820 Morgan Gist MacDonald:

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

There’s nothing wrong with us if we are procrastinating writing a book. It’s daunting because you’ve not ever written a book before, so why would you know how to write a book? And there’s some assumptions that we make when we haven’t done something about, for instance, how long it’s going to take. Many folks who I’ve talked to over the years will say, “Oh, well I’m going to need five years to write this book.” And we dig a little deeper, and it’s like, well, you’ve been thinking about this, you’ve been living your life, you’ve been running your business, you’ve been giving presentations, you’ve had a podcast. You’ve done a lot of the work of your story, your philosophy, your frameworks. Now, you really just need to sit down and write. It takes 40 hours to 80 hours to write that first draft.

There is nothing quite like a book to boost the credibility, authority and brand of any entrepreneur, apart from a podcast, though they go hand in hand. We all know we need to get that book written, and yet the task can seem overwhelming. Morgan Gist MacDonald is here to tell you that it is easier than it looks. Morgan shares all the do’s and don’ts of book writing, plus how to leverage your book to grow community and accelerate your business growth.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Podopolo, the interactive app revolutionizing podcast discovery and discussion and making podcasting profitable for creators. I’d like to invite you to take a minute, download Podopolo from either app store, listen to the rest of this episode there, and join the conversation with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice … Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who helps people write and publish their books – and optimize the process to grow their communities and businesses.

Morgan Gist MacDonald is the best-selling author of Start Writing Your Book Today and the founder of Paper Raven Books, an innovative publishing company designed to help first-time and experienced authors alike through the writing, publishing, and marketing process so they can get their books published and build a loyal readership and a long-term career as an author.

Morgan will be here in a moment, and first,

I know you love podcasts as much as I do, so what if you had an app that magically connected you to the exact right listens around what interests and inspires you and your friends – without having to lift a finger?  Podopolo’s AI powered recommendations and social clip sharing are just a few things that make it different from all the other podcast apps out there. Download Podopolo now – it’s free in both app stores – and if you have a podcast, get it featured on our home discover screen for free and access time-saving ways to grow your reach and revenue. That’s Podopolo.

Every entrepreneur has a book inside them. But what does it take to get it out to the world?

It’s so easy to procrastinate because as busy founders its not like we don’t have a zillion other things to occupy our time and attention as we grow our businesses.

And yet a book can offer exactly the boost in thought leadership and credibility you need to accelerate your business growth, and as Morgan Grist MacDonald says, the writing process does not take as long as you think and it helps you clarify your message in the process.

Today we did deep into how to write your book, how to use it to grow community and clients, plus new trends in publishing from AI to Blockchain.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Morgan Gist MacDonald, founder of Paper Raven Books, and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Morgan, welcome to Wings.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Melinda, I am so excited to be here. I was just telling you, I’m a listener, and I’m a user of Podopolo, so I am thrilled to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s wonderful. Well, I happen to believe that every entrepreneur needs a book, and I say that not having one yet. My journey was interesting because I started out writing a book. And then someone in the marketing world said, “No, you need a podcast to build an audience first before you can launch your book.” And so what, that was 2017? And I guess my podcast could now turn into a book, and that’s become the plan. But tell me why it’s so important for entrepreneurs to really have a book to really bolster, I guess, their thought leadership.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Yeah, I think for a couple of reasons, some external and some internal, right? So often what’s talked about is that external. You know, want the credibility, to be a thought leader. It’s easier for someone to quickly digest what are your typical sort of principles or frameworks or philosophies when it’s packaged up into a book, because you’ve really had to do the heavy thinking, the hard thinking in the process of writing the book so that it’s easy for someone to understand who is this person, what are they about, who are they talking to? So I’m sure you know, Melinda, as a podcast host, when someone has a book, it’s so much easier to sort of identify, yes, this is where they sit in the marketplace, as well as internal. There is something, I would suggest almost magical about writing your own book because there may never have really been a time when you sat down and collected your thoughts and organized them and put words to them.

