E
ven in this fast, cynical digital age, one
kind of person still commands respect.
The title itself carries gravitas: author.
If your seminars seem to be a grind
and you have to beg for attention, you
can turn that around so that people
come to you, eager to listen. Not only that, but they
will already know your back story and want to hear
more about you and what you do.
First, you have to write a book. That might sound
daunting, but Michael Levin is a highly successful
ghostwriter who can break down the process piece
by piece so not only is it achievable but it can be
an enriching exploration of your career and your
business strategy.
Michael has written, co-written or ghostwritten
more than 150 books, of which nine are national
best-sellers. You might remember him from his
appearance on the ABC-TV reality show, Shark
Tank, early last year. Although they didn’t invest
in his business, he is working on his second book
with one of the sharks.
12
InsuranceNewsNet Magazine » November 2013
Michael has produced books with Simon & Schuster, Random House, St. Martin’s Press, Putnam/Berkley and other prestigious publishers. His works have
been optioned for film and TV by Steven Soderbergh/Paramount, HBO, Disney, ABC and others. One
of his own novels became Model Behavior, an ABC
Sunday Night Disney Movie of the Week.
He has contributed to major newspapers such
as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,
Forbes.com and the Los Angeles Times. He has
taught writing at the University of California,
Los Angeles and New York University. In short,
Michael knows the writing business intimately.
So, his generosity in describing how anybody can
produce a book was a special treat in this discussion with Publisher Paul Feldman.
In this interview, you will see how to build a book
the easiest way possible. In Part 2 next month,
Michael will discuss how to market your book so
that prospects will come to you, wanting to do
business because they know that you are a perfect
fit for their insurance and financial needs.
Michael Levin
ghostwriter and
founder of
Business Ghost
FEATURE
HOW TO FINALLY WRITE YOUR OWN BOOK
FELDMAN: Why does an insurance
advisor need to have a book?
FELDMAN: Sounds great. So do you
start by thinking about the subject?
LEVIN: The biggest challenges for anyone in financial services are establishing
preeminence and answering the question of why someone should do business
with you.
The challenge is how do you get people to buy a product that they’d rather
not even think about and when your basic tools as an advisor are pretty much
the same as all of your competitors?
Maybe you have a really nice website.
So does everybody you’re competing
against. You might have a social media feed. But are people really deciding
whom they’re going to buy insurance
from based on what they see on Twitter or Facebook? I’m not convinced that
that’s the case.
So when you have a book, you have
a level of authority that nothing else
in our society can confer upon you,
certainly in marketing.
I had a client who sells long-term care
insurance. It’s a complicated product. It
takes a long time to explain. There are a
lot of moving parts. She would do a lot
of free client education and then at the
end of the process the prospect would
say, “I appreciate everything that you’ve
told me. I am going to buy it, but if I
don’t buy it from my brother-in-law, my
wife’s going to kill me.”
Then she did a book on how longterm care insurance fits into the overall process of keeping yourself or your
loved ones out of nursing homes. And
once that book came out, besides making the Million Dollar Round Table, she
no longer had the brother-in-law problem. Once people read the book, they
realized, “This person really is the expert. I cannot go anywhere else.”
LEVIN: The first step in thinking about a
book is realizing that you could write not
just one, but a hundred different books,
because you know so much more than
you realize about insurance, about life,
about people, because you see so much
as an insurance professional.
So the starting point is asking not
what the book is going to be about, but
whom do I want to influence? And with
that, ask yourself, who do I want to be
in the marketplace – the person I am
now, or someone slightly different going
after a different audience?
That’s an extremely useful exercise,
because when you start with that, then
everything else falls into place. Once you
decide, “I want more of what I’ve got,” or
“I want some different group,” you can
then ask, “What is it that I know that
would lead them to engage with me?”
FELDMAN: Do you need to start your
book by knowing what you want your
readers to do when they finish it?
LEVIN: That’s exactly right. You’re beginning with the end in mind, because otherwise, you can just kind of wander off
into a haze of glittering generalities and
nonspecific whatevers, and never get
anything important done.
