Susan Friedmann [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas, and tips from the masters. Every week, I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books.Â
Today, my special guest is Verity Craft. Verity is a speaker, book coach, and thinking partner. She's passionate about helping big thinking, purpose driven experts maximize their impact as thought leaders and authors. Along with her team at Intelligent Inc, she helps visionaries transform the seed of an idea into a manuscript they're proud of. Her mission is to bring better thinking into the world because she knows that books carry the power to spur big conversations, meaningful action, and purposeful change, All the way from Auckland, New Zealand, living our tomorrow. Verity, it's an absolute pleasure to welcome you to the show, and thank you for being this week's guest expert and mentor.
Verity Craft [00:01:14]:
Thank you so much for having me. It's a joy to be coming in from tomorrow.
Susan Friedmann [00:01:18]:
Yes. How is it there tomorrow?
Verity Craft [00:01:20]:
It's pretty good. I mean, I'm on the other side of the world. So right now, it's sunny and hot, so no complaints here.
Susan Friedmann [00:01:27]:
And it's snowy and cold here. So what can I tell you? It could have been more opposite. Verity, I know that you are passionate about thought leadership as in your introduction, that was pretty obvious. But so everybody's sort of on the same page. Let's understand, what does it mean to be a thought leader? What does that mean to you particularly?
Verity Craft [00:01:53]:
Yeah. So to me, thought leadership is all about having an impact with your ideas. I often like to break it into those two words. There's a thought part, which is your ideas. So it's improving your thinking. It's making sure that you've come up with ideas that can have some sort of positive change or that would solve some a problem that we have. And then there's the leadership part, which is getting them out there so that they can actually create that change, that they can have that impact because, you know, ideas stuck in your head a little bit useless, to be honest. It's only when you get them out there that they can really start to help.
Verity Craft [00:02:25]:
And so to me, thought leadership is all about how do you get your ideas out into the world and make sure that those ideas are as robust as possible so that they can help more people, create more change, and also help you build a reputation at the same time.
Susan Friedmann [00:02:39]:
And literally, talk to us about books and the impact and why they're so important in terms of building thought leadership.
Verity Craft [00:02:49]:
Funnily enough, we used to be a all things thought leadership business, and now we've really focused in on books. And the reason that we have is because we feel like books are the best possible accelerator for your thought leadership, and that's because of a couple of things. The first is because in creating a book, in the process of writing it, of planning it, of researching it, of editing it, of all of those pieces that come with writing a book, you were gonna make your thinking significantly better than it was to start with. You know, every client that we work with, their thinking comes so far over the process of planning, writing, and editing their book. And so it's this accelerator for the way that you think and making sure that your ideas are as robust and as engaging and as useful as possible. And then in terms of that leadership part and getting them out there, a book is such an amazing tool because, you know, and this is what you know and what you do. It's an amazing tool for marketing yourself as a thought leader, for building your reputation, for being seen as an expert, for getting to become kind of the go to. You know, there's a reason that we use the phrase, oh, they wrote the book on it because if you've written a book, it shows that level of expertise and that level of trust that people can have in you because it's really hard to write a good book.
Verity Craft [00:04:08]:
And so by doing so, you're showing why you are somebody to be trusted and listened to and hopefully worked with. Yeah. We really love books as a and I'd call them an accelerator for thought leadership because all of our clients who have had books have built their thought leadership significantly faster, significantly more than those who are just trying to create content on the Internet.
Susan Friedmann [00:04:33]:
So yes. And there's a big difference between that as we know because there's a lot of garbage out there and more and more that's being churned out, unfortunately. But that's enough said about that. Our book is full of ideas. But how do we take those ideas and make an impact with them? I mean, there's the difference between having an idea and then putting it out there so that people see us as a thought leader. Yeah. How do you go about even doing that?
Verity Craft [00:05:06]:
I mean, there's so many ways. Right? But I think it's exactly what you've just touched on as the first step is just getting them out there, and that can be in really small ways. You know? Yes. We hassle the fact there's so much terrible content out there these days, especially with AI. But if you're putting out something that's original and valuable and useful and speaks to people, that automatically is going to have impact. So it can start with something as small as posting on LinkedIn or posting on Instagram or posting on TikTok. But to me, the real impact comes when you are almost creating, like, an ecosystem for that idea. So it's really thinking about where does your book set within your larger business, within your larger thought leadership, and all of the ways that people can engage with that.