I’ve been a writing coach, book coach for 15 years. I found that when I sit down with an author and say, “Okay, tell me. We’re writing a book. What do you want to write your book about?” By the time we get through a two hour conversation, they’re like, “Oh, wow, I didn’t realize that I had this level of detail in my framework or philosophy, or this powerful of a story.” So doing that work of sitting down and writing can really be transformational for you as the author.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, it provides clarity. I think a lot of people launch businesses thinking, in a way, it’s kind of almost a meme now, this business is for everybody, and of course it’s not. And so there always needs to be clarity in that entrepreneurial process when the clarity gets clearer and clearer over time as you find product market fit. But a lot of entrepreneurs create businesses around something that’s very intuitive to them, and so intuitive in fact, that they don’t even value it. It’s just something kind of that they do. And that kind of secret sauce doesn’t come out in their marketing copy or in anything like that. So it sounds like just the book writing process is providing clarity that is isn’t just about the book, but it’s about your whole positioning in a market potentially.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

I a hundred percent agree, and anyone who’s ever been asked to present on stage or to a group, “Tell us your origin story and your thoughts in this industry,” if you have not sat down to write those things out, it comes off a little… You’re winging it.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

But if you have been through the process of sitting down, writing it, crafting it, let me create the narrative structure of my origin story, that sort of thing, it comes off as so much more tight and concise and understandable to your audience. And I would suggest that’s true whether your audience is reading the pages of a book or listening to a podcast interview or watching you on stage.

Melinda Wittstock:

So I know so many people, and I guess I’ll include myself in this, that have at least one book, possibly more in them, but just keep putting it off. What’s the root of that procrastination? Is that fear, or is it just like, I’m so busy, I’ll get to that later? Why is it so hard for people who want to write books just to start?

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s common, right? So there’s nothing wrong with us if we are procrastinating writing a book. I think there are a couple of scenarios. With your first book, you just don’t know, right? It’s daunting because you’ve not ever written a book before, so why would you know how to write a book? It’s one of those things that you’re going to stumble your way through, and it’s always a little bit daunting to try to figure something out for the first time. And there’s some assumptions that we make when we haven’t done something about, for instance, how long it’s going to take. Many folks who I’ve talked to over the years will say, “Oh, well I’m going to need five years to write this book.” And we dig a little deeper, and it’s like, well, you’ve been thinking about this, you’ve been living your life, you’ve been running your business, you’ve been giving presentations, you’ve had a podcast. You’ve done a lot of the work of your story, your philosophy, your frameworks. Now, you really just need to sit down and write.

And we run entire writing coaching programs now, and on average, especially for a non-fiction book, like what we’re talking about for entrepreneurs, it takes 40 hours to 80 hours to write that first draft. So it might not take as long as we are assuming, worst case scenario, it’s going to take. And then for those of us who’ve written a book before coming around writing the next book, I do think that we do a little bit of the same thing. Oh, that was so painful the first time. It’s going to be equally painful the second time. But typically, it’s not. Typically, we can jump into that second book a little bit more quickly once we just get that momentum. That’s almost about getting the riding session momentum going again, getting your feet back on that bicycle.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, I think with women, there’s an added aspect to this too, because we all have a tendency to feel we have to do it all. So we’re doing so many things for so many people, and there’s nothing left of us. And you add a book to it, it’s like, oh my god, that’s too much. So it becomes kind of a time management issue, I suppose, as well.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Yeah, and brain space. If your brain is always thinking about work and meetings and things like that until you are done at the end of your Google Calendar day, and then suddenly it’s about dinner and groceries and that sort of thing, you don’t really have that white space to let the book bubble up to the surface.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Well, here’s the other thing, book or notebook, entrepreneurs need to schedule white space into their lives because that’s when our best inspirations, that’s when we are really in touch with our intuition. I think businesses grow faster, we make better decisions, all those things when we’re creating that white space, but so few people do because we so easily get overtaken by events. So it strikes me that writing a book could actually help start create that discipline for people who don’t already have that in their entrepreneurial lives yet that need for just, okay, I’m not working right now. I know personally, I get all my best ideas and epiphanies about every aspect of my business when I’m not working, when I’m not staring at a screen or on a call or doing all the other things.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Can I give you one of my favorite hacks for how to use white space and really get that momentum we were talking about?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yes, please.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Okay, so this is borrowed from a guy named Mark Levy, and he wrote a book 20 plus years ago called Accidental Genius, one of my favorite books ever, not well known at all. But he has this exercise in there, and he developed this exercise actually with the C-suite kind of folks of these big businesses for brainstorming, but I have taken it and sort of adapted it for riders, and I use it myself. And I always get feedback of when people use this technique, it kind of opens up the floodgates for creativity and momentum. Okay, so here’s how it works. It’s called free writing, but there are some nuances to it that are super important. So you close down all of your distractions, pull up a blank document if you’d like to type or blank page if you’d like to write, instead a timer. I just use my phone. Set a timer for seven minutes, hit start on that timer and kind preframe your brain with a question.

