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Why You Should Have a Book

Introduction to this Course

Hi, my name is Jason Alba. I'm the author of three books, and published a number of career related courses through Pluralsight. In this course, I want to talk about something that a lot of people have dreamed about, a lot of people want to do this, but they just haven't done it yet. I want to talk about writing your book. In this course we're going to talk about why you might want to have a book. There are a number of different reasons why people write books. We'll talk about some of the benefits that I've seen in my own career and from others. In the next module we'll talk about how to get your book from the idea stage, to an actual finished product. After that, we'll talk about ways to market, whether it's to sell more books or get more books out there. How can you move your books to help you achieve the objectives that you want to achieve as an author? And finally, we'll talk about a number of examples of people who have done just that. We'll talk about what their books are, why they wrote, and some of the values that they're getting out of being a published author. Let's get started.

Jason Alba's Book Story

As a foundation to the course, I think it would be helpful to kind of lay out what I've done to get to where I'm at right now. Let's start at the beginning of what I consider my new career. In January of 2006, I got laid off from my job. I was a general manager of a software and networking company, and for various reasons it just wasn't a good fit anymore. In my very frustrating job search, I realized there was a gap for job seekers. I decided to start my company called JibberJobber, and fill that gap. This was May of 2006. In June I started my blog. I wasn't quite sure what I would get out of becoming a blogger, but I knew that blogging was going to be a big part of my marketing strategy. I like to write, it's an outlet for me, and I didn't have any money to put into real marketing. So I became a blogger. I would write at least five days a week and sometimes more than once a day. I don't do that much now, but blogging has always been a big part of my marketing strategy. In July, I wrote a blog post about LinkedIn. I asked my readers if they were linked out. It took some convincing to get me on to LinkedIn. I wrote a blog post about it, basically endorsing LinkedIn as a great job search tool. The interesting thing is, a number of people read my blog post and they said, "Okay, I'm on LinkedIn now, since that's what you recommended in your blog post, what do I do now?" Well, I wasn't quite sure what they should do, but I knew there was a lot of different things I could tell them. I had to make a decision. Was I going to write a lot of blog posts, I was guessing it could be a 100 different blog posts on what to do on LinkedIn, or was I finally going to sit down, and write a book? I had had some book ideas before, but the timing never really made sense. This time, it made sense. A few months later I found myself in Austin. I was at a dinner with a few other bloggers that I had been networking with. Two of them were authors. At a quiet moment in the conversation I turned to Scott Allen, and I said, "Hey, here's an idea for a book, what do you think about it?" Scott said, "Oh, I love that idea! Let me take it back to my publisher and I'll get you a contract, and I'll be your executive editor." I didn't know what executive editor meant, but I knew that I didn't want to do what I call, the dance. I didn't want to worry about getting an agent, trying to get a book contract, all of that stuff that I heard was very difficult to do. Just from the dinner that I'd arranged, I might have been on the path to get a contract with a real publisher. Shortly after the dinner, I had a signed contract and I was going to have a book. The problem is, I was told that you don't make any money from being an author, and I was still running JibberJobber. This was a big dream of mine, to run my own company. By this point in the company I realized it took a lot of work, and time, and effort to run a company. I wasn't quite sure that I was ready to put in the hundreds of hours that it might take to write a book, especially if I wasn't going to get any money out of it. Five months after I got my contract, I was at a conference. Realize that JibberJobber is a year old by now, I wasn't anywhere near my goals as a business owner. Andy Sernovitz was speaking, he's the founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, and he was talking about how you can get word of mouth for your business or for your blog, it was a bloggers conference. I was furiously taking notes during Andy's presentation. He presented five different things that we could do to increase the word of mouth for our business. At the end of the presentation, like any good consultant, he said, "If none of these ideas work for you, then find somebody or a company that is getting word of mouth, and try and figure out how you can take advantage of the word of mouth that they're already creating." I couldn't believe it. I had been sitting on a book contract for five months, I hadn't really made any progress as an author, but I realized that LinkedIn was getting a lot of word of mouth benefit. All I had to do was become the author who wrote the book on LinkedIn, and I might be able to get word of mouth benefit from their marketing efforts. After Andy sat down, I walked out of the conference and I called my publisher. I said, "I'm ready, and by the way, I have a conference in September, I need to have books that I can take to this conference." Initially he said, "There's no way, nobody puts out a book that fast." And I said, "Well when do you need to have a manuscript from me so that I can have my books by September?" He said, "If you get them to me within two weeks then we might be able to do it." In September, right before the conference, I got three boxes of my first book, I'm On LinkedIn, Now What? I had no idea what this was going to do for my career. We'll talk about that in future sides. I went to the conference, I sold most of my books, it was a great success. I swore to my wife and kids that I would not do another book, it really took so much energy and time, that I neglected things that I shouldn't have neglected. However, a few months later I was sitting at a restaurant with a blogger and entrepreneur who had recently sold his Facebook App. I thought, you know, I know writing, and now I know stuff about books, he knows Facebook, why don't we do a book on Facebook. It kind of makes sense. I'm On LinkedIn, Now What? I'm On Facebook, Now What? By January I was planning my second book with a co-writer. We've done different editions of these books. Let me fast forward to the summer of 2013. After having gone through the process a number of times with a publisher and reaping various rewards of being an author, I decided that I was ready to do my first book, self-published. In 2013, I shipped my third book, which is titled, 51 Alternatives To A Real Job. I only have three books out, but because of the different editions, it's as if I were to of written six different books. My experience from idea to getting a book and actually marketing and selling that book is what I'm going to lean on for most of this course.

