The Power of
Compilation Books

Transcript from the episode recording, with speaker names added and paragraphs formatted for readability. Automated transcription may contain errors; the audio is the original record.

Brad Hauck 00:14

Welcome back to the Experts Journey podcast. Tomorrow, a new conference in a book title drops called Connect Lead Succeed. And today we want to talk about compilation books and why they can punch way above their weight. A compilation book is not just a random pile of chapters. It's a curated lineup, like a conference agenda, but on paper. Multiple experts, one theme, each person bringing their best ideas, their strongest stories, and their practical takeaways that you can use straight away. Connect Lead Succeed pulls insights from 16 international experts across leadership, teams, AI, and tech, networking, marketing, and growth.

Lots of topics there. So here's the real question. If you were building your own compilation, what would your main stage, your main topic be? And what kind of speakers and friends and experts would you invite so the reader feels like they're getting the full event experience? Good morning, Dixie.

Dixie Carlton 01:11

Morning, Brad. Congratulations to us. We're doing it. So this is the second in the series. This was the first, the green cover, and this is the second one, which launches this week. And you touched on some really interesting points in your introduction. So I can't wait to have a conversation about this.

Brad Hauck 01:30

Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. I've been in, I think this is my second compilation book, maybe, and I'm really excited about this one because I was talking about leadership and AI. So yeah, we'll get into that shortly. But look, first big news, everybody, we are going to run a live event. So we're running that live event in conjunction with the Global Speaker Summit in Cairns on the 12th of March. And it's called From Pages to Paid Programs: How to Shell Workshops Built from Your Books. And it's going to run from 2 p.m. to 4 30 p.m.

We haven't confirmed the venue, but we will. And then we're going to follow it up with a chance for people just to have social drinks and networking opportunities and catch up. So it'll be really cool. This will be our first big live event together. And it's going to be really good hands-on learning information that you can apply in your business.

Dixie Carlton 02:20

Yeah, fantastic. I'm looking forward to that. And it will be great to do some hands-on work. You and I both do a lot of workshops and programs online, but to get around a real table and stand in a room with real people will be fun for a change. So that'll be great.

Brad Hauck 02:34

Absolutely.

Dixie Carlton 02:35

Yeah. And for those of you who are not going to Cairns for the GSS, well, we'll catch you next time and we may do a repeat of the workshop at some point in the future online. But but yeah, highly recommend if you've got nothing else to do on the Thursday before the conference, come along and have some fun.

Unidentified speaker 02:52

Yeah.

Brad Hauck 02:53

So it may be the first of many. Who knows? We might do an international tour.

Dixie Carlton 02:58

That would be fun.

Brad Hauck 02:59

50 countries in 50 days or something. But I don't think it'll be the last time we do it. And I think it might be a great opportunity, as I said, for anyone who's in Cairns for the conference or lives around Cairns even, who listens to the podcast, to come down and spend a couple of hours and learn some really cool stuff.

Dixie Carlton 03:17

Well, speaking of 50 countries in 50 weeks, that would be fun. But this series of books actually features a total now of 28 authors from I think 17 countries.

Brad Hauck 03:31

Wow.

Dixie Carlton 03:32

Which is pretty impressive. And what I really love about this series is that it focuses on a global perspective. Now, you mentioned in your introduction that this is a conference in a book, which it is. It's been designed specifically to look like and function as though it was a conference in a book. So we have done some different things with this, like a lot of anthology books, just to clarify before I explain more about this one, a lot of anthology books are simply a collection of authors who may or may not be managed by a project manager to come together and put a chapter together and then someone will produce the book and that's it.

What we've done differently with this series is that every single person was selected to be in the book based on their the merits of their content. They're all high quality professional speakers, including CSPs. There's a couple of people with doctor in in their name, but they are people who have worked closely with me to develop and curate their content based on their best keynote uh presentations. And then we've made it that at the beginning and all the way through the book, there is an MC style narrative leading the reader through the book and the contents so that everything and all of the sections and this the sessions, if you like, all make sense and relate to each other.

