The Social Media Takeaway - Louise McDonnell

Don’t Write the Wrong Book: Non Fiction Publishing Strategy That Works

• Season 1 • Episode 64

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In this episode of The Social Media Takeaway, Louise talks with Allyson Machate, bestselling author and publishing consultant who has worked with Simon & Schuster.

Ally shares how to write, publish, and market a book that aligns with your business. She explains why many authors write the wrong book, how to avoid that mistake, and how to use AI tools without losing your voice. She also introduces her course, Don't Write the Wrong Book, to help you get started.

You’ll learn:
✅ What makes a book the wrong one
✅ How to choose the right book for your goals
✅ Using AI in writing without sounding robotic
✅ Common publishing mistakes to avoid

If you want to write a book that works for your business, this episode is for you.

SHOW CHAPTERS
 00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
 00:29 Ali Machete's Journey into Publishing
 01:34 From Simon & Schuster to Freelancing
 03:05 Helping Authors Publish the Right Book
 04:27 Examples of Writing the Wrong Book
 08:22 Strategies for Writing the Right Book
 14:06 Types of Nonfiction Books
 22:08 Impact of AI on Publishing
 28:03 Final Takeaways

Connect with Ally:
LinkedIn

Join her free webinar training, Don’t Write the Wrong Book, where she walks through a step-by-step process for writing a book that supports your goals.

👉 Register here

She also offers a free book strategy call for aspiring authors via her website: thewritersally.com

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to my podcast because more like this is on the way!

If you'd like to book a call to see how I can support you head over to my website here. www.sellonsocialmedia.academy/hello

My 2025 Social Media Content Planner & Guide is now available! Packed with 400 content prompts, expert tips, and $377 worth of free resources to help you save time and get results in 2025.

Grab your copy now on Amazon!
Amazon UK
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Louise McDonnell:

So today I am delighted to be joined by Ali Machete. She is a bestselling author, and she is also an expert publishing consultant, and she has served small and big publishers including Simon and Schuster, where she acquired and edited books ali and her team lead serious authors to write, publish, and sell more high quality books. You're very welcome to the show.

Ally Machate:

Thank you so much for having me, Louise. It's great to be here.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah. So look, I'd love to know how you got into this area. So maybe just take us through how you came to be like a bestselling published author, but also to work with the biggest names in the industry.

Ally Machate:

Yeah, absolutely. I've been a book nerd my entire life. I've always loved books, I've always loved to read. I started reading at the age of three. My mom loves to tell people how I would make books out of construction, paper and crayons, and, I would publish them and give them to my neighbors and my mom's friends. And it's just always been a part of my life. It's something I always wanted to do. I've always been a writer. I've always been a reader. Fast forward through academic, schools and literary magazines and newspapers into college I was really fortunate to get an internship while I was still in school with a very small regional publisher near where I went to school in upstate New York. And because I was the only intern and because it was a small company, I really got a taste of everything. I got to get my fingers into all the different departments and be a part of different book campaigns from start to finish, which is a really wonderful introduction in education. And then of course I was really fortunate and I got my first job out of. School at Simon and Schuster, which is what we call the big five publishers, one of the largest American publishers there is. And it was just an absolutely incredible education and experience. I came to work for two different editors at first, one of whom went on maternity leave shortly after I started. So I ended up managing her entire list while she was away and just got thrown into it in really the best way possible very fortunate to be in a department where the editor in chief and the publisher were really supportive of young people. That's not always true in big publishing. I knew a lot of my peers who weren't even allowed to attend editorial board meetings, whereas at our company, we were not only allowed to attend, we were encouraged to attend and share our opinions and pitch projects, which I did. I bought my first project before I had been there a year which was, pretty unusual so again, just dove right in. Learning the ropes, learning how to do everything. And fast forward a few more years, it was the early two thousands we had the.com bust. We had nine 11. The industry was shrinking and opportunity was shrinking a little bit and I was almost finished with my master's degree, which I had been getting part-time. And I thought this is a good opportunity, I'll leave and go to school full time and start freelancing on the side. And I'll come back in a year or two when things have settled and, the job market has opened up a little bit more again. But the truth is, I loved freelancing so much, I never went back.

Louise McDonnell:

The right book?

