaller and ate each other up. And you know, we ended up with this very varied, you know, multi-publisher space. And now it’s swinging back in that direction again. Now we see more and more people are yet again self-funding their own publishing products. I think it’s a really fascinating thing. I think it’s a really interesting thing to watch happen. And I know that some authors get discouraged, but for me, I think it’s very exciting.
26:27
Ally Machate
Traditional publishing is still a really valid and a really great avenue for the right person. And yes, absolutely it does always come back to strategy, at least for me. So, I think everything is every strategy. So for certain people, for example, if you already have a pretty well established business or platform, but it’s small within your niche or small within your region, and you want to be national, you want to be mainstream, a traditional publisher can make that happen for you. They have connections to mainstream media. They have the connections to get you into Costco and Barnes and Noble and all of these different places offline. Right. Traditional publishers can make that happen. On the other hand, if you’re an entrepreneur, business owner, expert, coach, speaker, whatever, for you, writing a book most of the time isn’t about getting national visibility.
27:22
Ally Machate
It isn’t about trying to get on all the big radio shows and TV shows. Everyone would love to have that happen. Of course. That would be amazing.
27:28
Derek Fredrickson
Exactly right.
27:30
Ally Machate
But it’s not really the same business. And I think that when people get sad, like, oh, traditional publishing, you know, to me, they’re the major leagues, it’s the top 1%. It’s the Olympics. There’s no reason to be sad about it. Not everybody’s good enough to get to the Olympics. It’s okay. But there are still millions of incredibly talented athletes that find other avenues to express. And I think that self publishing is the same way. Traditional is reserved for the very top 1%. People who are already at a certain level, who already have a certain level of visibility, a certain size mailing list, certain size social following, etc. And people who have ideas that are more acceptable to a very large mainstream audience.
28:14
Derek Fredrickson
Right.
28:15
Ally Machate
But when you have a business, unlike a publisher, you’re not in the business of selling books. You don’t make money by selling books. So you don’t need to have a book that appeals to everyone. You don’t need to get on Oprah. You don’t need to get on NPR, right. You don’t need to get on these big stages. What you need is a book that’s dialed into your business and your offers and your goals so that you can then leverage that book to sell more of the thing you sell. Not more books.
28:46
Derek Fredrickson
Not exactly. Yeah. I love that. I think this is such a good distinction because I still see it a lot today where people have the intention of writing a book and they’re like, I want to be a New York Times bestseller. I want to get published by whatever the name. I mean, unless you’re like, I love it, unless you’re an Olympian, that’s going to be really hard to crack. I’m not saying you can’t do it, but also think about what your strategy is. If you’re a business owner slash entrepreneur, which means you’re a marketer first. You have to think about how can I use this book as part of my overall sales and marketing strategy, to generate leads, to generate more interest into your other products and services and offerings.
29:25
Derek Fredrickson
And I think the other thing, and I’m sure you would agree, maybe you could share a little bit about this as well, is that when it comes to the creation of the book and your self-publishing, it’s so much more about the marketing. Like the book is one thing, but then the marketing is everything else. And people think I want to sell more books. No, you don’t. You actually don’t. I mean, you could give your book away for free if it’s going to lead to say your high-ticket offer and you have more people that are knocking at your door because they read the book which you gave away for free plus shipping.
29:56
Derek Fredrickson
And then you’ve got people that are now on your email list or following you on social that are now engaged in your programs and offerings that might want to take the next step with you. So I mean, that’s probably another myth that it’s actually more about the marketing than it is about the writing. Would you agree with that? To some extent.
30:12
Ally Machate
I mean, I think they’re pretty intimately intertwined. Right. Like the writing has to deliver, obviously. But yeah, absolutely, it’s true. That’s where that big difference is. You know, I’ve had clients who decided to self publish because they had a book deal on their last book and they were frustrated because the publisher really hamstrung their marketing efforts. They wouldn’t let them give away thousands of books. They wouldn’t let them chop the book up into social posts. Right. There are a lot of things they didn’t want them to do because it cannibalized their business, which again, selling books. When you self publish and you are trying to sell something else, it’s a totally different ballgame. I mean, I always tell people like it’s a given. We all want to sell books. Right? You write a book, you publish a book, of course you want to sell books.
31:00
Ally Machate
That’s not the goal though. Yeah, no. Would you rather sell 100 copies of a book where you’re going to make maybe $2, $3 of profit off a book, or would you rather give away a thousand books and sell one $10,000 coaching package?
31:16
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah, that’s the key right there. I think for our listeners to really embrace that. That there’s the authorship, there’s the creation of the book with the strategy in mind. The right book versus the wrong book. Not to mention not every entrepreneur needs to write a book. But then there’s the part of, like, how is it really dialed into your overall business strategy from a marketing and sales and growth perspective that’s really really important for our audience to listen to. So thank you for. Thank you for sharing not just that perspective, but everything else. We talked about writing the book, the right book.
31:51
Ally Machate
If you’re out there and you have a business and you’ve published a book and you’re out there sweating, trying to sell one copy of a book at a time, you’re just, you’re missing out on so much more that that book could be doing for.
32:06
Derek Fredrickson
Yeah, yeah. Perfectly said. So I’m sure there are people watching, listening to this be like, okay, I need to reach out to Ally. Need to find out more. How can I get some of her wisdom and insight? Tell us a little bit about what you do with your clients, where people can find you, how they can contact you. I’d love to have that as a resource for our audience.
32:25
Ally Machate
Yeah Absolutely. So we are an author services company. We’re not a hybrid publisher. We’re not a traditional publisher. If you are publishing a book and you are the publisher, we are your outsourced publishing team. So we help you to develop the book. So all these things we’re talking about, we’re going to make sure all of these things are happening in your draft. We’re going to talk to you about what your goals are, what your business is, how you’re trying to grow it, how the book fits into that picture. If you’re not clear, we’re going to help you get clear. And then we’re going to make sure that the draft that you’ve written is actually achieving the goals that you say that you want to achieve. So that again, we don’t have just a good book.
33:01
Ally Machate
We have a marketable book, and we have a book that’s strategically positioned to be leveraged in the way that you need it to be leveraged. We take that all the way on through with publication, design, production, and book marketing. And I have something I would love to offer your audience. So I had this evergreen webinar training called, “Don’t write the wrong book”.. It’s all about the stuff that we’ve been talking about. What does it mean to write the right book? How do you avoid writing the wrong book? And then I take them through a simple five-step process for how to really think about which idea of the many, that are probably squirreling in their heads is really going to be the right book for their goals right now. And they can get that at offers.thewritersally.com/coosolution
33:48
Derek Fredrickson
Wow, look at that. I love that. Thinking like a marketer. Wonderful. And we’ll include that link specifically in the show notes as well. And I think, you know, this was a great conversation to highlight some of the things for people to think about if you’re writing a book, if you’re considering or have written a book. And I think doing a little bit of a deeper dive with your guidance and expertise with that webinar would be a great start in order to explore a little bit more detail of what are the things to keep in mind and some of the, you know, concerns as you’re considering moving forward. So thank you so much, Ally, for being here. This was a great conversation and really appreciate you sharing your zone of genius with our audience. So thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
34:27
Ally Machate
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.
34:30
Derek Fredrickson
Great. Thank you.