Verity Craft [00:05:51]:
I often talk about an a knowledge application scale. So there's lots of ideas that people share in social media posts, which are totally unapplied. So it's just the idea. It's cool. It sounds interesting. It maybe sounds a bit useful. But actually, for most people, what they need is really applied ideas. It's going, okay.
Verity Craft [00:06:12]:
Well, I've created these social media posts. I've now written a book, which might have a lot more application because it's got activities that people can do or worksheets that they can fill in or tools that they can use, then I might create, say, a course or I might have a community where we work on that or I might do one on one coaching or I might have one on one clients where I help them deliver. Whatever way that is, it's thinking about using the same idea in a lot of different ways to really apply it to people's situation. And I think just getting those ideas out there is already having an impact because all you need is one person to pick it up and go, oh my god. That's completely changed the way that I think about that, and that is having an impact. But I think the real secret sauce comes in making sure that you're thinking about how that idea can have an impact across a number of applications and making sure that you've got ways for people to engage with your ideas in a way that is actually gonna drive change for them and for whatever your corner of the world is as such.
Susan Friedmann [00:07:15]:
What that's saying to me, Verity, is really knowing and understanding your audience because it's only then that I feel that you can stand out as a thought leader with your ideas. What do you think about that?
Verity Craft [00:07:30]:
Oh, I totally agree. I think it's it is really, really hard to build thought leadership if you don't know who you're building thought leadership for. The same way it's really hard to write a book that's for everyone. It's much easier to write when you're imagining one person. In the same way that it's much easier to market your business when you know exactly who you're trying to talk to. If you know who something is for, it is automatically easier to create something that is going to be relevant for them. Otherwise, all you're kind of doing is putting stuff out for the sake of putting it out. Whereas when you know who your audience is, you can go, actually, this is why it's gonna be valuable for them, and this is how I can talk about my idea, adjust my idea, give them tools around my idea that are gonna actually help them create some sort of change.
Susan Friedmann [00:08:16]:
And, again, knowing that you can know better how best to approach it. I mean, is it through speaking or coaching or training? Is it through a course? Is it through, as you say, many of those other things that you talked about? But knowing what they need and how they consume their information would help with your thought leadership. Correct?
Verity Craft [00:08:39]:
Yeah. %. Yeah. For example, we've got a client who, when she was writing her book, she said, I actually don't particularly care about the physical copy of the book because my book is for female entrepreneurs who are becoming moms. So it's about her kind of journey doing that. And she's like, those people don't have time to sit down and read a book. They've got a baby. They've got a business to run.
Verity Craft [00:09:01]:
So she's like, so it has to be an audiobook form. And so that then defined how she created the book, but also then how she marketed the book and got it out there. And so I think that that's really important. Same thing as, like, we've got a client who most of the work that she's trying to do is change the way that organizations work. So she has a movement called work school hours. She is trying to get organizations to change so that working parents, but all workers really, are able to work school hours instead of having work hours completely misaligned with school hours. And so for her, she wanted to write and market her book to the parents who want that and then give them the tools to be able to go to their organizations and essentially create movements within them. Knowing that that's who she's trying to target means that she talks about it differently, means that she's giving them different tools, means that she's marketing the book differently, means that she's selling different things.
Verity Craft [00:09:59]:
I think it's really important to know because that helps you decide what to focus your energy on and what not to focus your energy on.
Susan Friedmann [00:10:07]:
Perfect. I love that example. That's just such a perfect example, knowing that your target audience and if they're not able to read, then knowing that the audio format would be the perfect way to share your thought leadership. Are there some common traits that you see in successful thought leaders?
Verity Craft [00:10:30]:
Definitely. And funnily enough, my business partner, Christina, wrote about four qualities of better thinking, which she put in her book, Beta. The first one that we really see is people who are able to embrace complexity. I think there's a lot of sort of influences out there who kind of say something at face value. They don't really go any further than that. They might just give a piece of advice without really thinking about it. But the best thought leaders that we see are able to kind of embrace the gray areas. They're able to embrace the things that maybe aren't as black and white or aren't as clear cut.