This might be something really open-ended, like what do I want to write about today? Or what might be included in my book? Or some sort of general open-ended question. And that timer is now going, so you’re writing as fast as you can. And the nuance here is that you’re actually writing faster than you can edit in your brain. So your fingers on the keyboard are typing faster than you are comfortable going. There’s spelling errors. It doesn’t entirely make sense. You’re not doing capitalization, you’re not doing grammar, but you’re really pushing past that conscious part of your brain that’s trying to edit and critique and accessing that deeper part of your brain to really let the writing kind of out. Let those ideas and associations come out. And as soon as that timer rings, seven minutes, it’ll go fast, stop writing because you’ve made a little bit of a promise to your brain. Let me go and push fast and write quickly, and it’ll be uncomfortable, but it’s only going to last seven minutes.

So that timer rings, you stop, and nine times out of 10, really 99 times out of a hundred, folks will come back and say, “I had this crazy idea. I didn’t even realize that that idea was in my brain.” And usually you get excited and you’re like, I want to keep writing. And so that can be a great primer for any sort of creative session.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, this is really about accessing the right side of the brain, getting out of the analytic, about really accessing what’s deep in our subconscious minds. When we think about it, if we’re run 95% of the time by our subconscious and we don’t even know what’s running us, how to access that stuff because there’s a lot of gold in there. There’s also a lot of stuff we need to release in there as well.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Yeah, absolutely. So it gives you a little, yes, access line to that subconscious, lets it come out in words. And then when you kind of scan back over it, it’s not usable. You’re never going to publish it, but it lets you see what those ideas were that are in your brain, and you don’t even realize it until you give it the opportunity.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. No, it’s really, really good advice. So with your company, you work… I’m going to assume you work mostly with folks who are self-publishing. And often with other book folks I’ve had on this podcast over the years, we always get into that. Should you get a publisher, or should you self-publish? Let’s just start there. What are the advantages and disadvantages of both?

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Yeah, we do work with a lot of entrepreneurial folks who want to self-publish because they like some of those benefits, right? They want to keep the license for their own intellectual property. They want to keep the profits from their book sales. They want to be able to print books at cost, which when you’re a speaker, or even if you want to be geeky internet marketer, kind of you want to go down that rabbit trail, if you want to run a book funnel, then you’re going to need to print your own books. And if you go through a traditional publisher, you will have to pay them, typically half retail for every copy of the book that you order. So there’s some definite advantages to self-publishing. However, the advantages of traditional publishing are pretty much immediate distribution into bookstores and a chance at the best sellers list, if you can coordinate something like 10,000 sales in a one week period, either with pre-orders or live sales. So those are typically the talking points we come down to when we’re trying to figure out with an author. Are we going self-publishing or traditional publishing?

