How To Write Your First Book

All rooms are perishable. If you haven't sold them on that day, you'll never, ever sell it again.If they don't understand their own vision and values of why they are and what they are for the guest, then they're not going to portray that to the staff and the staff won't be able to then deliver that to the guest. In hotels, you know, we're very good at doing the welcoming, but we're not so good at doing the goodbye. I said just do it.I mean, I think nearly everyone's good at book inside them somewhere, you know, just get it down on paper.

The voices, you know, Timothy, Tracy and Joe on the show, from front of house to chefs on the line, every voice can shape the future each time.

Monica, welcome back to Talking Hospitality.

Thank you for having me. Good to be back.

For those people who might be new to the show, would you like to tell us a little bit about who you are and your background?

Sure. So my name is Monica Or. I'm also known as the Dancing Hotel Inspector.I am the founder of Star Quality Hospitality consultancy, which means that I work with independent hoteliers looking at their business structure, their operations and their service delivery so they can deliver memorable guest experiences. I've worked in the industry pretty much all my life, mainly hotels and cruise ships, a little bit of traveling as well as that.And now I'm looking really to help hoteliers, particularly the independent hoteliers, how to improve their businesses.

Fabulous. That sounds really exciting.

Thank you.

Are we talking like the like, boutiquey hotels that are all like super swanky and lovely?

It varies. It can be that, but yeah, it's basically any kind of anything from like the small bed and breakfast you guest house to your fancy boutique ones.

So obviously you've got a fantastic background in hospitality and now you've moved into a consultancy with hotels and I hear you're also an author, is that correct?

I am indeed, yes. I've now written three books on the hospitality industry. So they're all called Star Quality Something.So one of the Star Quality trilogy at the minute.So the first one is Star Quality Hospitality, the Key to a Successful Hospitality Business, which has recently just been updated and released as a second edition. Then I had what I still have, Star Quality Experience, the Hotelier's Guide to Creating Memorable Guest Journeys.And that looks at the kind of behind the scenes of how to do a seamless guest journey from the hotelier's perspective. Some little secrets that happen there. And the third one is slightly different. It's more about Careers in hospitality.So star quality, talent, inspiring hospitality careers. And that involves lots of interviews with different people, looking at where they started from where they are now.And there's advice from all different sectors of the industry, basically how to get into the industry and then some top tips on what I call hospitality skills.If you want to work in the hospitality industry, the sorts of things that you need to build to look more at attitude and behaviour rather than the technical skills.

It's not a crowded market, hospitality literature, is it? There's a handful of great books that I love, but there's. Looking forward to reading yours actually now.But there's not a huge number of people in the space, are there?

No, not, not compared to other kind of genres out there. But I mean, one of the reasons that I kind of wanted to write the books was because it's particularly independent hotelier is.I mean, these days there are so many hotel companies out there which have numerous brands. So for example, if you think about Marriott, I think they've. I've lost count, I think it's over 30 brands or something like that.Hilton's got over 24, IHG's got over 19 brands. It's crazy. And I was looking at earlier, actually, apparently worldwide, there's 1,200 different hotel brands out there. Now.So for the independent hotel, it's actually, there's positive negatives to it, but everyone is kind of, I think, oh, because it's quite difficult being independent hotelier on your own at times you can feel isolated. Oh, just go and join a brand.But actually the beauty of being an independent hotelier is that, you know, you've got the freedom to do what you want to do, how you want to run your hotel, got all that flexibility and you can adapt very quickly to any changes in the market. So that's kind of why I wrote the book, you know, to help them with some of the common mistakes that happen.Because again, again with the inherent hotelier, sometimes it's people who've never worked in industry, they thought it would be quite nice to want a beggar and breakfast or it's maybe someone who had a hotel in the family thing passed down to them, but they never really looked at how you actually run it, you know, so really it's looking at advice, tips, guidance of what you need to know how to avoid those common mistakes. So obviously with hotels, the key issues is we always want a full hotel, so occupancy is always going to be up there.But the difficulty we have with hotels is that our rooms are perishable. If you haven't sold them on that day, you'll never ever sell it again. Just making sure you get that sale in.Obviously it's about making sure you get the amount of revenue that you need to be profitable. There's lots of common mistakes that happen there.The most common one, I guess people plucker throughout the day and think, oh, let's charge this rate. Sounds about right. But they haven't actually worked out why they're charging that rate.And of course, the big one in the whole of hospitality is a good old staffing issue. How do you keep them inside their staffing? How do you look after them? So it addresses a lot of those kind of concerns.