Verity Craft [00:11:09]:
Because of that, they then are able to come up with ideas and solutions that actually could solve the problems that we're facing because problems that we're facing are not black and white generally. That's a big piece to me. The second one, and I'm not gonna be able to go through all of Christina's four because now I can't think of them off the top of my head. But the second quality that I think is really important for thought leaders is being a little bit fearless. So we all have fears. A lot of us feel like if we're not super confident on the stage that we just can't do it. But actually, it's just being willing to take a step and do something towards it that's really important. And then the third one that I think is really important is the ability to keep learning and growing.
Verity Craft [00:11:54]:
So it's seeing everything that you do as an opportunity to learn and evolve and change. And one of my favorite things to see with thought leaders is when they admit that something that they said five years ago or something, actually, they don't agree with now. Greg McKeown McKeown? I'm not quite sure how to say his last name, but he's an author who has two books. So they're called Essentialism and Effortless. And in the forward for Effortless, he says, I was living by all of my principles that I put in this book. I was doing all these things. I was only doing the essential things, and it was still too much. And he admitted that actually just what was in his first book wasn't enough, but then he explained why he'd come up with effortless, which was the second one.
Verity Craft [00:12:37]:
And it made me respect him a lot more because he was willing to go, I do still believe in these principles, but it actually wasn't enough and here's why, and here's how I've evolved the thinking and grown and come up with something new. And I think that's really, really important because we live in a world where everyone's really polarized and stuck in, this is my opinion or this is what the truth is or this is what I think, and everyone who says otherwise is wrong. And the best thought leaders, in my opinion, are the people who are capable of going, I have changed, I have evolved, I have learned, and they're the ones that I think people really trust and go to because you do build trust when somebody admits that they are fallible, and someone admits that they're human and they can make mistakes or that they learn and grow. That to me is a really important piece of the puzzle.
Susan Friedmann [00:13:27]:
Yeah. Just admitting that, and as you say, being flexible enough to change because we do change and we do start thinking differently. It isn't just, as you say, black or white and just going down with one way of thinking. So I really love that trait. How about turning this around and talking about mistakes? Our listeners love learning about mistakes. So what do you see the mistakes people make when they're trying to position themselves as a thought leader?
Verity Craft [00:14:00]:
I think one of the first ones is putting it off or thinking that they have to be perfect to get it out there when actually it's in the process of sharing your ideas, whether that's through social media content, whether that's through speaking, whether that's through your book. Thinking that it has to be set in stone and perfect. And so letting that put them off. Because in my experience, the biggest learnings that I've had have been from putting things out there and then getting feedback and improving on that and same with most of our clients. It's by putting it out there. So a lot of our clients while they're writing their books, we'll recommend that they share some of the ideas that they're working through, wrestling with for their book as they go because the feedback that they get is really impressive. So I think putting it off because they want everything to be perfect or look perfect or have to have it designed nicely, you can just put something out there and evolve from there. It doesn't have to be perfect.
Verity Craft [00:14:55]:
The second one is trying to be like everyone else. Like, absolutely, there's best practice and there's things that really work in terms of getting the algorithm to work or there are proven methods for marketing your book that you should be following. But that doesn't mean you should be like everyone else because actually what makes you you and the thinking that you're doing is what is going to connect to people. So use the tools, use the best practice, use the strategies that other people have done, but don't just copy or use templates. It's the same reason why I say try to avoid using AI to create your content. It's one thing to use it to I'll use it for research. For example, I would go to perplexity, and I might say, I'm researching this. These are the things that I'm looking for.
Verity Craft [00:15:39]:
Can you find them? Give me sources. And that's really useful, but using it to create your content, actually, unless you're putting in the original thought, it's only gonna produce something that sounds the same as everybody else. So even if it's you creating the first piece of content like your book and then putting it into AI and going, can you break this down into 20 posts for me? That's okay because it's still your thinking, but it's really I think a mistake people make is going, oh, I can just use AI or tools like that or I can use templates that people have got, and that's gonna work perfectly. And, actually, if you're trying to build thought leadership, you have to do the thinking. The thinking is the important part and the thinking needs to be yours. That's a big one that I see as well. And then the third one, particularly when it comes to books, and we don't work in book marketing. We focus on getting the manuscript and the thinking and the ideas as good as possible.