Melinda Wittstock:

And I imagine for traditional publishing, it’s hard too, because you probably need a bit of a track record to even get a publisher and whatnot. It seems to make sense to start with a self-publishing route. And as an entrepreneur, yeah, you’re sort of mentioning you can use those books as basically gifts, calling card, your authority, your thought leadership. You can build your email list around it. You can do all kinds of things. You can repurpose the book. You can really use it in your marketing and you have control over it. So what are the biggest mistakes that a lot of folks make in the self-publishing realm? I guess we could cast it as mistakes you make, but also what are the, I guess the biggest challenges or the things that people don’t know and they should know?

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Yeah. So some of the mistakes that I see are not thinking about the specific market that you’re going to go for. And you mentioned this really at the top, Melinda, which is the book is not for everyone. Our business is not for everyone. We really do have a market that we’re speaking into, a conversation that’s already happening that our book is going to speak into. And so taking that bold, courageous step to sort of say, “Okay, these are my folks. These are my people. This is what I’m going to speak into,” and even doing a little bit of that comparable title kind of research. Go out and read some of the books that are in this space so that you can more quickly identify, here are the types of books that if you enjoy so-and-so’s books, you’ll love my books, and they’re a little bit different in this way.

So a lot of self-published authors don’t take that sort of extra step to think about where does my book sit in the market itself? And then the other mistake is, and it’s hard to say this is exactly a mistake because many times it’s our first book and we just don’t know what we don’t know, but trying to piece together the freelancers, and an editor here and a designer there and a formatter over here. And those people don’t always talk to each other, so you end up managing the publication process and there’s just hundreds of different questions that self-publish authors run into that slow down that process pretty significantly. And then I would say, just as a sort of clarification between different types of publishers, there are some companies that sort of say we help with self-publishing, but in the process, you actually end up uploading your files into their accounts. The printers in the space are KDP and Ingram Spark.

And if those files go into the publisher’s account to print, then actually the publisher really effectively retains the control over those book files. So they might tout themselves as helping to self-publish, but…

Melinda Wittstock:

[inaudible 00:15:23]

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

If the files [inaudible 00:15:24] into your own account, it’s not in your control. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

So it’s a backdoor way. So really keeping control is really, really important. So I imagine just with Amazon too, just all the hacks on Amazon, much like say SEO with Google, you got to know what your keywords are and all this sort of stuff. So let’s do a little primer on that. What are some of the things. Take me through your process on making sure that the book actually lands with the right people on Amazon and how to hack that so you get discovered.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Yeah, exactly. It’s the same across all of these, getting discovered on any platform. We have to do it with blogs on Google. We do it with podcasts, on Apple Podcasts or Podopolo, and we do it with YouTube videos on YouTube. Same idea with books on Amazon. There are keywords. You’re allowed seven keywords on an eBook. And a lot of folks will just put in something that’s relevant to their book. They just sort of say, hey, my book is about leadership. However, that actually puts you in a huge pile of competition because there might be 60,000 other books that you use the word leadership as their keyword. So we recommend using… There’s some different softwares out there. Publisher Rocket is a great one, but essentially it’s just a keyword search tool and you just want to look for more nuanced phrases. Maybe it’s something about inspiration for women in business.

Maybe that’s a slightly longer keyword, but there’s a lot less competition for it. And so choosing those keywords really selectively is important, as well as those categories. So you don’t have to go for the biggest category. You don’t have to go for business and money. You can actually go for a smaller category inside of business and money. And when you hit the top of a small category in the Amazon bookstore, it will actually begin to show you more widely into those bigger categories. So it’s a little counterintuitive, but go for a smaller category because that upward momentum in the small category will carry you up into the bigger categories too.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Yeah. So is it like Google in the sense that Amazon changes its algorithm all the time, or is it remain pretty consistent?

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Actually, Amazon just released an update about 10 days ago that…

Melinda Wittstock:

I had no idea. I don’t know why I asked that question, but there you go. So I was on point.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

… really unsettled things. And so it’s the same principles. It’s just that it’s changing how they relay the data. And it used to be that we could select 10 categories. Now we get three. However they’ve expanded the categories available, things like that. The specifics change, but the principle remains the same.

