Show Notes

0:50 Maureen introduces Laura Elliott.

4:52 Laura explains how she helps her clients create quality books and get them market ready.

9:57 Laura shares a story about her dad and gives the listeners some insight into how and why she became a writer.

12:50 Laura tells us what people are most interested in when it comes to a story. The significant “why”?

13:20 Laura references Joseph Campbell and Star Wars.

16:30 Laura tell us about her experiences specifically with entrepreneurs in the business world.

19:30 Laura provides further detail around what “the hottest new thing” might look like in a book—specifically in relation to the business world.

21:00 Laura discusses the timeliness of a book and how that impacts the publication timeframe.

23:06 Maureen and Laura discuss the visibility that a book provides an individual and how it promotes personal branding.

26:46 Maureen mentions advice by her late business coach.

27:18 Maureen and Laura talk about the different motivators for choosing to write a book to share with the world.

29:50 Maureen asks Laura to share more about her work on memoirs.

31:00 Laura talks about a book she worked on that was regarding WWII.

31:48 Maureen shares a personal story about her father-in-law and WWII—discovery parts of his story later on in life and how valuable that was.

36:00 Maureen and Laura discuss the struggle with the writing process that people often have. Laura shares her process on how she helps her clients.

40:20 Maureen and Laura talk about the problem with perfectionism and how to conquer that obstacle.

41:55 Maureen and Laura talk about the importance of the audience. Laura explains how you might not know the audience until part-way through your writing process. “It is a process of discovery.”

46:40 Laura shares with us where listeners can get in touch with her and access her content.

Transcript

Maureen Farmer

This is Maureen farmer, and I am founder and CEO of West Gate executive branding and career consulting, and it's my absolute pleasure today to be able to have a conversation with Laura Elliot ghost writer, traveler, and storyteller.

I'm just going to review and talk about her background, according to her website and I'm just going to read it out and it's just so fascinating to me. And I think the person you listening to this conversation today. If you're looking for a way to be able to tell your story and I want you to listen very carefully, because this is an amazing story. And not only does Laura have an amazing story. She's an amazing story-teller. As a teenager her love her story began in the Amazon where she water-skied with Parana while learning of head-hunters and curses. Her first travel article is about a visit to Dracula’s Bran Castle in Romania, and was published in the Los Angeles Times.

Her ghost-writing skills grew as she interviewed and reported on CEOs, celebrities, and style makers, for World Travel magazine, LA Parent, Jetsetter magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and E Entertainment Television.

Laura who I am very proud and honored to call my friend and colleague has a passion to help people write their books, memoirs, and biographies. she's written a humorous and insightful story about a therapist’s global quest for happiness, a novel with a new twist about how to live for the moment, and an inspirational cancer survival story, which has been released in English and Arabic languages, I can't wait to find out more about that. Other novels, including an inspiring story of leadership skills from a woman who suffered the loss of 20 members of her friends and family in the 2011 tsunami in Japan, a book about regeneration, a female entrepreneur story of empowerment after abuse. A book illustrating how an optometry franchise can enhance the lives and solve the problems of doctors at different stages in their careers and a book about a movement beginning for minority female entrepreneurs in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space.

Laura also has a passion for travel, particularly life at sea, and I know all about this Laura. She's traveled around the world twice traveling to 24 countries on six continents and she enjoys being inspiring stories to the world. No matter the language barrier, perceived danger, altitude, squalls, fashion faux pas, or ingested gluten, She writes to encourage with a focus on life changing, planet healing stories between self-discovery, pilgrimages, eco travel, and journeys of the heart. her clients include yachting lifestyle, 360 five.com Windstar Cruises, Alfa men Asia, and the Marriott Vacation Club, along with a multitude of successful thought leaders in business. So, Laura thank you so much for joining me today.

Laura Elliott

Thank you so much for having the marine. What a wonderful introduction. Thank you so much.

Very, very happy to be here. I can't wait to talk with you about ghost writing and, and all the things, travel and life in general.

Maureen Farmer

I think everyone has a story, and a story worth telling. Sometimes, I believe, and I know just from personal experience, we don't really know how to tell that story. And not only do we not know how to tell the story, we don't know how to use the story once it has been written. So given the fact that you have written for global thought leaders in business, among many others, I'd love to know a little bit about how you help business leaders and executives form their story tell their story and get it out to their audience.