Ally Machate:

Absolutely. With 20 plus years in the industry, I have seen all different kinds of. You want to traditionally publish, we help you prepare your manuscript, your proposal, your query letter, and if you're self-publishing, we take you all the way through to publication and marketing. And one of the things that I think really sets us apart is that we're not a company where someone just shows up with a draft and we just take your money and slap a cover on it and put it up on Amazon for you. Anybody can do that, with a little bit of time and knowledge. What we really do is we look to make sure, especially for nonfiction authors, but also fiction authors to some extent, there's also an idea of audience and genre match. But what we're really looking for is who are you trying to reach with this book? What are you trying to do in the world with this book? It's a given that anyone who publishes a book wants to sell books, of course. But for nonfiction authors, especially experts, business owners, speakers. You don't just want book sales, you usually have some other business goals, or in our view, you should have other business goals that book can help you to achieve. It's a really very powerful tool that's underutilized in most authors toolboxes, so we help to make sure that there's alignment. Between what our author says they want and who they're trying to reach and what they've actually written to make sure that when that book is published, it's not just something pretty that sits in their Zoom background, it's something they can actually leverage and use to achieve different goals.

Louise McDonnell:

So tell me, I know you talk quite a lot about don't write the wrong book. So obviously you have come across so many people who have written the wrong book. Can you give us a few examples?'cause that might help anyone listening in here, figure out like what not to do.

Ally Machate:

Yeah, absolutely. So I'll give you two examples. One is a client that we had many years ago. He. Was a coach and his business was struggling a little bit. He felt that he wasn't getting enough visibility. And so he heard as so many owners do, write a book, it will give you more visibility and you'll be able to get more clients. But the book he decided to write was a memoir, and that in and of itself. Can work. But the problem was the memoir wasn't targeted to any specific area that might have related to his coaching. It was just a general memoir about his life. Almost an autobiography really. And while this guy had led an interesting life and he had certainly overcome some financial hardships and a divorce, and there were all these things that he had been through. Ultimately it was a decent memoir. It was a perfectly well written book, but there really wasn't anything in it that would've served to attract clients. He didn't talk a lot about his work as a coach. It was really about his life up to becoming a coach. So more about his childhood and young adulthood. It didn't really talk about tools or systems or anything that he had drawn from his experiences to create, the kind of systems or things that he was going to now lead his coaching clients through. So it was a perfectly good book. There was nothing independently wrong with it, but it definitely was not going to achieve his goal of getting visibility in the sense of attracting coaching clients. So that's example number one. Example number two, a woman I met in a LinkedIn group many years ago, similar story. She was just starting a coaching business as opposed to having been a coach for a while. She was brand new and again, received advice from many people that if you're launching a business, the best thing to do is write a book. If you write a book, you can use that and get clients. So she went and she wrote this book her goal as a coach was to specifically work with women who had overcome low self-esteem from abusive situations, which is great, right? Like really targeted, really specific, very clear who she wanted to serve. The book that she wrote, however, was a collection of essays that she had gathered from her personal network. Just basically nice stories of women who would overcome low self-esteem. They were not all women who had overcome abusive situations. It was low self-esteem from a variety of reasons. None of these people were her clients 'cause she didn't have any clients yet. And I think most crucially. None of these women had worked with coaches, so there was nothing in the book whatsoever to highlight how these women might have used coaching as a tool to overcome that situation. There was nothing in the book that highlighted this woman's ideas or, processes or her philosophy on how to deal with any of this. So again, it was a really nice book. Perfectly well written. The stories were very inspiring, but there was absolutely nothing about this book that was going to bring her clients or help her grow her business,

Louise McDonnell:

know anyone, I know people listening in here will think, oh my goodness, how could they have done that, so obvious. But in my experience now, and you're talking about books, but as you're talking, it's making me think I would help people create the right lead magnet to attract, the right clients and lead them towards their offer. And it never ceases to amaze me how people. Put together the wrong lead magnets in the same way so this is actually, I think, probably way more common than people realize that to actually sit down and to create a resource, which attracts you the right audience, number one, but also takes them on a journey and brings them closer towards your offer. that is really difficult to do. So for somebody who's sitting down or walking, listening, whatever they're doing, and they think they have a book in them because I think when people. To write a book. it's in their minds. it's something they think about or ponder for a while. Oh yeah. So how do they go about writing the book?

