How deep is your love for books? 📗

National Book Lovers Day was yesterday, but my love for books is an everyday thing with no end in sight.

I love to read them, hold them and collect them. Adding author to my title was something I knew I’d wanted to do from my early 20s, but I needed to have a story to tell, the reach and platform to sell them when the time came.

That time arrived when I’d written a nice stack of personal pieces for Black Enterprise back in the 2016-2018 timeframe as a corporate exec. This is when I developed a strong curiosity about what was not going well in corporate America.

Little did I know that my story was evolving at the same time. When I first pitched my first book to one of the big publishers in person in NYC, it lacked the connective tissue that the resulting book, No Thanks: 7 Ways to Say I’ll Just Include Myself would ultimately have.

I had 12 essays that made for a great leadership strategy, but for whom specifically and why? It’s amazing what rejection does for you. I would receive plenty of nos. Nos provide the time to think, experience and grow. In the five years between penning the first essay and starting my coaching practice, I would speak at more than 120 venues in person and virtually in the first three years. It would prove to be invaluable.

No Thanks would become the book it was supposed to be in that time.

Both editions of that book maintain momentum, along with the companion journal and my daughter’s children’s book, No Thanks for Girls: 7 Ways to Say I’m Beautiful, Strong and Enough.

Needless to say, book #3 Yes Please! 7 Ways to Say I’m Entitled to the C-Suite, is also doing well and helping more people live their leadership dreams than I could ever imagine.

I’m full steam ahead researching book four which is now in the oven, and I’m making plans for #5.

Books are blessings, and the ability to fling my work into the world’s ongoing discourse in order to help others really is a dream come true.

Reach out if you’d like to book me to speak, facilitate a workshop or seminar or if you’d like to host a book event/signing. I’d be pleased to engage!

Lmichellesmith.com/speaking