I paused, wondering if I was hearing wrong. The Ministry was asking to review the book, and we had to pause on our publishing.
What could we do?
We could only wait, and be patient. There was nothing else I could do. Whenever people approach us to do a commemorative book, my initial questions used to be around their financial budget.
But now I’ve come to realise that the more important budget to figure out is, time.
Yes, I know this is probably not what you were expecting. You may have wanted some quick and easy steps to work through for your commemorative book.
But before that, the better question to ask is:
Why is a commemorative book worth it?
Let’s make no mistake. A commemorative book is going to be hard, and there are often many different options you can take to celebrate.
For example, many have chosen to do things like:
- Have a big party and pay for the food of your staff
- Have a big trip
Doing a commemorative book may seem to be far too much trouble.
I like to repeat this model from Tong Yee. He shares about how the antidote to our suffering is often leadership. Being willing to show the leadership to lead the conversations around your subject and topic are going to place you top of mind, before everyone else.
A commemorative book shows thought leadership. Of course, you might say,
Ah, with ChatGPT, there’s no more need for thought leadership. AI can synthesize whatever you do and give something even better!
I’m going to say here that at this moment, that’s still not possible from AI. AI can synthesize, but to come up with new insight is still something quite impossible.
Essentially, what you must ask is:
can you answer questions Google cannot, with your book?
Well, don’t just take it from me. Take it from Ismail Gafoor and Kelvin Fong, the Chairman and CEO of PropNex.
This year, they produced two books, and one would quickly wonder why these two astute businessmen did books, when they were so good with social media and marketing.
Wouldn’t it have made sense for them to have discarded the process of writing a book, and gone with a lighter weight marketing material like a post or article?
Clearly, they see some value. And here’s what I think they see.
A commemorative book positions you as the thought leader, above all else
Over and over again, why people do books is because it shows that they have thought deeply about a subject. Deep enough to write 50,000 words about it.
But you might then ask,
how would you do this well, if you did it with an agency?
The challenge of commemorative books
But before we get into how you choose an agency, what’s perhaps more important is to talk about the challenges, honestly.
I stared at the editor, wondering if I’d heard wrong. She wanted me to tear apart the entire manuscript, and start from scratch. She thought the story was all over the place, and she had little idea where the story was going.
It didn’t matter. What did matter was that she pointed out a clear problem.
Problem 1.Structuring your content
If you can’t structure your content, you’re dead. Your book will feel limp, lost and confusing. Your reader would read for a few seconds, not know where you’re going, and then put it down.
It’d be a pity, considering how much effort you put into making it.
In one of the books we did on a shipping company, the hardest thing was looking at the content we had, and then organizing it into a useful structure.
Here’s an analogy that might help.
Think of your book as trying to describe a jungle. Your role is to try to craft a path that would lead a reader through the jungle, so they would hopefully have a better understanding of the jungle afterwards.
There are many things in the jungle. Do you focus on the tiger that lurks in the woods, or the stream that winds lovingly through the trees?
Your role is to structure the path. And that might just be the hardest thing.
Problem 2. Gathering anecdotes
I sat in the roomful of people, wondering what to do next. We were at the Mac-Nels conference, listening to the different speakers share about the cargo volumes, and hearing abbreviations thrown across the room.
FCL, LCL, FAK, were enough for us to feel like we were stuck in a word soup.
But we persisted. Over the months, we spoke to more than 30 different staff and partners of Mac-Nels, so that we could finish the anniversary book of the CEO, Mr Nicholas Er.
Of course the question is,
how do you find these anecdotes?
Well, we went far and wide. We went to Thailand, and even found ourselves in the ports of Singapore to observe how the containers were loaded and unloaded.
No, we didn’t get to sit on the forklifts, though we’d very much have loved to. And yes, it was a revelation into the daily heartbeat of our economy, through the containers that were shipped in and out.
Find agencies that are masterful therapists
You need to find agencies that have writers that are masterful therapists. You heard it.
Not writers, but therapists. This comes from the words of Lori Gottlieb, who first started her career writing for the likes of The Atlantic. In her book “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone”, she points out that in her job as a writer, she learnt how to write stories.
But as a therapist, she learnt how to reframe these painful stories.
Because the writers can’t just write. They need to ask in a way that provokes people to share their stories, in a meaningful way.
Problem 3: Crafting something people want to read
This is probably the hardest part, and where you might need some help. Writing a book is easy. Writing something that people read, is much harder. And this is where you might need to take longer to find an agency, given that most agencies would just give you what you want.
Here’s an example.
Something we find has differed between our approaches and that of others, is the sheer fact that we spend time thinking about what people actually want to read.
Take for example the book we did with Mac-Nels. Initially, it was hard trying to understand why people would read the story of the founder. But after interviewing his staff and partners, we realised that his life, outside of the constant traveling, was inspiring to learn from.
Find an agency that tells good stories
Here, our worthy rival in the market is The Nutgraf, who’ve done this for a decade now. As trained journalists, they are probably the best in the business at finding stories and learning how to scale them.
Here’s how you might want to do it well.
Organise all your information well
Your first step is to dig through the archives, and pull out the relevant information.
Most of the other steps are self-explanatory. But what we would point out here is that at the end of the day, you need to find someone you trust. You’re going to entrust them with very intimate details of your company and your higher management, and they need to be a safe pair of hands whom you’d trust with this story.
Find the person you trust
I stared at the email, wondering if I was reading it right.
This client wanted me to write his book? I searched him up. His company looked legitimate and real.
It was July 2023, and I was broke. My team had just broken up after I was unable to bring in more sales. I had to do things like creating strange digital forms, websites, and random articles.
I didn’t know where the next dollar would come. Then this client turned up, asking if I was willing to write his book, to coincide with his company’s 50th Anniversary, which was happening in 2 years.
I wondered why he chose me, when I was one of the smallest in the business.
Later, he said, that he ‘vibed’ with me, whatever that meant. I later realised that it was true. Over the years of doing more and more business with different clients, we’ve come to see that the most important part of this business is trust.
Without trust, you really don’t go many places.
Find someone you will trust.
With your story, and possibly, your legacy.