Ally Machate:

Yeah. Great. So I think you just hit on a core piece of the problem actually, which is a lot of people who write books start with the book. They have this, flash of inspiration one day and they just think, oh, this would be a really great book. Or maybe they say something in a talk or to a client and someone tells 'em, oh, that's really great. You should write a book about that. Sometimes it's even more simple. They have a ton of content from other sources, blogs, social media talks, and they're looking at their content and they're like, oh, I should pile all of this together and make a book out of it. And they get too far down the road before they start thinking about strategy. They're just focused on the book as its own little siloed, complete thing. So what you really wanna do when you're thinking about writing a book. And if you come up with the idea first, that's okay. That's cool. But you wanna take a step back and you wanna think really specifically about what you want that book to do for you out in the world. Beyond book sales, right? Let's just forget book sales. That's just a given. What do you want the book to do for you? Do you want it to bring you clients? Do you want it to position you in a slightly different niche? Are you pivoting in some way? Do you wanna be a speaker? Do you wanna get media opportunities? Do you wanna do corporate retreats? It's really important to know what it is you want to do, as you said. The right book is a book that leads your ideal reader, who is also probably your ideal client on a journey that is ultimately going to result in them taking some next step with you. So you need to know what that next step is before you can plan that journey effectively. That's the first and most important thing. Once you know what you want the book to do for you, then you wanna think about the people. Who are the people you need to reach to make that goal happen. And sometimes it's not as obvious, to give you another example, we had a client once who had been really successful in running corporate retreats, like very hands-on, very practical stuff, and had a really excellent book. He had this workbook. That went along with his programs and he wanted to start doing larger keynote type talks on the stage. He wanted to shift from workshop leader to big stage speaker, and he was trying to use the same book and he didn't understand why he wasn't finding much success. And I explained to him that it's really hard for an event host who in this case is kind of part of your target readership, right? It's not just the end reader, but also the event hosts that you're using the book to market yourself to those event hosts. Were looking at this super practical hands-on workbook and trying to imagine how this guy was gonna get up as the keynote speaker and how that information was gonna translate into a keynote talk of, an hour. As opposed to this very work booky type of approach, and like they just couldn't see it. So they were passing on it even though he had tons of great information to share. So we explained to him he needed to take his core ideas out of the workbook, add to them a little bit, and create something that was a little more of a thought leadership type book, what I call a flag in the sand kind of book. This is where I stand on these ideas, this is where I stand in this subject. And once he did that, he found that he was able to book a lot of keynote talks much more successfully. So thinking about the people comes after thinking about what you wanna achieve with the book. Once you've done that you wanna think about the structure. So as you said, again, that book is all about leading people to take a certain step. What's the structure of the book that's gonna help you create that journey? What do you actually need to help your reader understand, believe, or practice? What do they have to actually do in order to get to the point where they finish that book and they're now ready for whatever that next step is? And that's what you wanna structure your book around. You wanna structure your book very deliberately so that you are priming your reader essentially to do whatever that next step thing is. If you're getting those things in place, you're already well on your way to writing the right book.

Louise McDonnell:

Very good. These are the steps. So like it's all about the strategy.

Ally Machate:

Absolutely.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah. That's, this is so true. I remember. And then when somebody decides that they actually, yeah, I want to do this, and they've got a blank page in front of them. One of the things when I was writing my first book was and I don't suffer from imposter syndrome. But when I was sitting down to write the book sometimes I would just be frozen into absolutely inaction because I would sit there and I'm like, oh, I wonder what this person would say. Oh my God, I'm putting myself out there. I'm making all my thoughts what I think, everything, what I believe to be what you should do out there, putting it out there, and what are they going to think? And when I thought about that, I couldn't write a word. And then I remember I had these avatars of my ideal customer and I just used to look at them and I go, what would I say to this person? What would I say to that person on this topic? And then I would be able to write no problem.

Ally Machate:

That's an excellent tip. Sometimes it's easier to think about talking to one person. Who's your favorite client of all time? The person that you loved to work with, that you could sit and have coffee and chat with all day long and totally geek out on, your area of expertise, and then just write to that person. That can be a lot less paralyzing and yeah. You said imposter syndrome. I've known, working at Simon and Schuster, I met very big bestselling authors. We were in contact with a lot of the greats and even the biggest bestselling authors admit to having imposter syndrome sometimes.

