Hello, writer!

It's hard to believe we're at the end of August. Summer is winding down, school is right around the corner, and it's time for the Back to School Writing Challenge! We kick things off on September 1 for four weeks of writing prompts, tips, and advice. Class is in session!

The end of the month also means it's time to introduce you to a new author, and I am so excited to welcome Nitya Kirat to the newsletter! Nitya and I have worked together on many projects over the past few years, including his book. I was delighted to get to interview him!

​Nitya has built, delivered, and coached sales and sales leadership development programs at companies including Google, PIMCO, BlackRock, Paypal, Amazon, and others.

He published an Amazon best-selling book on virtual selling, Winning Virtually: 10 Tiny Habits for BIG Virtual Selling Success, and was one of a select group of external trainers selected to be part of the Google Mastery Faculty.

Nitya's work with clients has also been influenced by his global perspectives, having lived and worked in several parts of the world, including Singapore, India, Hong Kong, Tanzania, and Belgium.

Nitya received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from New Jersey Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where he is an active Director on the UCLA Anderson Alumni Board. He lives in Long Beach, California, with his wife, Laura, and daughters Amara and Maya.

You can learn more about Nitya on LinkedIn!

How would you describe yourself as a writer? When and why did you decide to write a book?

I'll tell you a story. I did not grow up enjoying writing. I think partly it was because I was tall and good at math. I was ahead of my class by two years at one point in my early education, and as a child, you might be smart at math, but language is something that probably takes a little bit longer. My writing skills were probably not as strong as my math skills. If you're not as good at something, you don't like to do it as much. So that was my life early on.

In fact, in the summers, we were not allowed to just goof off all the time. We had to do some work before we could go out and play. My dad gave us a task, one hour of creative writing or something like that. I might have been seven or eight at that time. I found this little children's reader that had a poem. I'm like, “Dad, is it alright if I write a poem?” And he said, “Sure.” And I went and plagiarized the poem, and he was so impressed.

We used to do this thing—I'm older; there were no phone cameras as such, we used a tape recorder. My dad would record my younger brother and me telling stories or updates. I remember thinking alright, this is great. I plagiarized this poem, I got to go play, the matter’s done. We're doing a recording, and he proudly states, “And Nitya has just written his first poem. Would you like to read that for us?” I thought, “Oh no. This is not where I wanted this to go.” I read the poem. Several years later, I fessed up. We still laugh about it to this day.

That was a very long way of saying writing was not my first passion. It was not until after grad school that I actually even got back into into reading. I was a chemical engineer, reading very technical textbooks, and kind of lost that love or joy of having time to read or write for a long time.

I started reading a lot more about sales and leadership, and I had the idea to write a book. I thought it would be good to leave my mark on the world. But I didn't want to write a book that said what all the other books say in a roundabout way. So that was the thought. Then, when COVID happened and we started doing training and coaching and helping very experienced and less experienced salespeople navigate transferring what they can do in person to a video call, I realized I do have some value to bring to this world. That could be something to put into a book, and so that was the genesis for the idea.

Given that writing isn’t your biggest hobby or your profession, what strategies have you found helpful for getting words on the page?

I was talking to my friend, Russell, about this idea. I said I feel like I'd love to do this, but I don't have time. I had just had my first baby. I was growing my business. He said, “You know, I've been watching the content you've put out on LinkedIn. You have a lot of great content there.” I don't know if I'm allowed to plug my editor, but he said, “You’ve got to call Bailey. She can help.” [Bailey’s note: Nitya can always plug his editor! 🙂]

That was how it happened. I had some content, but if it hadn't been for finding the right resources, given my time in life and all the things I had going on, that wouldn’t have happened.

Get the help that you need, whatever that might look like. For some folks, it could be accountability. For some folks, it could be technique. For some folks, it could be other things. That would be my number one tactic, is getting the help you need.

You came into this project with a lot of constraints. How did you account for those roadblocks?

A couple of things. One was that the whole premise was helping salespeople be more effective when selling virtually, and when COVID started, people didn't know how to use their cameras. We all spent a lot of time looking up people's noses. People are muted and don’t know how to get unmuted. That still happens today, but there was a little bit of urgency then. We didn’t know how long this COVID thing was going to last. I thought I’d better get this book out before it goes away. Otherwise, it'll be irrelevant or unnecessary. I had a little bit of a forced timeline to get it done.

It was around the middle of November when we realized COVID was not going away. We canceled our winter plans, our Thanksgiving travel plans, our Christmas travel plans. Our family was about to come in, and they canceled their plans. It was like, “We’ve got nothing to do.” That's when I decided, let me give this a goal. I set a goal of getting it out by the end of Q1. Setting a hard deadline was helpful for me and my team to know that's what we were going toward.

The other element was that I didn't have time to explore publishing options or get a publisher or any of that. There are other courses and things for writers to get some help. I trusted Russell; I liked Bailey; I said, we've got this deadline. We're going to self-publish on Amazon and get the book going. That was the other piece that worked for me, to say, “Set a timeline and do it yourself” in terms of publishing.

What was the publishing experience like?

The purpose of the book was never to make money selling books. It was to give what I thought I had inside me that can help others. That was the goal and what we have been able to do since then.

You know, it hit number one on Amazon. I don't know for how long, maybe four seconds, maybe eight seconds. A friend of mine sent me a screenshot and said “Hey, we’ve seen your book!” I looked, and it was number one in new business books or whatever for that day. So we're able to say we're an Amazon best-seller. That's been cool.