And look, I've got to tell you, there's some amazing wisdom captured in these books. Uh I'm really excited about some of the feedback we've had already for the first book. But book two, I think, is every bit as good, if not better, in terms of some of the incredible wisdom that's coming out.

Brad Hauck 05:16

Yeah. So one of the things about conference in a book or compilation books or anthologies, if we like to use all those terms, is that they have a common theme through them generally, don't they? You go to a conference, you have a theme. What's the theme of this one?

Dixie Carlton 05:30

So the first book was Leadership Teams, AI, Marketing, and Networking. And as I said, it was something that you had to sub you had to submit to be included in. And we had so many people sub submit conference, sorry, submit content based on AI and leadership. We decided to do the second book on business leadership, AI. And what I call assisted intelligence. So not necessarily artificial intelligence, which is what we all think of as AI being, but assisted intelligence. How do you pull in all of these resources to make your life as a business leader and an entrepreneur easier without just getting hung up on the concept of AI?

And there's some brilliant chapters on that in here.

Brad Hauck 06:14

Excellent. Now, you know, these sorts of books, not so much the conference in a book, because you've really actually created a specific type of book here. It is different to a normal compilation. But books like this, like Chicken Soup for the Soul, for example, been around for quite a while. And we're very successful series for people. They were huge. I remember back in the I don't know, 2000s. They were big sellers. So this is quite a unique way to create a book and gives you an opportunity to be involved in a book if you're not ready necessarily to write a whole book yet.

Dixie Carlton 06:48

Yeah. And a lot of people get into anthologies for that reason. They think, well, I've really got a good set of information. I know that I want to write something one day, but this is like a shortcut version. Although just as many existing authors like yourself and Rayner Petick, for example, is in this particular book, have already done a number of other books, but they see this as being something that's, or they see an anthology concept as being something to just test a a smaller piece of information that maybe they're not quite ready to write a whole book for yet.

And so there's a number of reasons why people go into these. And often it is because they see value in it and not quite as much commitment. Writing a whole book can take an average of a year from start to published. Doing something like this is a lot less time, and you've got all of the other authors that you are positioning yourself alongside of, or being positioned alongside of, I should say, to help you stand as an expert in your particular area alongside of them. So there's a number of reasons for that. Yeah.

Brad Hauck 07:54

I think that's a really powerful point, is the fact that you may be thinking of yourself as a a new expert, you're new to this sort of area, even though you might have been doing it for a long time. Being able to have your name with other people who have a name in the industry is really powerful to leverage off that association sort of thing. And I think it works well.

Dixie Carlton 08:13

Well, when I first got into publishing, I was lucky enough to be in a book called Create the Business Breakthrough You Want. And it was created by a guy who was working closely with people like Mark Victor Hanson, Bob Proctor, Brian Tracy, Robert Middleton. And so what he did was he positioned this concept of where you have maybe half a dozen or several high-quality, well-known authors who are already making it, like Mark Victor Hanson and Jack Canfield from Chicken's Suit for the Soul. John Egan had already worked closely with them. So he was able to say, let's take this concept and make it where you've got the named leaders on the front cover.

And then we all had to apply, and I think there were 40 of us had to apply to be on the front cover as well. So we got nurtured through a 12-month process of how to create great content and also to learn about how the publishing concept worked for us as experts. So it was a really well-done program. And a long way from what a lot of others are out there doing, I see messages every day. Well, not quite every day, but regularly throughout the year, I see people saying, Hey, we're doing this book and we just want people to come along and pay a few thousand dollars to be part of it.

What John did with the Create the Business Breakthrough You Want was a long way different to that. And that's the model that I've tried to recreate with the books that I work on as this kind of anthology, where you do get to learn, you do get to be positioned alongside of other experts that you'd be proud to be associated with. And so the whole concept of doing a book like this takes a lot of planning. It takes a model development and research for who lines up well with each other. And you've got to be thinking about the big picture as well.

