#109 – Al Jensen on How to Turn Your Speech Into a Book

Al Jensen is fiercely committed to guiding entrepreneurs, authors, and subject matter experts to achieve confidence in sharing their genius with the world from stage.

He works with them to identify their signature story and prepare to share that story to gain the trust and confidence of those they want to influence.

Tips:

  • Why not just begin writing your book at the same time as you’re developing your signature keynote speech? The book will follow the same format as your speech. That is a great way to start to write a 100-page book.
  • At the end of your speech, you can say, “Listen folks, we only had 15 minutes together today. Why don’t you take me home with you? You can buy my book at the back of the room 20 bucks. I’ll sign it. The book goes into much more depth than I was able to cover during the event today.
  • A signature story is something that’s true, that’s happened to you and that you have learned a life or business lesson from that you can share with others. They want to know who you are, they want to know what makes you tick.
  • When we listen to other people’s stories, we relate to the storyteller. The brain is programmed to think in story format. So, when we share our story, it’s much more memorable much stickier than simply sharing statistics and facts and figures.
  • We propose that our clients write their speech in chunks of about seven to eight minutes.
  • The human attention span is generally considered to be around 7 to 7.5 minutes. If you watch television, that’s when the commercials come on about every seven to eight minutes.
  • Your book chapters need to go just a little bit deeper than your speech and provide a little more insight into that particular topic. The chapter is not necessarily a verbatim recording of the words that you speak in your speech. You may add a second or third story, illustrations, a case study, and statistics or that drive the point home, even deeper.

Website: Next Stage Communications