I created workshops based on the book and that's been the primary source of recouping the book costs. Having the book has certainly added credibility as a consultant and trainer. There are a lot of consultants; not everyone has a book. So that's worth it. In terms of money made, we've made money by increasing our fees. We've made money on doing workshops around the book. We've not made money on the book itself, even though we sold a bunch.

I'll tell you another piece of advice on the book. I had been told that it cost around $3 to print a copy on Amazon four years ago, and they'd take 40% or 60% of the profit. I did my math. I said, “Okay, fine.” But I wanted the book to be pretty on the inside. We had a lot of color, graphics images, and end-of-chapter summary boxes. When I went to submit it for printing, instead it was going to be $9 to print each copy. We were going to price basically the minimum that we could have priced for Amazon, so we were going to make 12 cents a book.

I don't know how many we've sold, but you need to sell a lot for 12 cents times that to be meaningful. At that point, we were getting close to the quarter-end deadline and had our marketing plan in place, and I said, “Fine, we're not going to make money on the book.” So, the lesson is to keep the inside pages monochrome. The cover can still obviously be in color. If and when there's a next one, that's the lesson for me.

What did you learn from writing and selling this book? What advice would you offer to someone else?

I think it's important to get clarity around why you are doing it and what you want to have come out of it. So there are services that can cost 20 or 30 grand that help you write the book and market the book and all of that, which might be the right solution if that's what your plan looks like.

Think about the economics of how much you'll make on the book sales, and then decide how much you want to spend on marketing it. How much of that marketing do you want to do yourself or internally versus hiring an agency or another service? There are a lot of considerations to think about. For us, we knew we needed some help, and we'll look for the best that we can find. We have a budget, and we need to stay within that. This book was not going to be the next War and Peace. We knew that.

What’s next for you creatively? What does writing look like in your life and your business?

At the moment, it is mostly content on LinkedIn. It's content for our website and blog. There's some overlap between that and then some content gets used in our quarterly newsletter as well. I still am the creative force behind that.

My inspiration comes from stories and stuff I'm doing and conversations I have, and that triggers, “Oh, let me let me write about this,” or “Hey, let me write an article that we'll put on our website.” So that's that's most of my writing.

I have one idea, but as time goes on, I become less of a subject matter expert on it. So, that window might be closing soon. I'll share the idea. I've got a professional resume, and then I've got a resume that talks about all the online dating that I've done. You've got your PhD. I could have my PhD in online dating. I started in the dark ages when nobody had a camera. Everyone had one grainy photo scanned in somehow. It was mostly weirdos and me, or maybe I was one of the weirdos.

So, anyway, I started then, and as online dating evolved, I was on the Matches and the eHarmonies of the world. Then we got to the swiping things and the Hinges and the Bumbles and the Tinders. I’ve been on them all and had great success, and I hear people talk about hating it and how frustrating it is. I feel like I could really help people not feel that way and have the success that they're looking for or the experiences they're looking for. So that was the idea, to write something like that.

The other idea would be to connect dating to sales, and there's a lot of overlap there. That one might still be relevant. But it's now been seven years since I did any online dating since I met my now wife. I feel like I'm not up to speed on the last couple of years. I think COVID took away a few years, so I'm not too worried, but I don't know what the kids and non-kids in the online dating world are doing today. I might write a book, and people will wonder, “What is this guy talking about?” So that's the idea and that's probably why that won't happen!

What advice would you offer to another writer?

You know, I'm an engineer. I like process. I like structure. So, step one was coming up with an outline. Even if it's not the final outline, I wanted to come up with the outline so I knew what I was building. In our case, it was to come up with the outline and then review the stuff we had already written or videoed and where those might fit in.

The other advice I would offer is time blocking. It’s not rocket science. I don't think you can do much in 15 minutes, but I think you can do a decent amount in 30 minutes. They don't have to be huge blocks. Depending on your style, you might want longer or shorter and more frequent blocks. I generally do shorter and more frequent.

The other thing I learned from Daniel Pink, who wrote a book I liked a lot. I think this was one of his weaker books, where there were really only two takeaways, and he made a whole 200-page book on it. But one of them is knowing when is the right time to do what tasks.

I thank him for that reminder and knowledge because writing, getting into that creative space, that focus doesn't work so well at 10 am when I just got off a client call, and I've got one more coming up, and I've gotten emails during that time. Whether it's early morning or it's late evening, figure out when you're able to really tune out anything else and block out your emails. Writing needs to be blocked off at the right times when creative juices can flow.

What is the best book you've read recently?

I read a lot of nonfiction. I'd say 96% of the books I read are nonfiction, and then I'll read fiction or biography. That's as close to fiction as I'll get. I think too many authors are trying to fill up too many pages sometimes. I'm reading Guy Kawasaki’s latest, Think Remarkable (affiliate link*). I heard him speak, and I appreciated it because he said the same thing. He said people write long books to say the same thing. So he's got, you know, nine chapters or nine points. It’s an easy read that I’m enjoying.

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I loved talking with Nitya about the work we did together on his book and how writing continues to be a part of his business!

One last note before we sign off for August—remember to register for the Back to School Writing Challenge! If back-to-school season has you itching to pick up the pen, this is the challenge for you. We start on September 1!

Sign me up!