Verity Craft [00:16:31]:
But it's really disheartening when our you know, a couple of our clients have gotten to the end and they've gone, great. Cool. I'm gonna go do something with it, and they don't do anything with their book because you can't write a book and just expect it to miraculously build thought leadership for you. You still have to market it. You still have to build it into your systems. You still have to leverage it properly. So I think that's a real one that I see is putting all this effort into writing the book, and then they're so exhausted that they don't bother going and marketing it. And, actually, that's a real mistake and a lost opportunity as well.
Susan Friedmann [00:17:03]:
Yes. And they want somebody else to do it for them, which I had a conversation this week. Somebody said, Well, won't you do this for me? And I was like, No. No. This is your baby. You've got to feed and water it, and, you know, you've got to look after it and help it to grow. I can't do that the way you can do it because I don't have the same passion for this topic, you know, and your book the way you do. So the best person to market your book is you.
Verity Craft [00:17:33]:
Yep. It's one of the reasons why we often say to people before they write a book to make sure that you're really passionate about the ideas because and I think I remember who said this to me, but they described your book as basically being like the wedding, but you've got to be married to your ideas for a really long time. Like, when you write the book and you publish it, it's essentially like your wedding day, but you still have to keep putting the work into marriage after that. And so it's making sure that you're committed enough to your ideas that you're gonna want to stay married to them for a long time.
Susan Friedmann [00:18:04]:
Yes. I like that very much. Because I've also had questions like, how long should I keep marketing my book? Mhmm. And it's like, well, how long do you want to be selling your book? Because it's an endless journey.
Verity Craft [00:18:19]:
Yeah. For sure. And, you know, for some of our clients, the goal isn't necessarily to sell books. It's to use it to leverage to grow their business, but it's still the same answer regardless. It's like, well, you still need to keep using your book as part of that leverage. You still need to be sending it to people that you might wanna work with or you still need to build it into your sales funnel or you still need to use it, you know, send it to people that you wanna speak at their events. Like, whatever it is, you've gotta stay married to it. You've gotta keep working on it for as long as you wanna leverage those ideas.
Susan Friedmann [00:18:51]:
And even more so, I would think, if you're using it within your business, not necessarily selling the book, but it's here it is. These are your ideas that you're putting out there as your thought leadership. Your business, I'm thinking, is built on your thought leadership many times.
Verity Craft [00:19:09]:
Yeah. For most of the people that we work with, that's definitely whether they are coaches, consultants, trainers, their ideas are what they are selling. Essentially, they're selling themselves or they're selling their ideas in a different form, whether that's through their frameworks or their courses or whatever it is. And so the book is the best possible tool for giving people a taste of their ideas or getting people excited about their ideas. And if they're not actually using the book, then they're not gonna be able to do that.
Susan Friedmann [00:19:39]:
Let's talk about what sets great thought leadership apart from just your average ideas.
Verity Craft [00:19:47]:
I think there's a couple of things. One is the ability of the thought leader to break down their idea in different ways. And what I mean by that is that a great thought leader will know that the way that they bring their idea to life in a book is gonna be different than they need to bring it to life on a stage or in a social media post. So they're able to take the same concept and it can be broken down in different facets. So in a social media post, they need to be able to just do something that's short and snappy, and the really great people will be able to sum it up really succinctly, whether that's in a phrase or in a paragraph, whatever it is, so that people understand it and can immediately engage with it. But they also need to be able to then dive into that idea and really explore it with some depth in something like a book or in a course or whatever other work that they're doing. Because I think sometimes you look at thought leaders and you go, that book could have been a blog post. Like, there's not actually enough to this idea to warrant a book.
Verity Craft [00:20:58]:
Whereas other people, you go, actually, this fully fleshed out my thinking, and it's now given me the tools I need to make the change that I need as a reader or as an audience member or whatever it is. I think the really great ones know how to break an idea down in different ways and are able to communicate that in a way that's gonna connect with people in whatever format it's in. But the other piece is that I think that it's really unique, their thinking and the way that they communicate it is really unique to them. So they're not regurgitating the same old information that anybody else is. They might be pulling on research. They'll be pulling on information from other places, absolutely. But they have a really unique lens or perspective or they've really thought about how that research or past thought leadership is applicable to their specific audience, and that might be a really niche audience. So while we think of thought leaders as being sort of your Brene Browns or your Adam Grant and people with really big followings, There are also some incredible thought leaders who are talking to really tiny audiences because they've figured out how to apply their idea and their thinking to a real niche.