It's quite different doing a book like this to even a book with maybe two or three authors who already know each other, because here you're developing a new tribe of people who can be connected through this one project.

Brad Hauck 10:18

Yeah, I think you made a really interesting point there when I was listening to you talking about the fact that you get inquiries every day saying, Hey, do you want to be in this book? And that's really interesting because people are saying, I want to do a compilation, I want to do a compilation. And it does sound like a great opportunity. But there's actually a lot more to it than that. As you said, the first one you were involved in, there were some big names there. They mixed big names with new names, sort of building credibility for people.

There was aside from the learning, there was there's a lot more involved in the marketing as well. It's all very well to say, I was in this book, but if no one ever picks up the book, it doesn't count for anything, does it? It's just another book. So if you can get involved in a project like conference in a book, you're now being specially vetted and put together and managed so that the book is actually something really good that when people do read it, they get some really good value and they're more likely to come and talk to you or share you or whatever.

Dixie Carlton 11:15

That's right. And the other thing, too, that a lot of people don't understand is that yes, there is a certain level of expertise in pulling such a project together. Because if you do it badly, and I have seen several examples of this over the years, if you do it badly, then you're not only hurting the brand that, you know, of everybody that's in it, but you're also doing a disservice to the whole concept of this style of publishing. All right. So if you've got people who have already got good names and well known and well respected for their expertise, and they end up alongside of people who are other authors that don't have that level of credibility or they don't have the level of integrity, or they are someone who comes along and upsets the industry in some way, then that does damage to your own brand.

Absolutely. The responsibility of pulling together the right group of people is quite high. And then also you've got the whole thing of everybody's different. So some people will be incredibly responsive to all of the instructions and A, B, C, D, let's do this in this order. And then you'll have some people that'll be really slow to respond or really need a lot of chasing up and reining into to make sure that they've got the right content or that they're sending things back in in a timely fashion.

Brad Hauck 12:31

For the listeners out there, Dixie's looking at me intently because I was one of those people she chased.

Dixie Carlton 12:37

But sometimes you have to learn to cope with the ebb and flow and the ups and the downs and the roundabouts of the people that are involved. I pull on all my coaching skills when it comes to the case. Yeah. A little bit. It's worth it in the end. And if you're working on a plan, and I know I always talk about planning, but if you're working to a solid plan with everything that you're doing, then it all comes together really well. And then everybody is proud of the result. And you don't want to have a situation where you've put all of this work and effort into a great compilation book and have one person let the whole thing down because they don't like what they ended up with or they're unhappy with something, or it's a project that takes a lot of careful managing.

And it's a good thing.

Brad Hauck 13:28

So I just thought of a question. Sorry. When you put these books up, so obviously we're going to promote this through Amazon. People can go there and get a copy. Um and it's going to be huge already. I see it's ranking number three in marketing. It was a business marketing? Business management. Business management, that's right. Yeah. So it's doing really well already. And one of my questions was can you tie that to other authors when you upload to Amazon? So for example, I have my author account and as one of the people in the book, can that be tied in?

Is there a way to do that? Sorry, I know that's a technical question, but Well, it's a great question.

Dixie Carlton 14:03

And there absolutely is. And that's one of the value points of doing a great job with this. So if you're working with authors who have already got books up, then they already have an Amazon author central page. So all of the authors that are already existing authors and have Amazon accounts with their own books, if they have followers, then those followers will be notified if someone has a new book come out. So for example, I think there's about seven of the authors in this book are already existing authors. And so collectively we may have a few thousand people following us for our author authored work already.

So that means that all of those people get notified that this book was now just released. So for example, Amazon will send a message to say, well, Brad Hauker's just got a new book out. Which is really great for marketing.

Brad Hauck 14:52

Yeah.