So in terms of, let's say boutique hoteliers and I've obviously you've touched on a few of the things within your books, but what do you think is like the recurring, biggest, most often issue that the hoteliers face? And have you got any advice that they can follow on that?

I think there's quite a few. Obviously, as I mentioned earlier, the biggest one is staffing. But it's not just that how to get the right staffing from the first place.I think a lot of it is because hotels, particularly the independent ones, haven't actually worked out who they are. They bring stuff in.If they don't understand their own vision, values of why they are and what, what they are for the guests, then they're not going to portray that to the staff. And the staff rent, be able to then deliver that to the guests. So it's getting that, that starting point correct the hotel.So in my star quality hospitality book, I based it on the model of the key.So the head of the key, if you had a picture key, the head of the key is like your hospitality business, you know, actually what is your hospitality business? Do you know your vision and values of your hotel? Or your hotel might just be a guest house, those sorts of things.You looked at that, it looks at your products and services. It looks at things like, well, okay, everyone has rooms, but you know, how have you designed your rooms?If you're thinking having business guests, are you having leisure guests? How can the same room work for two different types of guests? That sort of thing.And then from that, again, going back to the key, you have the barrel of the key, which is like the lifeline of your business and you have the free prongs and the three prongs are your suppliers, your staffing and your guests. A lot of focus goes on the guests. Yep, they're paying you, so. Absolutely. But not so much focus goes on the suppliers.If you get your suppliers wrong, usable desire, you can get all your costings wrong. Because why you're making enough revenue. And then of course, with the staffing these days, it is getting better.But how you look after your staff, because at the end of the day, if you don't have any staff, you haven't got a hotel to run. Look after yourself.You want to keep your staff, but in order to do that, you need to have the correct culture in your whole self, then links back to your vision, values.

There's something about, in fact, there's somebody on LinkedIn just this morning was talking about having a lot aligning your vision to the people that you're recruiting.And I think they described it as putting a square peg, trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It's like if you, if you don't. I guess if you don't even have your vision in the first place, how can you. You've got nothing to wear back from.

Right, Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

There's no. Yeah, there's no foundation. I guess hotels are probably better than that, than other areas of hospitality. Right.Like, I wonder, like, is there anything that you think that hotels could teach restaurants about hospitality? What's that strong suit that is. You notice it's consistent with hotels.

Whenever you mention restaurants, the kind of biggest fool that always comes to mind when we look at like the customer journey is the check back.So always checking, you know, is everything okay with your meal sort of thing. And a lot of the restaurants, some restaurants do, some restaurants don't, but a lot of restaurants that do do it, don't do it to the meals finish.It's like, what's the point doing when the meals finish? You can do it a lot earlier than that. So getting timings of those sorts of things.Also, like in hotels, you know, we're very good at doing the welcoming, but we're not so good at doing the goodbye. So, you know, whatever you start with, you need to keep that all the way through the whole of your journey.And every single touch point has to have the same kind of consistent level throughout always. We kind of, kind of have ups and downs throughout the journey. We kind of forget about the guests and.Oh, yes, yes, we need to be talking to our guests, you know, but it just needs to be a seamless journey throughout. And it doesn't matter what department your hotel, your guest comes into contact with within the hotel.Even in restaurant, you know, These days, say we're looking at restaurants. Yeah. Sometimes the chef will come out in the kitchen. They never used to do, but now they do a nice thing.And if you're going to do that, though, you know, you need to make sure the chef knows about the guest. Who is they going to be talking to? Yeah, it's not just the fancy thing. Let's bring the chef out, say hello.Well, you know, let's grief the chef on who this guest is as well. This sort of thing. Again, what I would say is that in a hotel particular is.Doesn't matter what department you're in, you should all know, every department should know that the guests that are coming in, because you, the guests could be walking down the corridor. Yeah, you might be a member of the housekeeping team, but that guest could be walking down the corridor. You need to know who that guest is.So it's having that kind of cool knowledge. And the key education is a key thing to get that across to everyone.