How Much Money do You Make, by Source

Shortly after my first book came out, I started getting some very interesting questions. Friends of mine would say, "Jason, where should I buy your book? Should I buy it from you directly, should I buy it from Amazon, should I buy it from your publisher? Where should I buy it so you get the most benefit?" Well honestly, I didn't know. I was really new to this, and really the only benefit I was thinking was how much making money I would make from each book sale. So I went to my publisher and I asked him, how much money I would make if somebody bought it from this place verses that place. For example, if somebody bought it directly from Amazon, how much would I make in commission? If somebody bought it from a website, like a blog, and they had an Amazon link to it, how much would I make then? Or if somebody comes to you, the publisher, and buys it from your ecommerce system, am I going to make more? What if somebody puts an affiliate link on their blog, not to Amazon, but from your system, will I make more there? What if I have a bunch of books when I'm at a speaking or networking event, and I sell them directly. Will I make more money that way? And then of course I had eBooks, so what if somebody bought the eBook through any of these channels? Where am I going to make the most money? His response was really interesting, he said, "Jason, you will not make one penny from selling books." He said, "Hardly anybody makes money as an author." Another interesting factoid that he shared was that most people who write business books don't sell more than 500. He said, "If I were to sell 500, I would be considered a grand success as far as a business author." Well my concern was making money. My business wasn't paying all my bills at this point in my career and I felt hungry, I felt hungry for money. As our conversation continued he said, "If you really want to make money, then you need to be a consultant or a coach, that's how authors make money." I told him I had zero interest in being a consultant or a coach. I didn't want to get paid hourly. I wanted to build my web-based software business, and scale, and leverage what I had online, and get a lot of money that way. I didn't want to make hourly money. Shortly after this conversation, something very interesting happened. I got a phone call from somebody who was running a conference in Florida. In the phone call she said, "We NEED you to sit on a panel." She didn't say, we would like you to, or can you, or are you available? She said, "We NEED you to sit on a panel." I asked her one of the smartest questions that I've ever asked anybody, I said, "What's your budget?" Now understand that's a smart question because, if I were to have given her a number first, I would have no idea what kind of budget they were thinking about. She said, "Well we're a non-profit." You know what that means, right? Non-profits love to bring in value, but they always talk about how they don't have any money. She said, "We don't have hardly any money for speakers." While this conversation was happening on the phone, I was chatting to a friend of mine who also puts on conferences. I said to her, "How much should I charge her to come out, or what's a reasonable fee?" She said, "Well Jason, the truth is, people like you, being people who talk about social media, social marketing, and LinkedIn, people like you are a dime a dozen. It's easy to find somebody to replace you." She said, "At the best you could ask for expenses and maybe $250." Honestly, I wasn't interested in a $250 gig to fly down to Florida. As I was having this text chat with my friend, the person on the phone said, "We're a non-profit, we don't really have any money to bring people in, how about $5000 plus expenses?" I could not believe it! For an organization to say they don't have any money and then offer something that would be valued around $6000 to $6500, I wondered, how much money would they pay me if they did have money to bring in speakers. Even though I had just told my publisher that I was not interested in speaking or consulting, this figure changed everything. As soon as she said that, I thought, well of course, I am a professional speaker. $5000 is a lot of money. It would have taken me about 830 to 1000 book sales for me to earn $5000 from selling books. Of course I said yes, and that's what launched my professional speaking career. I was recently talking to a friend talking about my speaking fee, and he said, "How did you come up with the figure $5000?" I said, "Actually, the first person who paid me to come speak at their conference, gave me that figure, and I've just gone with that figure ever since." So if you're wondering how much money you could make as an author, you might think about other ways to make money because you're an author.

