How can you build a scalable business around non-fiction books? How can you turn a book into multiple streams of income? How can you delegate in order to scale? Michael Bungay Stanier shares his thoughts.

In the intro, Bookfunnel's Universal Book Links, and How to Write Non-Fiction Second Edition; ALCS survey results of writers on AI, remuneration, transparency and choice; AI Translation is the Game-Changer’s Game-Changer [The New Publishing Standard]

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Michael Bungay Stanier is the bestselling author of five books, with a million copies sold, including The Coaching Habit, How to Begin, and How to Work with (Almost) Anyone. He's also the founder of training and development company Box of Crayons, a podcaster, speaker, and coach.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

Michael's publishing journey and why he likes the control of hybrid publishing
Creating a business ecosystem beyond the book — multiple streams of income
Tips for successfully delegating in your author business and improving professional relationships
The challenges of creating a premium print journal
How journaling can help you figure out what you really want

You can find Michael at MBS.works or BoxofCrayons.com. You can get the journal at DoSomethingJournal.com.

Transript of Interview with Michael Bungay Stanier

Joanna: Michael Bungay Stanier is the bestselling author of five books, with a million copies sold, including The Coaching Habit, How to Begin, and How to Work with (Almost) Anyone. He's also the founder of training and development company Box of Crayons, a podcaster, speaker, and coach. Welcome to the show, Michael.

Michael: Jo, I'm so happy to be here. It was earlier this year that you and I were hanging out in a field together, and this is warmer and less damp, amongst other things.

Joanna: Yes, indeed. We were at The DO Lectures in Wales, which we're going to come back to. First up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.

Michael: Well, the seed was planted by having a grandmother who was a writer. So my dad's mum lived in Oxford, England, and she wrote columns for the local newspaper, kind of gossip columns. Her pen name was Culex, which is Latin for mosquito, which I love.

She also wrote kids’ books, and memoirs, and plays, and radio scripts. She was a really prolific writer.

So I think that was probably the early seed, along with my dad being a great storyteller. He would tell stories at night of Sir Michael. I was meeting Sir Nigel, Sir Angus, my two brothers, and we'd head off and have adventures.

So this idea of loving stories and loving writing, I think was planted pretty early on. I found in university and in my first careers after university, I would inevitably end up writing the newsletter. In university, I was part of the law newspaper and the English department newspaper.

Writing and writing and writing has just been part of the practice for a long time.

Which, as you know, is all part of putting in your 10,000 hours, finding your voice, learning how to write a sentence. Starting off copying other people's styles and then trying to find your own style emerging from that.

The first time an actual book idea showed up in my head, and this turned into an actual book that I published called Get Unstuck & Get Going. I had this idea that I thought about coaching, which was a profession I just started in. I was like, you know, there's a way of doing this that can be more efficient than actually having a coach.

I had this idea of like the kids’ flip books, where you have like a ballerina's head and a scuba diver's body and a soccer player's legs, and you kind of combine them into these kind of different combinations. I had this idea that you could create a book with different questions.

So you'd bring a problem to the book, and you'd open it and randomly generate some questions, and voila, you'd have a self-directed coaching practice. So I had this idea, and wrote some stuff up, and went and made some prototypes.

Then I honestly just couldn't figure out how to publish it because no publisher wanted this, and self-publishing felt impossible.

So I kind of put it in a drawer, until my cousin Robert went, “You know that book you were telling me about, this kind of self-coaching book? I noticed you're not doing it, and I was telling my boss about it, and he thought he his company could do it.”

I was like, “Wait, no, what? Ah!” So that was kind of the catalyst to me getting a first book published. After that —

I just realized that writing books and producing books and getting them out in the world is one of the best expressions of the way I try and serve the world.

Joanna: I love that, and it's a really interesting story. Just give us a sense of the timeline because you said there that self-publishing would be difficult. I mean, self-publishing that kind of book would be difficult. You've got five books now with, I presume, different publishers or self-publishing.

Tell us a bit about that publishing journey and the timeline.

Michael: So, let's see. Get Unstuck & Get Going would have been around about 2006, so before Amazon and others kind of made self-publishing a regular book normal.

Then I self-published another book called Find Your Great Work, and did a print run of like a couple of thousand copies. I was super excited about it. A friend of mine went, “Oh, this is good,” and he sent it to his editor at Workman, which is a New York publishing house. They came back and said they'd like to publish this.

I was like, well, I've already published 2000. They're like, well, soon as those are done, we'll redo this book for you. So in 2010, I think, I published a book with Workman in New York. So that was a regular publishing experience.

Building A Business Ecosystem Around Non-Fiction Books With Michael Bungay Stanier