Laura Elliott

Well I think it is such a great question and you know I would have to say that the process is so individualized, there's not one general way but the process really honors, the person that I'm working with. Everybody comes to the project with so many different ways of working. That said though, there is a real commonality with the people that I work with which is that they don't have a lot of time. So I really make the process fun and easy for people. And really, it requires just an hour a week of their time to give me their story and to get to the heart of the story.

Like I was mentioning, I learned this process, a long time ago with my own dad. Because, you know, he had such a time management obsession. Like it drove me crazy as a kid because he planned everything down to the last detail, to last second. He always said the most valuable time is time that you take on vacation. Because you spend premium for that time. And so when we would go away, I led a very international life because he was a hydro electric engineer and worked in jungles or hydroelectric power plants all over the world. So I knew travel very well when I was a child, but this is for like just regular vacation travel, and he would have the itinerary down to the minute, literally, of what we would be doing because he never wanted to be somewhere where a museum was closed for instance or something like that. That would be like the worst thing in his mind. Even down to my wedding. Like, we were five minutes over, there was a blizzard, it was February in Chicago and the wedding went on, people who were there were in the snow, in the blizzard and had to deal with it. And this is all stuff that I like realize like, ‘Oh my gosh, it's driving me crazy about my dad’ but it's really in the fullness of time that I would understand why he has this obsession with time management and one of the reasons, was that you know what would be more important to someone… you know he was the Japanese prisoner of war so he was locked away for three and a half years. And it's like, what would be more important to someone who had three and a half years of their time stolen from them or taken away…it’s time itself.

So this idea of people's time first of all is very precious to me, but also why we do the things we do, you know some of the things that we do and some of the things that are important to our story. We can't see because we're too close to our story. So just having that outsider, like me come in for just an hour a week, really opens up a lot of information and new ideas because I can see themes in people's stories or patterns or through-lines that people very frequently can't see. And one of the things I would say is like we all have this colorful Uncle, right, or Aunt. Like everybody's got a story right everybody's got millions of stories…it's like, and you know they'll say, Oh, “this happened and this happened”, and everybody's got great stories, but a book has to have a through-line, you know, it could be the best stories ever, But if it's not taking you on an emotional journey, or it doesn't have a narrative arc, It's just all those crazy stories my uncle tells. Those are important, and to get to the heart of those stories are very important, but also even more important is to offer it up in a way that a reader can relate to it, and transform their own lives, and that is part of the art of it.

The important thing is that you get the stories so it resonates with the people that you're trying to reach, so that they can live a more fulfilled life with the, you know with your offers and with what your service is.

Maureen Farmer

Can we take just a second. If it's okay to go back to your story about your dad and the prisoner of war, just because we talked a little bit about this before…this conversation about how you became so curious and how you wanted to write. I'd love to know a little bit more about that because I think it will help inform.

Laura Elliott

Sure, yeah, yeah. That really was my window into my entire writing career. And I wouldn't even know it. It was just a question that I had about my dad's past. And he like a lot of people who survived prison camp experiences or Holocaust experiences wouldn't really open up until late in their life. And we would have about a dozen years where we wrote letters to each other that it was that long ago, right when we didn't have like email. We were literally, old school writing letters back and forth and then you know it would transform with the technology as well. And we had a dialogue, you know, and he was curious even about his own story. He didn't have a lot of the gaps filled in. He, he didn't know a lot of what happened to him. Some of it was gone and so, you know, it brings to mind what my daughter was saying about journalism and she had this insightful comment that said, you know, she was thinking about being a journalist but she was like “why would I want to do that and spend the rest of my life trying to get somebody to tell me things they don't want to tell me” you know, and that is so interesting. Yeah, maybe there is that aspect to it sometimes when you got a subject. But really most of us want to be able to access this information. It's just we don't we don't have the way in, you know, and my dad didn't either…he was traumatized.

Some of the people I work with have been through serious trauma. And part of that is, you know, learning how the person, kind of, accesses information and how we can get to the heart of the story. In sensitive ways and in interesting ways and so that was, you know the art of the interview that I really learned and I wouldn't even know it. It was just a personal project, but that would inform my work at E-entertainment and at the LA Times. And, you know, everything that I worked on afterwards with various style makers, CEOs, architects in the travel space that I would interview, because there's always a story behind the story.

