"Publish or Perish" Applies to You, Too
Take a good look at this Atlantic magazine illustration of a guy burning his books while holding an e-reader.
Thanks to Kindles, Nooks, Kobos and iPads, overall readership is up. Yes, overall readership.
- A Harris Interactive poll says 53% of those with e-readers read more now than they did six months ago.
- And if someone uses an e-reader, that person will buy more printed books than those who read printed books exclusively.
Business professionals, marketing means putting yourself in front of people who want or need to know about you. Today this means you need to PUBLISH because the world is reading again.
If you're an expert, you'd better have a publishing strategy -- whether you're publishing to paper or a screen is immaterial. PUBLISH.
With the proliferation of sites and services catering to independent publishers (self publishers) if you're not publishing your expertise, your clients start reading someone who is. PUBLISH.
Start with a newsletter. Transfer the newsletter articles to blog posts. Start somewhere. PUBLISH.
Start with your goals. You do have goals for the book, right? Most business people are motivated by fame, fortune or passion for a cause.
Very few people want to write a book just to check it off a bucket list — that’s the poet’s purview. These questions will help you determine whether a book will meet the goals you’ve set for it:
- How will you calculate the return on the investment of your effort? Your answer could be expressed in hard or soft dollars or social outcomes.
- Could you meet your goals by giving your book away? Or do you need a profit on your book? A good number of decisions hinge on your answer to this question, including whether self-publishing makes more sense.
- Whose work is your audience reading today? What unique point of view do you offer?
- How many platforms can you distribute your content on? In other words, can you write it once and move it electronically, in print, through a recording, and perhaps video seminars? Some books, for example coffee-table books, just don’t translate well to audio or text-only readers.
Two of the best resources I've come across to help you figure the book business out is Guerrilla Marketing for Authors: 100 Weapons to Help You Sell Your Work and Dan Poytner's Self-Publishing Manual
. I suggest reading them before you begin writing your book, even if you intend to place your book with a publisher.
Let’s put a stake in the ground and say that a book requires at least 15,000 composed words. Whether those words are delivered to the user electronically, in an MP3 or on paper is a matter of platform.
Just how big is 15,000 words? These examples may help:
- Do you read newspaper opinion columns? They average 700 words, so if you’ve written 22 pieces of that length, you could compile them into a book.
- Most blog posts average 300+ words, so 50 posts would total 15,000 words. Count the average words in your blog posts and do the math.
- How many speeches or presentations have you delivered? Those add up, too. If standard speech without long pauses runs 150 – 170 words per minute, a 20-minute speech is 3,000 to 3,400 words. If you’ve delivered five 20-minute speeches on your subject, you’re ready to roll.
- Your old newsletter articles are good book fodder.
If you don't have enough for a book, start with a guide, which could also be called a white paper, special report, executive brief and other names. The point is to PUBLISH.
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