Melinda Wittstock:

So I have to ask this. We’ve got all these trends. Everybody’s talking about AI, and I suppose blockchain as well is transforming so many different industries from writing with ChatGPT, for instance, and now getting good at all the prompts, but even just figuring out, can you use ChatGPT to figure out where your keywords are on Amazon? All that kind of stuff. Is that really transforming your business?

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

So ChatGPT is not yet hooked into Amazon’s database, so it can’t really help with that keyword category selection. However, I think ChatGPT is a great writing partner. If you’re writing a book and you want to ask it some questions… I’m thinking about writing a section on women leaders. Can you give me some examples of well-known women leaders in this space? And it can go and do that research for you and bring it back, and you know, can have a little almost conversation with ChatGPT that can keep you inspired and considering things that maybe you wouldn’t normally consider. So ChatGPT as a writing partner, I love that. I think your style is still going to be important, right? So you’re ultimately going to be the one who’s writing down your story and your principles and your frameworks and your lessons learned. But ChatGPT [inaudible 00:19:42] great.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. And that can only come from you and your unique experience, which ChatGPT can’t tell you about you.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

It tell you what’s external to you.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Exactly. And ChatGPT, it hooked into the whole internet basically. I think a really cool development will be when we are able to load up our own smaller space, our own smaller AI, and just feed it our own podcast recordings and YouTube videos and recordings of courses or talks and just give it our content, and then say, okay, now Melinda’s ChatGPT, help me write this book based on what from my content. That will be really fun.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s really very, very interesting. I think these large language models, they’re kind of huge and they’re going to be really inaccessible and very expensive for people to access ultimately. And so when you’re kind of creating your own language model, that’s actually quite an interesting thought. So how is blockchain changing the publishing industry?

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

I think blockchain will change the publishing industry. I don’t know that the publishing industry is, or even readers, the consumers are going to embrace it as quickly as some other industries. However, you can certainly postulate. When we get there, when there is an embrace of it, it’ll be so much easier to have different people share the rights and rights to profits from a book. So a designer, or an editor even, could get some portion of the sales just through the blockchain itself. So royalty distributions are really difficult, same with music and movies and TV and all that. It’s just that the publishing industry’s not quite as interested in embracing that. Where I think we’re going to see a quicker embrace is probably the NFT space where authors can sell NFTs, which is on the blockchain, for access to their community.

Brandon Sanderson, he writes fiction, but he’s done some really cool things with growing his own community and giving people access to books that don’t come through his publisher, that he releases. Gary Vaynerchuk, of course, nonfiction business guy, he sold a million books in a 24 hour period because he was selling an NFT. He said, buy 12 copies of my book from Barnes Noble and I will gift you an NFT, and that broke the records in publishing. So I think the NFT could be maybe the first thing that people really step into.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. That’s very, very powerful. That’s something that I think is going to really change podcasting too. And it’s something that’s in the Podopolo roadmap for creators, because we’re always looking at ways… 98% of podcasters don’t make any money from their podcast, even though it’s fastest growing media of all time. And so there’s all kinds of different things that we’re doing, just with our AI, to allow podcasts that have traditionally smaller audiences to for the first time receive part of the ad revenue because we know more and more about who’s actually listening, so the ads are relevant, so conversions are higher, this kind of thing. So that’s a big structural change. But beyond that, I think there’s so much capacity for podcasters, just like authors to leverage NFTs, just a book authors, right? And we’re talking about entrepreneurs with books, and that book is a marketing arm of their business, so too as their podcast. So I think there’s kind of a lot of really interesting overlap, and there’s going to be a lot of really rapid change in this area.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Well, can I just say, Melinda, I’m inspired by how you’re using Podopolo and AI within Podopolo to help serve. When I use Podopolo versus Apple podcasts, I get totally different, and quite frankly, better recommendations from Podopolo. So even just as a user of podcasts, it improves the discoverability of the types of podcasts you want to listen to. We need the same thing in books. There’s a meme that goes around the reader community about people who want this thing called a book bar where they don’t even serve alcohol, but you walk up to the bar, you slam down the book, you just finished and you say, “Give me another.” And the bartender serves you kind of the perfect next book, and you can just sit at that book bar and read to your heart’s content because someone’s giving you the next, the next, the next. Book readers want the same thing. They want an AI that can serve them up the next perfect read. So I hope that’s coming sooner rather than later.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, it’s just so important. And thank you for what you said about Podopolo, because I think that recommendation and that AI is still in the earliest phases, and so it’s nice to know that we’re doing better than Apple. I believe we are, but that’s going to get more and more and more, oh my goodness, more and more sophisticated over time. Because in the next iteration of the app, our AI is going to be able to go into every tag, every single kind of second minute of every single one of our 6 million podcasts that are on there and understand what’s going on topically and whatnot in all of them, and automate the creation of clips, send those clips to relevant people by their interests and behavior on the app. The potential is just so huge because we want to sit, save people time, make it easy for them to discover things, make it just easy to make information actionable and useful to them, right? So it makes sense across all these industries, not just podcasting. It can easily be done for books.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Can you imagine an app where, yes, it serves you your next best book, and then as you’re reading it, when you highlight something, it creates a social media meme that you can then share on your platforms. And oh, when you finish reading books, it compiles the notes for you and puts them into your favorite note taking app. There’s so many things that it could do. It could serve advertisements at the bottom of a book or between page [inaudible 00:26:18].