I think if E-entertainment taught me anything, I did work on the E True Hollywood Story franchise, a little bit and, you know, the big thing about that is you know the personality, but you don't really know the person and so they really get behind whatever the public persona is to get to the real story. And so I worked on that very early in my career and it stayed with me, alongside you know the story behind my own dads story. And, you know, we all have that. It doesn't have to all be on the page, certainly, but people are always interested in why, you know, why are you doing what you're doing, what spoke to you to make that day when everything changed for you. There was a moment in time when your life changed, and you made a decision, and you're on the trajectory to who you are now. And that's fascinating. It’s classical storytelling though, I don't know if you've ever heard of Joseph Campbell. He is a philosopher, and he's written a book, you know the Hero's Journey, and many, many different books actually about myth and his life work was to study myth all over the world—ancient myth, with people's who are not associated with each other at all. And they were telling the same stories. They were telling stories about origin, stories about the stars, making sense of their world. And they all had similar patterns, and he used this technique to team up with George Lucas, to create the Star Wars trilogy. They were very, very close together in working on that on that structure of that franchise. And one of the things that happens in The Hero's Story is, they have the world before—their common world. And then there's an inciting incident, something that if it didn't happen, the story would never happen.

So that's one of the classical techniques that I use with my clients, and with people in general. To get to the heart of their story I always ask them well what's the day everything changed for you. And it's funny because sometimes people have one moment in time. Some people say “well you know there's three or four things that come to my mind when you say that”, and that's the beauty of this process—it is a process. You know of just unfolding and pulling the layers back on our own stories and getting a little bit clear and it's beautiful because the best part about writing a book is that it doesn't have to be finished to begin to feel the effects of the book. You, you get an energy in your insights personally and also professionally. When you're in the process of writing a book it's a great time to write around the book or podcast around your book. That way you already have a market of readers wanting to buy your book, hire you for services, and writing your book just helps you hone your message and have a clarity of focus and purpose.

Maureen Farmer

So Laura one thing I know about you is that you have such a diversity of career experiences. I mean not just, saying just should be eliminated from the English language. Because when I say just I feel as though it objectifies the thing, but I don't, I don't mean that. You have a rich array of experiences and I know that the person or two that may be listening to this conversation right now are likely from the business world and I know that you have experience in the business world from an entrepreneur perspective so why don't you tell us a bit about that.

Laura Elliott

It started by painting sets in Hollywood, I'll tell you what. But, no, I have my original degree in accountancy from the University of Illinois in Champaign Urbana, and I worked in a startup. I was, I was the ninth employee of a company that went public that was recently actually acquired by NCR, and it was in the home banking space. This was in the 1990s before people had internet banking so the principles of the company who were about 25 at the time, wrote some proprietary software for making home they called it home banking at the time. And so I have a lot of experience in the startup world and going public so I do write for the startup world entrepreneurs. I also write a lot for minority, entrepreneurs, I'm located in the Bay Area in Santa Cruz so it's a bit south of Silicon Valley, but very close to that area. And so, yeah, the entrepreneurial journey has always fascinated me. And, you know, just the idea of the way start-ups, are, you know and then there's a mature market to a business and how different people are great at different seasons of different companies as they mature.

So that was really fascinating. But it wasn't enough really for me I did enjoy it. But I had other ambitions. So, my artistic like animation kicked in, and I left that company to work at E entertainment and the LA Times where I would get further into storytelling, through, where I would talk to writers, prize winning photographers, videographers and we would take content from the paper and package it for the internet to create a very online, very immersive experience for the viewer. And that was just at the heart of when old media and new media were kind of having a clash of civilizations in the world of the newspaper world. Yeah. 

And it was fascinating to see that as well. But yeah, so I think my real forte is in business books from all different kinds of angles from, you know, whether somebody is working for like a Google or an Apple. And I have written for people like that. Or people that have the hottest new thing in town and they really want to talk about it.

Maureen Farmer

And I'm gonna interrupt you there for just a second because I'm so curious about that comment so the not the hottest thing in town…I mean not to not to ask for too many specifics but can you give us an example of that one that might be like?

Laura Elliott

Yeah, I mean, a lot of times, it's just a window into an experience that they've, you know, gone through, and they have something to teach people about how to do the startup world, in the silicon environment, and a real nuts and bolts case would be how I had a minority female entrepreneur who wrote a best-selling book that defined blockchain and cryptocurrency in the healthcare space. It defined an industry that didn't exist before. So, it can be anything from a point of view or experience of seeing wait this is, this is an insight I have into this industry or could be talking about a brand new industry, like, like blockchain and cryptocurrency in healthcare.