Once that’s done, you take that body
of knowledge you’ve identified as the information that’s going to convince that
group to take that next step, and you just
chunk it down. And you say, “How do I
break this down into six or eight steps or
parts?” I always advise your first chapter
should be “I feel your pain” – the famous
Bill Clinton line.
FELDMAN: What about advisors who
say they don’t have enough time or
who say they’re not a writer?
LEVIN: Well, that’s why God created
ghostwriters. We work with people and
get their books done for them in a minimum amount of time. But, I’ll walk you
through a process by which your readers can create their own books without
the need of a ghostwriter, and without
spending a lot of money or time.
14
InsuranceNewsNet Magazine » November 2013
HOW TO FINALLY WRITE YOUR OWN BOOK
Most people think that they should
start by establishing their qualifications,
but that implies that the reader really
cares about them. In reality, the reader
only cares about the reader.
Bring the pain, although not too much
that they just can’t bear it, but enough
that they’re feeling it in the 45 minutes
to an hour it takes them to read the book.
Then chapter two is, “I am the solution. I’ve done this before. I’ve handled
this for other people. I have enormous
expertise.” This is where you bring your
qualifications.
Chapter three is “what is your process?” Then the next several chapters –
four, five, six, seven, eight – should be
either different steps in your process of
how you take care of people or different
aspects of the problem that you solve.
Then wrap it up with a call to action in
the final chapter.
Then you don’t have to write a word
to create a book. What you need to do
instead is have someone on your team, or
a trusted friend, or even a grad student
in English or journalism from the local
university interview you for an hour per
chapter. And just do a file dump on them.
Tell them everything you’ve ever known,
believed, experienced, seen, all the case
studies, war stories, anything about the
topic in that chapter. And just do it chapter by chapter. Then hire that journalism
student to edit the interview into a 12- to
15-page document, which we’re going to
call a chapter. Do that eight times, and
then you have a manuscript.
Then whether it’s to yourself or to the
ghostwriter, tell the person who’s doing
the interviewing, “I want each chapter
back in my inbox within 10 days of our
call.” Set a deadline so that it helps keep
momentum up.
You could write not just one,
but a hundred different books,
because you know so much more
than you realize about insurance,
about life, about people.
Michael pitching
Business Ghost
on Shark Tank.
FELDMAN: How much time should
someone expect to spend on creating a book?
LEVIN: If you’re diligent, you can be
done with your book and have it in hand
in four to five months.
FELDMAN: How do you keep your
momentum after you’ve started?
LEVIN: That’s a really great question. I
say that momentum is more important
than quality when it comes to books.
And people hate it when I say that.
I taught book writing for 11 years at
UCLA, three years at New York University and around the world at private
seminars, and they all get outraged
when I say that.
But I say, “Here’s my proof – have you
ever bought a bad book?” And they all
say, “Yeah, I guess so.” The simple reality
is that every single bad book that anybody ever bought or read, they all have
one thing in common: the author finished it and got it out there.
There are so many wonderful, useful,
impactful, powerful, half-written books
that are sitting in people’s drawers or
on their hard drives and are creating no
value for anybody.
So the way to achieve momentum is
to just make sure you get that first draft
finished. If you’re doing the book yourself, schedule all of the interviews with
yourself that will be the basis for the
book. Set deadlines to write each chapter. And make those scheduled times
sacrosanct.
FELDMAN: Whether someone’s writing it themselves or having it ghostwritten, you talk about working
through the process one chapter at
a time.
LEVIN: We want to take the quality to
that highest level not in the first draft,
but in the second draft, and then in the
revision process. So this piecemeal
process takes all the pressure off
because you’re no longer expected to
get it right the first time.
FELDMAN: Does perfectionism kill
momentum?
LEVIN: It is death for a writer, because
once you start thinking, “I’m writing
a book,” you start thinking Hemingway, Proust, James Joyce, John Grisham
– whomever.
You get into this mindset of, well, my
book has to be at least as good as the
best book that’s ever been written. No,
it doesn’t. It just has to be good.
You’re selling insurance. Let’s keep
things straight. You’re telling a story
about yourself so that you can help peo-
FEATURE
ple and you can make sales. So when
people get into perfectionism, they are
worried that if every word isn’t exactly
right, and if every turn of phrase isn’t
just phenomenal, then people will laugh
at them. And this thing is in print, and
they can’t call it back, and so on.