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, that’s how we’re using it too. One of the things the advertising industry has missed, it’s always gone by volume, reach a lot of people, but you don’t really know a lot about those people necessarily. It’s a broad audience, so your conversion rates aren’t going to be huge necessarily, and your ad isn’t necessarily going to be relevant to people. so the specificity of the ad, it serves the consumer better because it’s actually relevant to them. You don’t need a large audience anymore. You just need the right audience.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

A hundred percent. Yes. Totally agree.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think we think the same, Morgan. This is really interesting. But it’s interesting where all these different fields of books and podcasts and such, there’s so much kind of overlap. And I tend to think that every podcaster needs a book and every author needs a podcast.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

As you said, we are entrepreneurs, we’re serving clients and customers, we’re creating products, whether they’re physical products or digital products or just straight up services for folks, we develop a way of thinking, a way of believing, a way of being. And people are magnetized to that. They love to hear it in your voice, and they love to read it in your words too. And so it may be that people love your podcast, and they would love to take a book to bed with them too. They’d love that sort of shareable, tangible kind of product as well. And we speak differently than we write. And like we talked about, there’s a different clarity or sheen of thought that comes out when we sit down and write and craft those words and to a book, and our audience will appreciate both.

Melinda Wittstock:

So say for your process, say for instance, you have somebody come to you with either a book idea, or they’ve got their structure, they know what they want to do or whatever. Talk to me about your process and what you do to get them, get their book kind of written, whether you’re ghosting it or whether you’re coaching or whatnot. How does that all work?

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

So if someone comes to us with a book concept, or maybe they have the structure or just a few thousand words into the writing, we can help get that first draft finished in a couple of ways. One, we can just straight up coach a writer through that writing process. Sometimes it’s as easy as just giving them the, here’s best practices for a great nonfiction book. And giving people a little bit of that overview roadmap and some support and feedback as they’re writing is sometimes enough that they can write it themselves. And that’s what a lot of us want to do. Other folks are like, “No thanks, I’d rather not write it myself. I’d love to just talk with a ghost writer.” So we have kind of a triangular configuration that we put together. We have the author, the client who we’re going to interview, we have lots of questions and pull out stories and philosophies and frameworks and ideas from who will be the author.

And on that same call are two folks. There’s your ghost writer who’s listening and getting to know your style and your tone, and we have a book coach. And that book coach is the one who’s really used to asking the right questions, pulling out those clarifications, going deeper into a story. So as the ghost writer is delivering sort of chapter after chapter, the book coach is sort of right there with them saying, “Wait, I think the author said something a little bit different. I heard the story slightly differently,” or “I think this clarification would be better.” So there can be a whole sort of triangular triage of your first draft to help really pull it out. And that’s more efficient because you get it done faster. It might only take 10, 15 hours to get all of that material from you, and it’s still your voice, which is really, really important. We found that when it’s just author and ghost writer, they tend to butt heads and not see to eye to eye, and it’s really difficult to move forward.

