How Writing a Book Enhances Your Speaking Career (and Vice Versa)

Successful speakers often get asked, “Did writing a book help your speaking career?”

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After all, speaking and writing a book seem to be the perfect fit. It’s a great way to showcase your authority and credibility, reach a wider audience, and spread your message further, faster. 

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Writing a book can help you market yourself and promote your speaking—and it looks really good to event organizers. Not to mention, you could earn another revenue stream from book sales (and who wouldn’t like that?).  

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So, logically, those successful speakers respond with a resounding yes. 

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It was after my first book, Book Yourself Solid, came out that I started getting paid (a lot) to give speeches.  Before that, I spoke as a way to promote my business, but it was only after publishing my book that I started getting inbound requests for paid speaking gigs, highly paid speaking gigs. Now, that’s not how everybody makes their start as a professional speaker, but for me, writing a book propelled my speaking career dramatically.  

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However, the truth is, rather than just your book enhancing your speaking career, speaking can also enhance the writing, quality, and success of your book.  

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You see, writing a book is great for your speaking career, but speaking is also great for writing a book. Learning how to take advantage of this symbiotic relationship can make both endeavors much easier and help you be more successful in both. 

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The Traditional Book-Writing Strategy

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Writing a great book—a book that changes the way people see the world and the way they see themselves—requires a huge amount of effort and time. It’s a serious commitment, and it takes dedication, motivation, and drive to finish.

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You see, when most people set out to write a book, they see it as a stair-step process with five major steps: 

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1. Researching 
2. Writing
3. Getting feedback and revising 
4. Publishing
5. Marketing and promotion

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Of course, each of those steps is made up of smaller steps. But most of the time, almost the entire process is done in a vacuum—without much outside feedback.   

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The majority of people only consider incorporating speaking into the very final step of their book-writing process, as part of their marketing and promotion efforts. They take what they’ve written in their book and turn it into a speech they use to further spread their message and increase book sales. 

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This traditional book-writing strategy has worked for many speakers and authors—in fact, that’s how I wrote both Beyond Booked Solid and The Contrarian Effect. However, there are some potential risks and downfalls when using this method.  

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You see, those two books are my least successful books. My most successful books, Book Yourself Solid and Steal the Show, were both developed first on stage. Then, using the audience feedback and additional insight I gained by iterating and aerating those speeches, I turned them into books. 

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In my experience, a tandem writing process was much more successful than writing in a vacuum—Steal the Show became A Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller and Book Yourself Solid is now on the seventh edition. 

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Potential Risks of Writing in a Vacuum 

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Now, there’s not any one way to make yourself in the speaking or writing world. Many people have been successful with unique publishing paths, writing techniques, and marketing methods. At the end of the day, the quality of your work on stage and on the page is what matters most. 

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However, writing in a vacuum can isolate you from potential new ideas and essential feedback that could make your argument stronger, your big idea more powerful, and your book more successful. 

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My good friend and HEROIC Speaking Business thought leader Andrew Davis realized this after writing his book Brandscaping: Unleashing the Power of Partnerships. He wrote the book in a vacuum, far away from any outside influences or audience feedback. He was really excited about the book, and even more excited to start speaking about it after it was published.

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After promoting the new book, he earned his first few speaking engagements. That initial excitement quickly turned to concern as his audience asked him questions he hadn’t thought of before. 

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He says: “I realized there were a lot of holes in the book, holes I would have caught if I had been speaking about the book while I was writing it.” 

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Writing your book in tandem with your speech is much more beneficial and effective than first writing a book in a vacuum and then promoting it. 

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This unconventional method becomes an iterative process that allows each element (both your speech and your book) to improve at the same time and support the success of the other.