So, there's all different kinds of ways that people come to the hot new idea. And yeah and so some books are very very timely some books have to come out right away. And that doesn't really fit necessarily the traditional book market because to publish traditionally there are years invested before the book comes out. So my clients have all kinds of needs. Some need to have them come out because the book simply would be a dinosaur in two years not that it wouldn't be published traditionally but you know and then other people just really wanted to have for their speaking engagements or to offer, you know, potential clients, so that they can work with them, like in a workbook situation…that type of thing. And then I work for traditionally published clients also. And you know I've been brought on board with clients that have had their books with a publisher. And it was just deemed by the publisher that the manuscript wasn't ready for primetime. And so I've been hired to take that, you know, take that book. And, you know, edit the manuscript, coach the writer to finish the project, you know, help with issues like formatting and transitions, and that saved their book deal and also got endorsements from, like many of Silicon Valley's heavy hitters, like academics in the world of conscious thought leadership, as well as like best-selling leadership and mindfulness authors, and so Stanford University Harvard and companies like Facebook, like LinkedIn and Google implement her signature like conscious leadership training. But you know the thing that kept her from that is a bad, poorly written manuscript, so I mean all it needed was some insight and polish.

Maureen Farmer

So, she wrote the manuscript herself?

Laura Elliott

Yes, was writing it herself and had some help from someone who was helping her write it, but it still wasn't ready to go. Yeah. That's another thing that I help writers with.

Maureen Farmer

Would you say that your clients in the business context, are looking to raise their visibility in the market? I know some individuals struggle with…they have the leadership…they have the technical acumen down pat, but they don't have the visibility.

Laura Elliott

Right, well this is great. This is so essential. I really think that, you know, think of your book, like a golden ticket. Okay, and it provides you entry into like incredible coverage you wouldn't get otherwise. Like you receive book endorsements that fuel sales and connections, which can take your business to the next level. The more you and your message are out there, the more people find you. And the more people find you the more in demand you are. I think really at its essence, a book really makes it easy to talk about, it's physical. It's that thing. People can hold in their hands, you know, even a documentary you can’t do that. You know and I'm a screenwriter. So I write feature films, short films, episodic TV shows. And those are great but you know, there's really nothing like going to the book on the bookshelf and going to that page that you need something from, and whether that's you know digital or print or whatever.

Maureen Farmer

Or like the books on my desk that have all these different sticky notes.

Laura Elliott

Hahaha. I should come over to your place and you should come over to my place. Our places are probably quite similar.

But I do think that to your question about raising your visibility…if you have like an important authentic message that is told in a way that places you as an expert in your field, you can see dramatic increases in income and platform. You can kind of reap the benefits of the newer increased revenue streams through like royalties, or paid speaking engagements, bookings on radio, TV shows, podcasts that potentially have millions of listeners who can become your clients or customers and it can even crazily propel you into your brand… you or your brand into celebrity status. I've had some of my clients have had that happen where their book turned out to be a best seller, and they became a celebrity, brought increased revenue through their YouTube channel and TV appearances, but also helped promote and further their entertainment careers.

So, that's kind of a side note, but these kinds of results, you know, breathe kind of like new life into whatever current offerings or subscription services that you may have or signature programs, I think, I think that is the bottom line though like in the heart of it all, is that really the most important thing that a book does is it brings your message to way more people than you can ever bring it to people yourself. You know, and it can help people, many many more people, transform their lives. Because you can't see everyone, you can't one on one, help everyone maybe. But your philosophy can be there and enrich and make people's lives more fulfilling, so they can live their lives in the fullest. Yeah, and that's priceless.

Maureen Farmer

Oh, absolutely. I remember my late and great business coach, Pat Schuler from three years ago, before that we worked together until about three years ago and, and she always said you know if you have a gift or a message that will benefit the world, then you have a moral obligation to tell it. And so I guess with that, I'd love to know what is the number one or two signals that really propels an executive to need or want to tell her story. So, what I think, oftentimes, is when, when someone is asked the same question over or questions repeatedly over time, there becomes a theme, and then you have a core message that you're repeating time and time again. I feel as though that's a signal that, you know, the world needs to hear this. Would you agree?

Laura Elliott