We decided the second week of this year to write a business book a week for a year. Now, we know that is crazy, but we did have some that were already content-ready because we could repurpose some course content. That said, all in all we ARE writing a book a week, we have published 13 as of today, so only 39 more to go!
There has been nothing more galvanizing in our business ever than writing these books has been so we want to encourage everyone out there to write AND PUBLISH your book!
Here are our Top 10 reasons to go for it!
Get your message out
When you are doing a book, it is a little different than even the most in depth blog posts. Our posts tend to be really long, bumping up on the 2,000 word length often, but a book is more like 10,000-15,000 words minimum in order to be able to sell it for a fair amount of money.
When you are writing that much about a topic, you really have to know your stuff and be willing to spend some time thinking about your take on the content and being deliberate about how you present it.
Our blog writing has improved the more books we write, and our books are better than the average bear’s because we have written so many blog posts.
Use hidden content
Speaking of how we started, because we had taught so many classes in person, we had content that was just “lying around” on our hard drives, going fallow and collecting dust. If we didn’t happen to be teaching that class at that time, no one was benefitting from our knowledge and it was just getting stale as the world moved on.
We repurposed a number of the topics that we taught, either using whole passages or the general structure of the class that we had already slaved over, getting those books done more quickly than some of our subsequent title, just because we had already done some of the work!
Advertise your speaking or coaching business
Having a book in digital or printed format gives credibility to your expertise. Everyone knows that writing a book requires time and energy so they are impressed with just the accomplishment, let alone the knowledge contained.
You can leverage that using visuals on your social media, on your website and anywhere you advertise, showing that you are a publish author and making people more inclined to trust you right out of the gate. Jay Baer says in Youtility that 60% of all buying decisions are made BEFORE they pick up the phone to call you and a book can get you close to that line before they even give you a call!
Get speaking events
Speaking of speaking, we have gotten speaking requests that never would have come our way had we not published our books. Before becoming authors we were kind of scrabbling for speaking work, but now we have requests almost weekly and can pick and choose events that are interesting to us.
Attract real publishers
We were approached by a traditional publisher shortly after we started publishing our books. They approached us with an okay offer and we spent some time talking with them about the possibility of writing a book for print publication. Now it didn’t pan out (mostly because we were not willing to write the kind of book they needed), but we were still fine with the process and have not taken traditional publishing off the table at this point.
Any new author that is going the traditional route would be well served to show that they have an audience already built in when promoting their manuscripts or published works. Today’s publishing houses are not going to be marketing your books aggressively, so they need to know that you will be able to bring reader with you on the journey.
Grow your reach
We have sold books in 11 different countries at last count! While we do get web traffic from outside the US, we rarely sell to anyone outside of the US or Canada. The excitement we feel about “going global” is really unexplainable and will increase our reach in ways we could never have anticipated when we started this project.
Have something to sell
Another great factor for us was having an entry point product that anyone could afford. Our books cost between $2.99-$4.99 so the barrier to entry is really quite low. Before this our absolute rock bottom price was $97 and most products and services were in the hundreds or thousands range, well beyond most of our new entrepreneurs budget.
We also always know what to sell! When setting up our new auto-responders, we made sure that there were books in the sidebars so people could just click on over and order one.
Make money
Speaking of selling, we are making money on our titles. Now, don’t get us wrong, it is little money compared to some of our services, but it has actually come close to doubling every month but one. So, using the “would you take a million dollars or a penny doubled every day” thinking, we are pretty pleased at our progress so far!
The one thing to remember though is that mostly your books help sell your other books, so don’t plan on stopping at one, have writing a number of titles on your radar.
It is interesting
This is more nebulous, but we have been in marketing a long time and are pretty burned out on the “novelty” of social media at this point, preferring to stick to the old school, real marketing disciplines.
But marketing books, this is a whole new world for us and figuring out the rules and what works is actually really fun. We imagine that it would be fun for anyone, learning a new way to get the word out and getting new opportunities.
The world is going digital
The last little thing is that we are currently only publishing digitally on Amazon. While we would (maybe) like to have a book-book someday, the world is going digital so we are on the cutting edge of building an empire now, before everyone jumps on the bandwagon.
It feels like why we have great blog traffic (our sites are old and we started early) and lots of social connections (we started early so people followed us instead of us chasing them). This feels like we are still getting in early before the digital book revolution really becomes a reality.
Are You Thinking About Writing A Business Book?
We have LOTS of experience, from the right tools to use to make it easy, to figuring out content and focusing in on your perfect customer.
If you asked us today what was the one pivotal decision we made in the last year, choosing to write and publish non-fiction business books was absolutely the best thing we could have done for our company.
>> Sign up today for a one hour Business Book Strategy Session!
Leave a Reply