Louise McDonnell:

So it is real and everybody goes through it. So don't let that be a reason that you don't write your book. And so are there different types of books then I know, let's say for nonfiction, let's say for our shared coaches, consultants, service based professionals, like what type of books could somebody consider that maybe is thinking about writing a book?

Ally Machate:

So the first question I would say nonfiction is very broadly divided into two categories. You have books that are very prescriptive, so those are like this really self-helpy. There's exercises, there's tangible actions to take, right? So prescriptive nonfiction. And then the other type of nonfiction is generally more narrative. So within that realm of narrative, you can range all the way towards the memoir type, and you can range a little bit back to narrative. That is what I call the thought leadership book. Where you are explaining your unique twist on whatever idea or concept it is that you're writing about, maybe you're trying to shift a paradigm, or you're trying to help people see something in a different way so you can lead them to, whatever your solution is. With prescriptive books, I've seen anything from a straight up workbook. We published a doctor's book a few years ago. She wanted to create a workbook to help people go from being stressed to being resilient, to help them leverage their feelings of stress in a positive way to make them emotionally stronger. It was absolutely a start to finish workbook, if we worked through the different exercises. It helped you to get a result. Some books have a nice combination. I think one reason a lot of experts gravitate towards memoir is because they instinctively understand the power of their own stories and sharing their own experiences, which is excellent, but it doesn't have to be in a memoir. I'm sure we've all read, lots of different kinds of self-help books where the author has along the way shared plenty of personal stories and personal anecdotes and examples of whatever it is they're trying to teach. They'll explain some concepts and say when I was, younger this happened and when I was first starting my business, I suffered through this thing. You can still employ that same tactic of sharing your stories and in fact, you should put a lot of yourself, but it shouldn't be a memoir, it should be more of a self-help book that has that element of the memoir. So there's lots of different ways to mix up these pieces in different combinations. What you ultimately land on is gonna be a combination of your writing style, your goal, your target audience, what's trending in your category. Sometimes I think people are afraid to look at other people's books because they're worried about accidental plagiarism. And, that's laudable. We don't wanna plagiarize other people's books, but you should know what's trending in your category. You should be aware of what whoever your ideal reader or audience is, you should know what else they might be reading, what else they're looking at, or considering buying on the proverbial shelf, I like to use the metaphor of entering a cocktail party. When you publish a book, it's not. Shouting into the void. There's an ongoing party. There's an ongoing conversation already happening in your space, and your book is like you walking into the party halfway through, right? If you don't know what everybody else has been talking about, you look like a jerk. You just come in and start spouting whatever you wanna spout, and everyone's yeah, we just talked about that 10 minutes ago, right? So you wanna be aware of what that conversation is and what else is going on in the space so that you can add to it, riff off of it. Argue about it, debate it, contradict it, whatever it is you wanna do, but you need to know what's going on.

Louise McDonnell:

Very true. And then so is there, you mentioned earlier on, and I've seen this style of book as well, where there is like a different chapter from different experts. Like how does that kind of work in the world?

Ally Machate:

Yeah. Those generally, you would call those an anthology. So they might be straight up articles. Sometimes it's more personal like essays or even case studies where the author is focusing each chapter on a different person's stories. These can be really powerful for a lot of different reasons. Just like a single author book though, you wanna be very careful about. Like that, the example that we shared, you wanna make sure that you are collecting stories that are very clearly a part of a theme, a message, a piece, whatever goals you have for your book, all of those rules still apply when you have multiple authors. But it can be really cool because when you create a book like that, you are baking in some networking, right? You're like talking to all these other people who presumably have. Bitten through whatever it is you're teaching or are experts like yourself in different ways. So you're building relationships. You have an easy in or a warm ask if you will, for a bunch of people to help you promote the book when it's out. You know they're in the book, so they're a little bit invested. It can be easier to get the book visibility with everybody in the book participates in promoting it, running ads, or promoting it to their own list. I've seen some companies have a business model where they actually charge to create these anthologies as like a pay to play scenario. I have mixed feelings about those, to be honest. I've seen them really well, and I know some people who have really high integrity putting those books together, but I've also seen a lot of people who are basically just making money off of getting other people to pay to be in collections that they just slap together and don't market. So I would say if you're invited to be in something like that, just make sure that. Whatever it is you are putting in that you are guaranteed to get something out of it, that they're definitely going to be promoting the book for you. That everybody has some requirement to participate if that's, a part of the game. I don't think it's bad in and of itself. I just think it's something to be a little cautious of. But yeah, anthologies can be great for a lot of different reasons, and of course, in a way they can be easier because you're not creating all the content yourself. It's different type of work. You're project managing, you're editing, you're. Herding cats sometimes, but it's a different type than if you are someone who doesn't really consider themselves a writer but wants to produce a book. It could be a good option.