But when we started putting that book coach in the same conversation, that really helped facilitate everything moving forward so much more smoothly. So yes, that’s getting the first draft. Do you want me to pause before we move on?

Melinda Wittstock:

No. No, no, no. Keep going. This is great.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Yeah. And of course, some people just write the first draft. They got inspired, they went away for a couple of weeks, or they’ve been working on this for a year or two, and they have a first draft. Okay, perfect. Once we have first draft, now we can move into editing, developmental editing, copy editing, proofreading. There’s different levels. Happy to… If anyone has questions, feel free to reach out to me. We move through all the same levels of editing that a professional traditional book publisher would, as well as cover design, interior design, getting that Amazon algorithm really working for you with the keywords and the categories and the description and all of that. And then we actually launched the book, available as eBook, paperback, hardback. And for the folks who want that bigger splashier launch, we help get book awards and endorsements. We love doing podcast tours.

Podcasts are perfect companions for people who are doing a book launch, organizing your book launch team to leave reviews. So all of that is really part of that launch process. And so we can kind of meet people where they are in that process from book concept to launching a book with massive visibility.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, well, you know what? We’re going to talk offline because I can see where our brand studio, because Podopolo also has a whole production arm now and working with some pretty major brands, but also with entrepreneurs to create their podcasts, so we should collaborate.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Absolutely. I have so many authors. Because as you know, you can do it either way, right? You can write the book, and then start the podcast, or you can start the podcast, and then write the book so you have the audience to launch it to. So many of our authors who write the book first, as soon as they hit launch, like, “Okay, I’m ready for my podcast.” So yeah, we should absolutely talk.

Melinda Wittstock:

And it’s so funny because I’m the opposite. So in my case, so I have, with the publishing of your podcast, Morgan, 820 episodes with all the themes. So what I was going to do was kind of use our AI to go through all these and pull out the themes, what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur as told by the best entrepreneurs female founders in the world.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

I love it. I love it. That’s going to be amazing.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so the book is already sort of written, but it weaves in with my own kind of experience. And it’s kind of funny, I feel like all these years I’ve been writing the books, so should get together on that as well.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Yep, a hundred percent.

Melinda Wittstock:

I use this podcast. Podcasts are good for lots of things, just even making deals.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Exactly. And that’s exactly why everyone should have a book and a podcast. The book gets you on the stages, in the back rooms, in the green rooms, and the podcast gets you those more one-on-one personal conversations with folks who are high level in your industry. So yeah, hand in hand.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, that’s amazing. So what have been some of the challenges along the way for you and building your business?

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Oh, holy moly. Well, the first major challenge for me is I didn’t know how to publish a book.

Melinda Wittstock:

You learned the hard way. You rolled up your sleeves and got it done.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

That’s exactly what happened. Actually, in my twenties, I was getting a PhD in sociology, thought I was going to be a professor. And then got deep enough into academia and realized that was not going to be a great path for me personally, just my personality, but I’d been working with folks on writing, writing articles, dissertations, monographs, which are academic books, and left after I’d finished my master’s and continued working with folks. So I was really deep in the trenches, word documents, Google documents with the writing, and started to specialize in books specifically. And four or five years into it, I had enough clients that I started hiring editors to work with me on these book manuscripts. And then a few years into that, people would come back and they’d say, “Thank you. I love this book that you helped me write and edit, and it’s still a Word document. No one will publish it. How do I self-publish this book?”

