Lessons Learned From Selling Over 1 Million Books from Michael Bungay Stanier
Be a Lighthouse and Embrace the Albatross
Welcome to the Creativity Business, a newsletter about how to Earn Attention as a marketer or content creator. If you’re not a subscriber, sign up and get content strategy delivered to your inbox every two weeks for free.
Last edition, I talked to the best-selling author of The Coaching Habit and The Advice Trap, Michael Bungay Stanier, about building great creative relationships. (His brand new book is How To Work With (Almost) Anyone).
This time, we’re talking content and marketing strategy, and much like last time, MBS has brilliant insights to share, especially for anyone who does interviewing as part of their work.
How To Ask Questions to the King of Questions
Steve: I'm asking questions to the person who is the guru of asking questions. Here is an odd first thing to ask you: what types and formats of questions should I ask to get the best responses out of you? And tell me why they work.
MBS: I like a conversation that has some depth to it, so it's almost less about what questions are you are going to ask. It's more, what are you really curious about? And how can you go to the level of depth that you are most interested in? There's a whole bunch of obvious things - it's less interesting if you ask me a closed question, so my only response is yes or no. But other than that, take me wherever you're curious.
Steve: There are going to be a lot of people reading this who ask questions of other people for content projects. What can people do to level up their interviewing skills?
MBS: I'm known - if I'm known at all - for suggesting good questions and for helping people be more coach-like, and stay curious longer. So I would say that if you're interviewing somebody and using that to create content, ask shorter questions rather than longer questions.
Ask slightly less obvious questions. Sometimes just ask broader questions. I sometimes see people who have worked really hard on some very specific questions, and it actually pulls them out of being in the moment with the other person. Part of what makes a good interview is when I feel like you're present with me.
So a question like, ‘What was hard about that?’ Or ‘Where was the struggle?’ Or ‘When did you first notice?’ All of these questions invite self-reflection and stories and act as an invitation toward vulnerability.
And for me, when I'm interviewing people, they're often people who've done a bunch of podcasts and they may have a book that they're pitching, so they've got their talk track and key messages. And I'm most interested in how we get to what's interesting and less predictable.
Get to the Point & Don’t be Boring
Steve: I love the advice to just ask the question and cut out the preamble. Why does that matter?
MBS: There's a place for occasionally for a preamble where you're like, let me give you a bit of context to why I'm asking that question. But quite often if you're in an interviewer mode, you're trying to put the spotlight on your guest.
The preamble to a question is like, ‘I'm going to set this up. I'm going to explain it. I'm going to try and sort through my own thinking, and I'm finally going to get to a question.’ You've bored everybody in this process. You've bored yourself, you've bored the guest, you've bored your audience.
Steve: I could not agree more. I feel like it may be particularly true in podcasting - it’s a crippling weakness for some very famous hosts.
Build a Lighthouse
Steve: What does the phrase Earning Attention mean to you, with a focus on the word Earning?
MBS: If I was to pull a metaphor out of the air, are you building a lighthouse or are you trying to fire off a lot of flaming arrows? Sometimes when you're seeking attention, you’re shooting arrows all over the place and hoping that somebody notices it.
But Earning Attention says I'm building a lighthouse that helps people navigate by what I stand for. It only works if people come into the realm of your lighthouse. I'm not a big believer of build it and they will come because mostly they don't come. But there is something about having the confidence to say, this is what I stand for and this is how you can choose to navigate by what I put out into the world. And so I suspect Earning Attention is saying that you can trust my lighthouse.
Steve: I love the lighthouse metaphor because the things that you choose to illuminate are yours. It's not the sun - it's a focused beam on a certain area, designed to aid others. I think it's actually a brilliant metaphor.
Why do you think your books have been successful in Earning Attention?
MBS: It's an interesting question because one of my books has really taken off. So the Coaching Habit book has sold north of a million copies now. And it has that virtuous circle of being a famous book, therefore it gets recommended more often, therefore, more people know about it, therefore, it gets sold more often, therefore it keeps getting printed. And success breeds success.
But I've actually written eight or nine books, one of which has been a runaway bestseller, two of which have had some good success, and maybe three of which have not had that much success. So not all my books have Earned Attention.
One of them has Earned Attention. And I would say it solves a very specific problem for a specific person. It made coaching accessible for busy managers and leaders. They're like, ‘You know what? I need to be more coach-like. How do I do that?’
I had a goal to write a book that would be considered a classic in the coaching world, and that's what it's become. It's a really well-written book. It’s a really lean book. There's not a lot of fluff in it. One of my design principles is what's the shortest book I can write that's most useful?
And I spent two years marketing it and talking about it and putting it out there in the world, and very significantly, I got a sprinkle of fairy dust and it managed to take off and do really well.
Steve: I feel like you're not giving yourself full credit - you talked about solving problems, being useful and as short as can be. You're valuing people's time and you're thinking deeply about your audience.
MBS: Doing the problem-solving is fascinating. It's very audience-centric for sure. I have roots in that because one of my first jobs was in the world of innovation and product development. And that was done by running focus groups with consumers, going, ‘Hey, what do you want? What do you need?’