Louise McDonnell:

And then, I feel that everything that we online and even on social media, everything is becoming form. What about books like, has the length of books been affected? Do people want a long book or short book? And how many words are we talking about?

Ally Machate:

Yeah, so length is something that varies a little bit, but it hasn't changed as much as people think. Okay? And part of the reason for that is that people consume content in different forms for a reason, right? You're a social media expert. Nobody wants a LinkedIn post that goes on for a page and a half, right? It's just, that's not what social media is for. It's for shorter bits. But a book in and of the format itself is designed to be an immersion. It's designed to be something that you sit with for a little while, something that you digest, something that you work through. They're usually much more complex ideas or multi-stage transformations. That's not something that can happen in a minute, right? So by design books are meant to be a little longer. That said, going back to that idea of always knowing what your goal is for a book and who your target audience is, we definitely have seen some types of books get shorter. In the business world in particular, people are super busy. Business people are always on the move, always hustling, always networking, doing lots of. Stuff. They in particular tend to appreciate shorter books. But the key to a shorter book is just that you have to narrow the scope. It's not just that you write fewer words, right? Like you can't take a 70,000 word book and just make it 20,000 words just for the sake of making it shorter, like it's just not gonna work. But if you get really narrow and really. Specific in the topic, you can write a very good, very useful book that serves as a kind of lead magnet, but some people will call a business card book or a lead magnet book. Those typically end up somewhere between about 25 to 30,000 words. In a print book that translates to roughly 200, somewhere between pages. So those are definitely shorter. They can often be read on a long plane flight. And somebody can digest the ideas much more easily because it is so subject specific.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah, that's so totally doable. Like 20 to 30,000 words let's say, so easy to put together. And how is AI impacting your industry?

Ally Machate:

I think it's changing every day. Lots of stuff is going on. I'm having these conversations constantly because it's changing so fast. People should be aware that Amazon and most book publishers have clauses now in their terms and conditions or in their contracts, that you have to disclose your usage of ai. Now, they're not at the point yet where they're automatically rejecting you. Right now it's just about disclosure, one could assume with Amazon, for example, that if you lie about how you're using ai, and eventually we will have more and more tools that can reliably detect content that has been generated by ai. They're already out there, they're just gonna get better. So presumably if you're disclosing and you lie contractually and then they run a tool and they find out that your book is in fact something other than you've claimed it to be the repercussions could be anything from taking your book down to banning you from Amazon for life, which is pretty bad for someone who wants to publish books. So that's happening. One of the big important things I think, for people to understand, because I use AI myself, this is certainly not a don't use AI message. I think it's a really powerful tool. It's moving very quickly. It's one of those things where you're gonna get left behind if you just, reject it. So it's not that you can't use it, it's just the difference between understanding AI assisted and AI generated. So AI assisted is things like brainstorming, outlining, getting ideas for titles, helping someone to give you a flow for what you wanna put in the book. Or even tools like Grammarly are considered AI assistance, right? You're running an AI tool that edits the book after the fact. That's all. Okay. All of these places, publishers, Amazon, et cetera, they want you to let them know that you've done that, but it's not a problem for anybody. The problem comes in with the AI generated when you sit down and you tell ai, I wanna write a 20,000 word book on this subject for these people. Go. It just, writes the book for you. And there are people who are doing this, the Amazon has had a real problem. They're being flooded with books generated by ai. And this is one of the reasons why the policies are starting to crack down because nobody wants to read them. They're bad books. They appear to be well written on the surface, but once you start reading them, you realize they're repetitious. They jump around. There's no connective tissue, there's no real target because it's ai, it's not a human. You don't wanna let AI write your book for you. And if you have it, create a rough draft that you then rewrite, that's less of a problem. But you wanna really make sure you're not just swapping words. If you're using it to create a rough draft, to give you something to start with, to avoid that scary blank page like you were talking about earlier. That can be okay, but you wanna be really conscious of the fact that it is just something to get you going. It's still ultimately needs to be something you've written.