And I was like, “I have no idea. I know how to write a book, I know how to edit a book, but usually I just pass it off to the publisher and they handle it.” But as an entrepreneur, you get a few questions from clients persistently, and you say, “Okay, I’m paying attention. I’m going to figure this out.” So I wrote a book and I published it. It is very straightforwardly called Start Writing Your Book Today. It was just all the lessons and frameworks and principles I developed in working with clients, packaged it up into a book, published it, took notes on the best practices, and took a few Guinea pig clients through. This was 2015. So we did a handful of books in 2015. And every year, have just grown our process and our best practices and our networks. And this year, we’re doing 63 books. So yeah, we’re growing pretty rapidly.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so, you described typically the entrepreneurial journey of just iteration. I’ve just come to the conclusion that entrepreneurship is simply about learning. That’s pretty much what it is. And so have you had failures? Have you had things like, oh my God, I wish I’d known that before, that kind of thing?

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Yeah. Certainly in the business itself, just growing a business. And this is true, I believe, across industries. When you start to try to transition from getting clients purely from referrals into clients who don’t know who you are and don’t have a referral, they’re really cold traffic clients, it’s just a totally different game. So I started with webinars back in probably 2017, something like that. And my first webinars were… No one came, or maybe one person came. And I just was… I would do webinars every single week live. And I have kids, so I didn’t have a ton of childcare then, so it was really stressful to make the house quiet for 90 minutes to 120 minutes, and then to get to the end of that webinar and realize, “Oh my gosh, no one applied or no one bought.” So I think I did… Okay. I did over a hundred live webinars in one year.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wow.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

I made some sales. I didn’t make as many sales as I wanted to make. But now having built those skills in 2017, 18, 19, I can do a live webinar and it’s a six figure launch, right? So there was is dozens, if not over a hundred sort of “failures” on these webinars, but it was building the skills that I needed to go to the next level.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. That’s amazing. So what is your big vision? Where are you going to be in five years?

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Oh, I love this question. I do intend to revolutionize the publishing industry. That’s in my personal roadmap. I think it’s really about finding better ways to connect authors with readers directly. So I’m always advising our authors like, “Look, we need to be building your email list with this book, and we need to not only…. Yes, we care about Amazon and Barnes and Noble and sales and reviews and that sort of thing. And every single person who reads your book should have a reason to join your email list, so that you can offer them products and services. You can pre-launch the next book. So an email list I think is one way right now. That’s the common sense sort of way to connect directly with your readers. And I think it can go deeper with that. I think, just like we were talking about with apps and NFTs, are there going to be new ways for readers to connect directly with the authors they love, and for authors just to sell their books directly to readers?

And I think it’s going to require bookstores to really step up and do something different. So it’s fascinating. The publishing world moves like molasses, right? So I was reading a industry magazine earlier, and bookstores were sort of saying… There’s a collection of bookstores that say, “It’s really hard to sell books. We should just be supported by charities.” It’s like, I don’t know, maybe you should move with the industry and find more valuable ways to serve your constituents, your readers. And I think there’s going to be a massive sort of opportunity for bookstores to step up and serve readers the content that they want. And rather than alienating authors, actually figure out how they can help authors in a lot of ways. And so I think there’s going to be…

I would love to start a bookstore. I haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to do that exactly, but you wrestle with Amazon enough times and you’re like, there’s got to be a better way to sell books. Amazon is sort of required for the moment. It’s the big gorilla in the room, and I think there’s going to be be some new things happening with bookstores, eBooks, audiobooks, and connecting authors with readers more directly. So it’s a little bit vague, but that’s a general direction I feel like I’m heading.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s amazing. Well, I want to make sure people know how to find you and work with you, Morgan. What are the best ways?

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Paperravenbooks.com. So yeah, our company is called Paper Raven Books. We have a whole team of editors, designers, marketers, projects managers. And so if you want to get plugged into either just working with us to write the book, or even take it all the way through the publishing process, all that info’s at paperraven.books.com. And if you want to reach out to me personally, I am Morgan g mack at on pretty much all the platforms. So I would love to just connect with anyone who’s listening and thinking about books and or business and just have that conversation with you.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Morgan Gist Macdonald:

Thank you so much, Melinda. Truly an honor. Thanks for having me today.