Dixie Carlton 14:53

What the authors all have to do is they go into their author central account and they select the book by the title or by the ISIN to be part of their list of books in their category.

Brad Hauck 15:06

Okay. Oh, I'll have to do that today.

Dixie Carlton 15:08

Exactly. And then what happens is as anyone's looking at the listing on Amazon, they will see not only the names of the authors on the first part of the listing, but they will see some of the authors listed on the page and their connections through to their author pages as well. So it's a brilliant marketing system. And I've talked a lot in the past about the value of using Amazon in lots of ways that a lot of people don't think about. But having that from an anthology of book concept means that you're actually also increasing your marketing potential.

And then when all of the authors, for example, in this book all post up on LinkedIn and all share with their respective networks, it means that you get more traction and more movement on the book at launch time and then afterwards, which is great.

Brad Hauck 15:55

Well, I think it's interesting because, as I said, I've seen different people, Dale Baalmont and obviously people like that do these concepts over the years. But I think it's really important, as you said, like how you approach it. The conference in a book, I think, is a brilliant idea because you read through it, it's like going to a conference, except you can sit there and read it rather than sitting there and listening to the speakers. But if people are thinking about doing this sort of thing, do we like pick a niche? Do we pick a question?

Is there any kind of tips you can give us there? For example, should I write a book about clarity or something like that and get everybody to talk about it? Because sometimes I suppose that would bring seven different ways to solve the problem, which is not necessarily a good thing. You want one way to solve the problem. So just thinking.

Dixie Carlton 16:37

This goes back to theming. And you just mentioned Dale Beaumont, who did a brilliant series about 20 years ago of anthology books. And he would, I think, collect specific experts from specific topics like executive woman or C-suite operators or managers or entrepreneurs or whatever. It's a long time ago. I can't remember, but I know this was absolutely brilliant. And I think this does come back to the theming concept. So these books, these two books are specifically around business leadership and AI. And yes, there's a few chapters on the first book about marketing and networking, but that all ties together in a business conference concept.

So this is a business conference book. The next two books in the series, one will be on marketing creativity and innovation. So all of the chapters will be based on that. Now then the fourth book, I believe, is intended to be about sales and marketing. So sales and marketing fits really nicely with creativity, marketing, and innovation. So but marketing is a big wide topic because that includes things like social media and all that as well and branding. So again, this comes back down to how you select the people to be in it. But from my point of view, when I'm doing one of these projects, I'm carefully curating what fits where.

Whether there's a cache of two people writing about the same thing or close to, whether there is room for something completely different, or whether we need to go and find an author in particular who fits that's got something quite dynamically different. So there's a process of pulling it all together. But you also would notice, for example, if we did in the marketing and sales for entrepreneurs, or no, hang on, maybe it was business startups and off the top of my head, I know that there's about three books coming out and I can't. But essentially, if we did a book on creativity, innovation and marketing, then you would notice if suddenly you got a chapter on HR or wellness.

So that's when you say, well, okay, as part of a series, we'll maybe do wellness and HR further down the track, or maybe that's two separate books. But you do want to make sure that when you're thinking about the reader, the person who's going to go to a conference on leadership and AI is not going to be looking to see the speaker talking about or listen or read the chapter talking about wellness and HR, just as an example. So you do again have to think about what you're doing when you're putting an anthology book together.

Make sure everything fits and flows.

Brad Hauck 19:10

Yeah, and I think you see that at conferences too. Sometimes you get a speaker and it's a little bit jarring because it's like they're out of alignment with the overall topic. They brought someone in to talk about something, and you're kind of like, well, hang on, how does that fit in? Or they haven't tailored it to fit in with the theme. So while you could talk about wellness, but if the conference is about AI, then maybe you should be talking about apps to help you with your wellness or something. So you know, you do see that in the real world as well.