And so I've got a degree of being wired to think about the person I'm trying to serve. But you know, there are lots of books out there that have all of those attributes that haven't taken off. Without the luck, it would've done well, but not extraordinarily well, which is how it has done.
Embrace the Albatross to Become a Perennial Seller
Steve: Are there any other lessons that you've taken away from the successes of your books and projects that you now apply as kind of part of your standard toolkit?
MBS: ‘Build it and, and they won't come’ is a good starting point. And I also think ‘launch it and they won't come’ is another. In the world of books there is a lot of weight on the book launch.
Ryan Holiday wrote a book called Perennial Seller and his key insight is that your book launch is one small part of your book's journey. How do you keep getting this book out into the world? How do you play the long game with that? And one of the really helpful decisions I made around the Coaching Habit was to commit to marketing it for a year.
And then I committed to a second year after that.
So I gave it two years of really talking about that book a lot.
There's a poem by Baudelaire, the French poet, about an albatross and how ungainly the albatross is when it's trying to take off. But when it finally takes off, it soars gracefully. And, you know, most of the time, most of your stuff is on land, kind of being ungainly and not soaring anywhere. It actually takes a while for it to kind of be able to really launch.
Steve: You're nailing it with the images! This is brilliant.
The idea of promoting a single project for two years is foreign to me - in most other media formats, it’s more like every week or two you have a fresh thing to put out there. BUT, many creators forget about the huge value of their back catalogue. People forget about marketing this amazing asset that they've spent all this time building that still holds value. Marketing content in general is undervalued and under-prioritized.
Are there any lessons from the two years you spent successfully marketing the Coaching Habit? Where was your time well spent and not well spent?
MBS: I can't claim to have figured this out at all. It's really interesting to watch other people and go, what are you doing and why does it work? And what can I learn from that?
Steve: That was a much better and more succinct question than I just asked you. Nicely done! (Note: STILL working on cutting the preamble…)
MBS: The stuff that irritates me is this push to create more and more content - ‘Here's how you become a content creator!’ So people say, ‘Okay! I'm gonna churn out content!’ And they churn out just mediocre content. A lot of content that I see in my world is boring and repetitive and not fresh, and… who cares?
So the phrase I use for myself around that is T.A.B.O.O.: True And Bleedingly ObviOus.
Earning Attention doesn't just come from having a noble and pure heart. Learn about how people actually give their attention away. Study it. There's a whole bunch of systems and structures out there that if you figure those out, you get a better chance to be found.
How to Give Advice about Not Giving Advice
Steve: I want to talk about the concept of thought leadership. In the spirit of listening rather than telling, how do you think about sharing wisdom where you actually have deep expertise?
MBS: I just try and balance it as best I can. I would frame it slightly differently for me. I know that one of the ways that I best serve the world is as a teacher. I’m good at it. Taking complex ideas and making them feel simple and accessible and doable and practical for people. That is one of the things I'm good at.
AND, I'm also asking myself all the time, how do I de-center myself?
I know that learning happens better when you can de-center yourself.
Politically, I'm interested in trying to disrupt hierarchy, and that's part of why I'm so delighted the coaching stuff has taken off. A coaching conversation in its subtle way disrupts hierarchy. It shifts from ‘I'm the authority, I'm telling you what to do,’ to, ‘I'm asking you a question and handing you authority and power to figure some of that stuff out.’
The book that followed the Coaching Habit is called The Advice Trap, and it's a book of advice on how not to give advice. I get the paradox.
Steve: I find your newsletters really interesting. You're putting ideas out and you're not telling people what to think. They provoke thought and ask questions that let people do some stuff on their own. That’s a really interesting, unique way of creating impact with content.
MBS: The newsletter starts and ends with a couple of questions typically. I'm just throwing seeds out into the world. You can use the questions to till your own soil and see what lands that's helpful or useful for you. Not everything lands for everybody all the time, but if something lands for a few people some of the time, then overall, we all get to win.
Big thank you to MBS for generously taking time to talk with me. Michael’s brand new book, How To Work With (Almost) Anyone, is out now.
(This interview was lightly edited for clarity, mostly to make my questions appear smarter and remove meandering preamble :-) )
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I’ve known Tyler Bancroft since his amazing band, Said The Whale, began to get featured on CBC Radio 3 many years ago. He has consistently impressed me with being not only an exceptionally nice and talented artist but also a very smart entrepreneur. Check out Tyler’s creative and effective video resume and you’ll see what I mean - how cool is this?
If you’ve got a great gig for Tyler, you can reach out to him directly.
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JAR Audio has put out a very clever podcast about making podcasts with brands - it makes fun of themselves, of branded content, and of podcasting, but it ALSO reveals a lot of smart strategy for actual branded podcasts. Plus, they ask everyone to leave horrible reviews, which are very funny!
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Yes, I know, it’s ANOTHER link to Rishad Tobaccowala’s newsletter. I don’t know him, but his writing makes me feel like we are kindred spirits on the same wavelength. This one is about the power of kindness. (Maybe you should subscribe?)
If you’re seeking to create a differentiation strategy for your business and your marketing, please reach out to The Creativity Business.