Many speaker marketers like to tell new and aspiring speakers that the most important reason to write a book is to use it as a business card. This is bad advice, and an even worse philosophy. If you want to be taken seriously as a thought leader, you should not only write book, but write an EXCELLENT book! The average personal development book sells 250 copies over a lifetime. That’s not a typo. Two-hundred fifty. And there’s a simple reason: they’re bad books. I’ve read thousands of personal development books over the past 40 years, and most aren’t worth the paper on which they are printed. Professional speakers need to establish a philosophical platform seeded with their unique points of view that differentiate them from other thought leaders. Learning to write well is no easy task, and writing a good book that sells is even tougher. In the 1.7 million books I’ve sold, I’ve invested thousands of hours in each of the 12 I’ve written. I call it bleeding on paper. The bottom is it’s worth the investment of time and treasure. In this episode of the Author Speaker Podcast, I take a deeper dive into this very important subject for Professional Speakers. #professionalspeaking #authors #publicspeaking #personaldevelopment