Well, this is very good advice and I think anybody who's worked in hotels will recognize what you're talking about. Now a question.I want to return back to the book, actually, because obviously you've written three of them and you've told the reasons why you're doing it. But what I quite. I'd like to understand the process, if I'm listening, what's the process of, I don't know, starting a book or whatever?

Yeah, it's having lots of ideas in your head that are very jumbled to start with. So for me, I mean, I'm quite a kind of logical, ordered type person. So isolated in that respect comes a little bit, maybe a little bit easier for me.But even so, me, I, I need to have some sort of model to base it around so I can put the ideas into some sort of order. So that's why it was the first bit.That's why I came up with a model of the key and then I worked around that model to then split the book into three separate parts. So the first part of the book is about the business of bodies, hospitality.And the second part is all about the customers, your lifeline, looking at your supply piece up and your guests. And the third part is all about measuring your success because it's all very well known how to put these things in place.But if you aren't measuring it, there's actually no problem doing that anyway. You don't know if you're doing well or not. So it's organizing your ideas, basically. So for me personally, I need some sort of framework.So I did it on. For the model of the key. The second book, I did it on my model of seven Rs, the guest journey, looking at pre, during and post.So each of those R's represent part of that journey. So you go around in a little circle and it's a continuous circle because it never stops.And then the third one that was slightly different because it was all based on the interviews. But again, I kind of had three sections to it. One was about interviews about people in their careers.It's like the second section was about looking at the different organizations that can help you get into the industry.And the third section was about the different skills that you might need to put that in a little baby model under mnemonic hospitality, which those letters means something that relates to kind of skill that you need to know. So yeah, it's all about kind of having some sort of framework and then putting the eye to sweating ideas into the relevant part of that framework.So it comes from some sort of local order. The key thing is just breaking that big idea in your head down into lots of smaller chunks. So they're a lot more.

It's difficult to. It's difficult to sometimes put those into a structure.When I was listening to you speaking, then I'm thinking, oh, surely is a logical thing, great ideas. And like, you know, that's just how my mind works is.But in terms of, you know, having that concept when you describe in the key, I can, I can see it in my head and I'm going, right. Like that's so accessible. I just. Yeah, it's how like did you always have the idea of. Of. Of it be. Or did it.Was it a case of like, was your process more. Here's a load of ideas and there seems to be some common themes. And then how do I put that into a paradigm?Or was it like this idea that this is how hospitality works and the ideas spread from that. Like, how did it work?

Different ideas, try and put them in some sort of order.

Yeah.

And then the logo, my organization is. Is a golden key. And that's kind of where I got the idea of using the logo key as. Oh, let's use that as a model.And I thought actually that works quite nicely. So. Yeah.

So when you write a book, how you. Because I know, I know this from experience. Right. Because I've. I've attempted to write two. Okay. One, I got further down the road than the other.I have an ebook that I have actually co written with somebody but haven't published yet. So how do you keep motivated during that time?Because, you know, you start off and maybe you're different, but I know it's oh yeah, got to get these ideas out. Da, da, da, da da. Start writing it and then, you know, enthusiasm wanes or the pub beckons or whatever it is mainly in the pub beckons, I suppose.But then how do you stay motivated during that time?

Basically I set myself little targets or plague targets which then I break down into little targets. So the main target was once I formulated my ideas, I thought, okay, this is what's going to go where.Then basically I set myself a target of writing a thousand words a day for a month to get the raw manuscripts out. And then, and once you're sitting there and writing, actually it's quite easy to write a thousand words.Doesn't actually take that long if you think about. It's only like two sides of a four. It's not really that, that much. And it's, it's not about making it look pretty or anything.It's just getting ideas, just, just writing, you know, getting those words down. And then after that you can tidy up and make, reread it and make sure it makes sense. And then you might start moving things around a bit.But the key thing is just get that the raw ideas out onto paper. You say, well, I've started, I'm doing something now. And then you can go to say, I just can't think of the link to write.Just leave it, just forget about it. There's no point. I've got to write something because it's not going to happen. You just skip that day then.Yeah, and then you might have another day where suddenly you just, you can't stop, right, and say, okay, I want to talk about this, we talk about that. So yes, but you've got to be in the right frame of mind to do it. Keep that motivation going.But yeah, having kind of daily targets to get the bulk of it out. And then you can play around with it and move around and pass up and make sure it actually makes sense.

