Best Business Books for TpT Sellers

Building a StoryBrand is the perfect book if you’re just getting started with your TeachersPayTeachers business and want to really narrow down your image and brand. Once you’ve gained some experience with creating resources and marketing, you should revisit the book to read more about writing sales copy for your emails and social media posts. Miller walks you through strategies for connecting with your customers by showing you how to talk about your business using the power of storytelling. If you listen to the audiobook, I recommend accessing the print resources from Miller’s website beforehand.

Atomic Habits will help you improve both your business and personal habits. Before you read, I recommend listing a few good habits you want to build and a few bad habits you want to break. Having these habits in mind before you begin reading can help you get more out of the book. Clear draws from the fields of biology, psychology, and neuroscience to present the research behind habit formation.

Getting bored just reading that sentence? I promise he is really good about distilling complex topics and making them easily digestible and his anecdotes help enhance understanding. Clear will show you how to make time for new habits, overcome your lack of motivation and willpower, purposely design your environment to enhance the likelihood of success, and how to get back on track when you fall off the habit wagon. TpT sellers who are a little more established and already have multiple systems in place will benefit most from this book.

I will admit that The 12 Week Year is not my favorite book. BUT, I’m still happy I read it and think you will be too. The overall premise is simple. Instead of creating long, drawn out goals on a yearly basis, we should create goals for just 12 weeks at a time instead. Because we only have 12 weeks to accomplish all of our goals, we have to be more purposeful about how we spend our weeks, days, and even hours. Is the book a little too long and repetitive? Probably. But it also changed the way I plan for my business.. By planning for just 12 weeks instead of 52, I can keep both a long-term and short-term vision for my business. Read the book, give the strategy a try, and you can thank me later. 🙂

Work Optional will help you more with your mindset than actual business strategy. But that’s why I love it! Hester walks you through the steps of creating a financial plan that will allow you to retire early–in a form that works best for you and your situation. There are different ways to retire early, and your options are on a spectrum from working full-time to not working at all.

Unlike other retirement books, this one explores those options in the middle for those of us who want to work less but aren’t financially able to fully retire yet. There are several activities and exercises included in the book, so I recommend either reading the text or being prepared to pause several times while you listen to ensure you are getting the most from Hester’s advice. If you’re considering early or semi-retirement even just a little bit, I highly recommend this book!

If you’re struggling with finishing projects or even the tiniest bit of perfectionism, you should read Finish. Instead of pressuring you to just work harder, Acuff suggests taking some of the pressure off your goals instead. He provides several other research-based strategies such as making sure your goals are manageable and measurable, sharing your goals with others, making sure that you’re having fun, eliminating secret rules, and choosing something to bomb intentionally. Or if you’re like me, a FEW things to bomb. Acuff’s sense of humor and relatable anecdotes make this a really easy read.

While Grit isn’t technically a business book, I think the information can be applied to many situations. Duckworth argues that the secret to achievement and success is not talent, but focused persistence, or grit, instead. You’re going to experience multiple challenges as you begin and run your business, and this book will help demonstrate the importance of picking yourself up after any setbacks. Duckworth’s research is explained in easy-to-understand terms and is well-supported by plenty of real world anecdotes and examples from a variety of contexts. It will motivate you to keep pushing and reach your personal and professional goals no matter what obstacles you face.

The author’s basic premise is that if we ate a live frog first thing in the morning, everything else would be easy in comparison. If you apply the analogy to your to-do-list, it serves as a reminder to concentrate on the most important tasks of the day instead of just spending time on smaller, easier to finish ones. Eat That Frog! provides 21 steps and shows you how to organize your day so that you can hone in on the most critical tasks leading to success in your business. These include tips such as clearly articulating your short and long term goals, planning your day in advance, organizing your tasks by value and priority, and outsourcing, delegating, or eliminating the tasks that are wasting your time. This is a short read and could be particularly useful to read before doing your quarterly or yearly planning.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed about everything you need to learn and do in order to have a successful business, you should definitely consider giving Everything Is Figureoutable a try. The title tells you exactly what the book is about — even though starting and running a business can be extremely overwhelming, you have to remember that everything you need to know is already out there. You just have to put in the work to find the info and make your dreams happen. A few things annoyed me about the book (she’s very privileged and doesn’t acknowledge it much, etc.), and she isn’t really saying anything new.

However, she’s packaged her advice in a way to make it very approachable and relatable, especially if this is your first dip into the world of self-help and business books. The good thing is we can use this knowledge to help with our own mindsets. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking you shouldn’t do something because someone else has already done it, Forleo reminds us that our message can still resonate with people just by adding our own perspectives and sharing it in a way that makes sense to us.