Louise McDonnell:

So what about, okay, here's an example. I was chatting with somebody earlier on and she said that she loves to talk and that she walks around with Otter AI recording. And then she takes that transcript and she uses the transcript then to create. Now she's not creating but writing books. But let's say you had somebody who, just has a wonderful thought leader, just finds it hard to sit down and write. And they would prefer to sit down and be interviewed or record themselves, take the transcript of their ideas, their words, their tone, their style, and they put it in and they say to chat, GBT. Now I want you to write the first chapter of a book, and the topic is this, use my words. Is that okay? Or is that something

Ally Machate:

That is a very dicey gray area, and an excellent example because the legislative branch is still figuring this. Type of situation out. The real problem is that it's unclear how much AI has relied on basically stealing the copyright of other people's works. We know that the tools have been trained on, thousands if not millions of books, blog posts, articles, et cetera. And if it is. Regurgitating content. Even if it's inspired by your ideas, if it's taking content from other people's books, you could still be in trouble for plagiarism without even knowing it because you don't know that's what AI is doing. So what you're describing sounds like a really smart thing to do. It's your ideas, as you said, it's coming from you and that's great. I would say the problem is the extent to which AI takes your words and the extent to which it takes the spirit of your words and gives you new content. So that's an area where if you're doing that, be very careful. These tools that they're using to detect AI generated work, they're not sophisticated enough to understand. If you run that through a tool, it's going to see that AI did in fact generate that text. It doesn't know that it generated that text based on a transcript of your work. Now, if you got into a situation, I'm not a lawyer, I would imagine in a situation where you had to prove it, you could then produce the recording and transcripts. Transcripts, and somebody would have to compare them. But I don't think we're in a place yet where that kind of litigation is gonna be common. You just get rejected and you're frustrated because you know that you shouldn't have been, but you were because you didn't get a score on some software tool. So be very careful if you're doing that. Make sure that the ultimate product really is primarily your words.

Louise McDonnell:

That's really good advice for anybody listening in, because I know like somebody who either using AI too much to generate the content, which yes, as you said on the surface, it'll look good, but it will be weak and it won't represent you as a person if it's not you. Whereas I think, yeah, so if you are taking your transcript and you're using that. That's definitely a gray area and something to think about going forward. Okay. Great. And any final bits of advice there? I know you have a nice training course for us. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that, Ali?

Ally Machate:

Yeah, absolutely. So it's a short webinar training. It's called Don't Write the Wrong book is exactly what we're talking about. It tells you in a little bit more detail some of the things we're talking about today. First of all, explaining what does it mean to write the wrong book? How do you avoid that mistake? What does it mean to write the right book? And then it takes you through a simple process, a step-by-step process of how to think about and then structure, and then write a book that does in fact help you to achieve your goals.

Louise McDonnell:

Fantastic. So anyone who's got a book in them feels, I've got a book in them. Be sure to check it out. We will have it in the link in the show notes. And just wonder if people want to connect with you online. Where will they find you?

Ally Machate:

Our website is the writer ally.com. There's a contact form on there. You can go ahead and fill that out. Especially if you are getting ready to publish a book. Please fill the form out and then we can have a free book strategy call and talk about what you're trying to do and how we can help.

Louise McDonnell:

Fantastic. And what about the socials? Do you hang out? Where do you like to hang out on social media?

Ally Machate:

LinkedIn probably most I'm getting more active on Instagram, but I haven't been doing as much in those areas just yet. I'm still really learning that form,

Louise McDonnell:

perfect. I look forward to checking out your free training. And thank you so much for coming on the show. I've really enjoyed our conversation.

Ally Machate:

Me too. Thank you so much for having me.

Louise McDonnell:

Thank you.