Did you have a sort of like daily routine or did you create space even for to do the writing?

Yeah, I, I'd have a set time each day of when I'd do it. And also I'd like, I normally do it in the morning to get it out of the way and it'd be like, okay, do this.And then in the afternoon you can do whatever you want to do. Yeah, and I'd give myself a little treat of what I'm going to do afterwards. But I'm not allowed to do thing if you have written the words, whatever.So, yeah, it's motivation yourself too.

It's good advice, actually, isn't it? Rewarding yourself for doing something you actually enjoy but can become a chore occasionally.

I feel like one of the things that can hold people, but I'm sure the people listening who've got aspirations to write a book, and I'm sure there's probably more than even definitely include myself in this group of struggling to sort of turn off the inner critic when maybe you've got an idea that's not quite fully formed. It's just in its sort of fledgling stage. It's just. It's a little bud that's just starting to get a bit of greenery on it. It hasn't fully grown yet.But trying to just give yourself permission to be creative and let ideas come. Have you got any advice for anybody who might struggle with that when trying to form ideas?

I'd literally just. Just write them all down. Doesn't matter, you know, how obscure they might seem at the time.Just write them down and then you can either include it or say, I know, I'll scrap that. You always take stuff out, you know, once you've written it down, doesn't mean he's got to stay in there.And so just getting all those ideas down and then having a play with them and it might be. Have an idea, it might sound a bit obscure at the time and then later on as you get other ideas.Actually, no, that works really well if I do it with this. Yeah. So just allowing yourself to play with it.

We've talked a lot about what, you know, what your book can look like and the process around that.Have you got any other advice that you'd give to someone who is thinking about writing a book?

Yeah, I mean, once the writing process is done, you also got to think about the publishing process.Although I'd actually think about the publishing process before you start your writing test, because there's a lot involved in how you're going to do the publishing.So, Tim, you mentioned, you know, you're doing ebooks and things like that, but all the, you know, when it comes to doing your books is how are you going to one thing putting in a Word document and typing it up, but then it's actually, well, how do you then edit it and actually put it in the correct format for it to be a book? What are you going to do is you want images in that and that sort of stuff. He's going to actually proofread it, he's going to edit it, etc. Etc.So there's a lot more along the process before actually gets published. So again, if you're like so my books on Amazon for example, and you need to have ice skin numbers and all that so stuff as well, which you can buy.But I like me writing a book was the main thing for me. But when it came to things like doing book cover, I was like stumped.It's like a lot I have ideas in my head of what I want it to look like, but I can't create those properly on illness like that that's where I needed my father to help me to do that maybe all the graphics cement thing. And I said like this is kind of what I want to do, this is a light but this is kind of sort of different that I want.And they may come up with suggested in the do some things and how would you like that's what cover. So there's lots of other things you need to think about as well. And these is is different ways you can publish your PDF, self publish.I'm guessing you will go down that route, Tim. Yeah, but you know, again you're the pros and cons.Do you want it to be like an established publisher, you know, like you like the kind of Routledge, whatever publishers or do you want to go with a hybrid publisher or do you want to self publish and all that sort of thing? So it's looking at that as well what the kind of pros and cons in and that sort of thing.And it also depends, I guess how quickly you want to get that information out.So for me, very quickly and I've worked, I've worked in a couple of books, well, not fully on my own, but like with other people, I wrote a couple of chapters in their books and that sort of stuff and they were going like with the old traditional publishing houses if you like. And then maybe two years later the book was published, like, oh, I forgot what I wrote.So sometimes in a traditional publishing it will take a long time to actually get the book published.

Sure, it's months, isn't it?

That's why I went down a different pathI went actually down the hybrid publishing route and write the main manuscript and the help sheet, do everything else before I can head into a book and get on Amazon, et cetera, et cetera in all that stuff. So there's that side of things to be looking at as well.

So think about the publishing route. Link your targets with some rewards and just write.

Yeah, get those ideas down. Anything else, meet me. I just said just do it.I mean, I think nearly everyone's got a book inside them somewhere, you know, just get it down on paper.

And on that note, I think we shall wrap it up. Wonderful advice there from Monica. Once again, thank you so much for today.

Talking hospitality, the voices, you know.