Verity Craft [00:22:08]:
But I think to me, that's a really important piece is that they are really unique in the way that they are sharing their ideas. Even if they're talking about the same topic as some other people, they have a unique take on it.
Susan Friedmann [00:22:21]:
Yeah. And you're talking my language. Anytime you talk about niche markets, absolutely. You know, where you have the opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond. I find that much easier than the opposite in trying to go with the masses just because everybody else is.
Verity Craft [00:22:40]:
It's a really interesting thing actually because we are now looking to grow more globally. And to do that, actually, it's forcing us to become more niche, which is really helpful Because in New Zealand, our market is quite small. You know, we have 5,000,000 people across the whole country, and we're obviously only talking to thought leaders who want to write a book, basically. And now as we grow globally to try and grow our business, we realize we get to be a lot more niche and have to be a lot more niche for that to work. And I'm actually really excited about what that means for us because we can get even more specific about what we talk about in our thought leadership.
Verity Craft [00:23:18]:
It's kind of been a good reminder for me of, like, actually, we've been encouraging clients to get this niche. Now it's our turn to get that niche as well.
Susan Friedmann [00:23:26]:
Which is an incredible segue into you telling us, Verity, more about what you do there at Intelligent Inc and how, listeners can get hold of you.
Verity Craft [00:23:39]:
We are a thought leadership agency turned absolute passionate book creators. So we work with visionaries to help them craft incredible manuscripts that they can be proud of. So either through the Better Book Project, which is our small group coaching and editing program, or we work with a small handful of clients one on one either as the ghostwriters or as one on one coaches and editors. And I say small because we try and keep it to each anchor, as we call them, each member of our team only having one ghostwriting client at a time. But for us, it's really about we are thinking partners, so we're not transcribers. We're not just gonna take exactly what they say. We're gonna challenge your thinking.
Verity Craft [00:24:21]:
We're gonna make it better. We're gonna help you craft a book that is really the epitome of your thought leadership, of your thinking. And then we're gonna send you on your way to the right people depending on who it is to help you make the most of that book and get it out there. It's a fun and exciting process because we just get to work with people on making their ideas great, and we absolutely love it. So excited to do more of it this year.
Susan Friedmann [00:24:46]:
I love the idea that you challenge people with their ideas to think deeper. So you're already sort of setting the stage for them to be thought leaders. Correct?
Verity Craft [00:24:58]:
That's exactly it. It's really what we do differently is thought leadership is infused in our very being. It's what we're all about, and we just happen to do that through the medium of books. But it's very much about making sure that their ideas are robust. We say, we're not gonna help you write a book in thirty days. We're not gonna help you use AI to write a book. We're gonna help you write a book that is incredible, that people who read it love, that you are gonna be really freaking proud of.
Verity Craft [00:25:23]:
That's kind of what we are all about.
Susan Friedmann [00:25:26]:
I love it. As you know, Verity we always ask our guests to leave listeners with a golden nugget. What are your final words of wisdom?
Verity Craft [00:25:36]:
I think it's something that I mentioned earlier, which is that if you have great ideas but they only stay in your head, they're not a value to anyone. The biggest thing that I would encourage people to do is to start getting their ideas out there in whatever form that is. I think if you can take the ideas from your head and start putting them out there, that's when you can start having a real impact.
Susan Friedmann [00:26:00]:
So much wisdom. Thank you for sharing that. It's just made me think so differently again about thought leadership and the importance of it and how to take your ideas and make them more robust. So this has been extremely valuable. Thank you.Â
By the way, listeners, if your book isn't selling the way you wanted or expected to, let's you and I jump on a quick call together to brainstorm ways to ramp up your sales because you've invested a whole lot of time, money, and energy, and it's time you got the return that you were hoping for. So go to bookmarketingbrainstorm.com to schedule your free call. And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparked some ideas you can use to sell more books.
Susan Friedmann [00:26:52]:
Until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.
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