But in a book, it's very permanent and it's not fluid like on stage where people can adjust things. So I think, yeah, you're right. You've got to get it balanced. And I know that you've done a great job with this one and the previous one because I've seen them both. And then we also had one that we did for Bali for the GSS last time. So it is a balancing act. It does take an expert to really do it well. So if anyone is interested in being involved in this sort of project, you are the sort of person to talk to about that.

Dixie Carlton 20:03

Yeah, thanks. And if someone's thinking about doing a book but they're not ready, then exploring concepts for doing this kind of option is a really good way of getting your feet wet in the publishing arena. But again, you do need to be planning well and thinking about how your brand will be affected by being in a book and who's pulling it together, you know, how it's going to be marketed, who else is in the book. So there are a few things that I always tell people when they're thinking about people will contact me and say, I've just been invited to be in this book.

What do you think should I go in it? The three things I'll always say is who's producing it and have they done it before? And have they been successful doing it before? Because you don't want to be working with a newbie in this space. How many people are going to be in it? You don't want to be in a book that's got 50 people or just having one or two pages. You want something a little bit more in-depth than that. And, you know, who's making decisions about the content and how well it all fits together.

Are you being, you know, is it going to be edited? Is it going to be designed to a high standard? Who else is in it that you may or may not want to be associated with? So those are really important considerations when you are contemplating going into anything like this. It's been easier with this particular series because everyone that's in it is part of the Virtual Speakers Association. So they're all high-quality speakers. They've all got great content. And it's been easy to pull everyone together because many of them have already had experience with publishing, or at least with being part of a stage lineup where there are other speakers.

There might be two or three speakers on leadership in a day, for example. So you get to experience that kind of scenario rather than thinking, oh, I'm going to do this. Where do I start? What do I write about? Yeah.

Brad Hauck 21:55

Excellent. Well, I think that pretty well covers our topic for today. Yeah. I think for anybody who's listening, the book is available now. You can find it at Amazon or check our profiles, you'll find links for it. And grab a copy. It's a fantastic read. There's some really top quality people and some top quality thinking in this book as well. And I know I really enjoyed doing my chapter. It was a lot of fun bringing a bit of firefighting into AI and leadership. So hopefully people enjoy that chapter as well. And yeah, so go and check out Amazon, check out our profiles, you'll find it there.

Dixie Carlton 22:30

So and you won't be bored reading these books. Like each chapter is about 3,000 words long. They're really good, easy to read, and well curated as far as that goes. So they are the kind of books that you can pick up and put down, or you can just read in a whole day and say, oh my goodness, that's really cool. And then you can go to all of the author's individual pages at the end of their chapter. They've got URLs to go to where they want to then share some resources. So you've got a lot of scope to use this as literally sit yourself down on a Sunday or a Monday or take a day off and say, I'm just going to do some professional development.

And this is how I'm doing that. So instead of jumping on an aeroplane and dealing with bad hotel food and lousy pillows, etc., then you've got the ability to go and do this as an as an alternative to fronting up to a live event. And it is that quality. So you won't be bored. You'll enjoy the content. And uh yeah, go and find it on Amazon. Connect, lead, succeed, book one and book two.

Brad Hauck 23:31

Excellent. Well, before we finish, just a reminder Thursday, 12th of March in the afternoon, we've got from pages to paid programs in Cannes, if anyone's interested. There'll be some information coming out about that. So check our profiles, keep an eye on your emails. And we look forward to seeing you there. If this episode has you thinking about writing a book, but you're not sure how to shape your ideas, reach out to Dixie by indiexpertspublishing.com. She'll help you turn what's in your head into a clear, compelling book that builds authority. And if you're doing the work but you're not getting enough clients, start with clarity.

If you want help to sharpen your positioning and build marketing with AI that actually converts, join us in my authority multiplier mastermind community at bradhauck.com. Take the step that fits where you're stuck right now, and we'll see you in the next episode of the podcast.

Dixie Carlton 24:19

Fantastic. Thanks, Brad. Great conversation as always. See you next week, everyone.