The simple reality is that when you’re
writing your first draft, a first draft is not
the final draft. You will have time to revise. You will give it to other people, and
they will point out the things that need
to be changed.
I always tell my students and my clients the first draft is like a newborn.
With a newborn, all you want is 10 fingers and 10 toes. You don’t expect it to
come out of the womb and play Mozart
right away. You just want it to be. And
then you can give it piano lessons over
time, and then it can play Mozart as a
10-year-old or whatever.
FELDMAN: Do people also have to
get over being perfect in even talking
about the ideas that will later be
crafted into a story?
LEVIN: Yes. There are very few people
who can actually speak in perfectly organized paragraphs. And those people are
annoying. Nobody likes them anyway.
The serious point here is that a chapter is not a transcript of a call with some
light editing. It’s got to be organized
properly. There’s got to be a beginning,
middle and an end. There have to be
stories told in appropriate places. Get
somebody good. It’s typically not the
highest and best use of an insurance
professional’s time to write his or her
own book.
Your time is way too short and way
too valuable, and if you’re going to
spend the eight hours it takes to translate an hour of interview into a chapter,
well, that’s eight hours that you could’ve
People don’t even want books.
They want leadership packaged
in the form of a book.
November 2013 » InsuranceNewsNet Magazine
15
Promotion
FEATURE
Check out our full Michael Levin interview on PAGE 18 of this issue.
HOW TO FINALLY WRITE YOUR OWN BOOK
been using to sell. The whole point of
this process is to make your selling life
easier, instead of giving you less time to
do the thing that makes you money.
FELDMAN: How long should the
book be? You talk about having eight
chapters.
LEVIN: I had a kind of revelatory moment
a couple of years ago. I’m a big admirer of
Dan Sullivan. He has a program called
Strategic Coach, and it coaches a lot of
financial professionals, people in insurance, all kinds of entrepreneurs.
I heard that he had a new book out
and I’m all excited, and it turns out it’s
a download for the Kindle. And I go
to buy it, and it’s 48 pages. And I kind
of blinked a few times, and thought,
“How can anybody say a book is 48
pages long?”
I read it and I realized that he only
needed 48 pages in which to make all
the points that he needed to make.
Then it hit me: we’re living in an era
where people’s attention spans have
been shredded by technology, by texting, by tweeting, by social media, by
surfing the Internet.
In the past six or seven years, since
“I’m the leader,” and then you’ll get
your followers.
FELDMAN: How much editing should
someone do if they’re not an editor?
LEVIN: It boils down to three words: fix
what’s wrong. If there’s a fact wrong, if
there’s a story that wasn’t caught precisely by the writer, fix that, but leave
the grammar and the punctuation and
all that stuff to the professionals. That’s
not your job. If the client has to edit the
writing from a quality-of-writing standpoint, then one of two things happened.
Either the ghostwriter failed miserably, or the client is an over-controlling
fuss-budget and needs to learn to let go.
Remember that the people who are
reading these books are not reading
them to their kids as bedtime stories.
They’re not reading them because it’s the
latest and greatest John Grisham novel
that’s just come out. They’re reading it
because they want to buy insurance, and
they’re going to forgive you for things.
FELDMAN: Haven’t there been compliance issues with ghostwriting?
LEVIN: Compliance departments love
Our experience is that insurance advisors, or anyone who has any sort of responsibility to their clients in a financial
sense, are all different with different life
experiences and have different reasons
for having gone into the profession.
Everybody’s got different personal stories about things that they witnessed in
their homes, or with relatives or friends of
the family, that could have been so different
if the right insurance had been in place.
Everybody has seen different examples of the government getting millions
and millions of dollars it really wasn’t
entitled to because the family hadn’t
planned properly. Everybody has different approaches to selling.
FELDMAN: So this is good for compliance and for sales, because you have
this consistent story about you?
LEVIN: Yes. For prospects also, because
from their perspective, they don’t have
to tell their story over and over again.
They can be comfortable with you after
reading your book because they know
you get them.
Insurance professionals typically look
at things from their own perspective and
they don’t often see that it’s no fun to
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