My Expectations and Reality of Being an Author

Let's talk about the expectations that I had from being an author, understanding that expectations is not the same thing as hope. I was expecting that maybe I would get this idea of being an author out of my system. It had been nagging me for a number of years. I remember my first real job out of school was as the IT Manager of an organization. One day I remember thinking, even though I have a management degree with an emphasis in Computer Information Systems, I really have no idea what I'm doing as an IT Manager. Every day there are new challenges, and I need to figure out what I'm trying to do. Wouldn't it be cool if there was a book for new IT Managers? This idea of writing a book had nagged at me for a long time. I think it was time to get it out of my system. I was really hoping that being an author of a book would help increase the visibility of JibberJobber. One thing that I've learned is that you always want to be in front of your customers and your prospects, but it's not always easy to have a reason to be in front of your customers and prospects. Announcing that you just authored a book is a great reason to put your name and your brand in front of them at least one more time. I was expecting, maybe hopeful, that I might make a little bit of money. I really didn't know what was realistic, but I expected that I would be able to make some money. Even though everybody said you don't make money with books, like I said, I was hungry. Those are my expectations. Remember, from January until May, none of these were enough to get me writing the book, but once I caught the vision from Andy Sernovitz about what I could do as an author, and how to take advantage of the marketing success that LinkedIn was doing, that was the motivation to move forward. Here's what I really got from being an author. I got fame and fortune. Well, let me qualify that. Fame at my level. I went from being a job seeker, which is almost like being a third class citizen, I would beg media, newspapers, radio, TV, to just to give a head nod to JibberJobber and acknowledge it. To somebody who could sit back and watch the emails come in from people saying hey, we're from this news station or from this magazine, we'd like to interview you. Now of course they weren't interviewing me because of JibberJobber, but every time they interviewed me they said, "How do you want us to cite you?" And I said, "Jason Alba, CEO of JibberJobber.com and author of the book." The level of fame wasn't anything to put me on a celebrity list, but it was an awesome jump from where I had been. I also realized a certain amount of fortune; well it's kind of funny to say the word fortune. I wasn't rolling in the dough, I wasn't making a ton of money for my book, however, I'll never forget the time when I got a royalty check which was a pretty big check for me at the time. I took it to my bank to deposit the check and they said, "We're going to have to hold on to this check for a few days and make sure that it clears." I couldn't believe it. They were going to hold my money? This was the first time that this had ever happen to me. I asked them why they had to do that, and they said, "Well this is a bigger check than what you've ever really had in your bank account." On the one hand I was upset that I didn't have immediate access to my money. On the other hand, I thought man, this is kind of cool. I'm making so much money in one check, because of my book, that my bank doesn't even trust it. This was pretty different from what my publisher had told me, remember? He said I wasn't going to make any money from book sales, and now I had made enough money from book sales that my bank was holding on to a royalty check? That was pretty cool. I became more relevant in the industry. Like I mentioned, people started calling and emailing me so that they could get interviews. I started getting request to speak, people wanted to cite me, I became the expert. Not only was I becoming more "famous", I was staying relevant in the industry. As a business owner, this is a huge deal. It's easy to do your job and serve your customers, and have other people come in and get all the press. Being the author of the book was a critical step in making sure that my company was going to survive the first few years. Along those lines, I had significantly strengthened my personal and my corporate brand. I went from the guy who started a company that might be around next week, might not be around next week, you never know, to the guy who must be an expert because he wrote a book on the topic. Lucky for me the timing of my book, and the topic of my book, were perfect. I wanted to take advantage of LinkedIn's marketing efforts, and being the guy who wrote the book on it, was the exact thing that I needed to do. I reaped rewards that I would never imagine that I would be able to get. Those are some of my expectations, and some of the reality of what I got from being an author. Let's talk about you, and what you want.

Your Expectations of Being an Author

In the following slides I'm going to share with you some benefits of being an author. Before we go into the list of benefits though, I want you to think about what your objectives are. Please, write down at least one thing that you want from being an author. Hopefully you can define what the one thing is that you want. I'm okay if you write down more things because I got more than just one thing, but I want you to focus on what you really want from being an author. Now, having that written down, let's go through a list of things that you might get. You might get money. I'm convinced that most people that write books are not going to get much money from their books. I got a lot more money than I expected, and a lot more money than my publisher ever expected to pay, but traditionally people don't write books to make money. However, we're not living in a traditional world, are we? People have become so empowered with self-publishing and eBooks and things like that, that people who might have been turned down by traditional publishers, or who might not have had any idea how to sell a whole lot of books, are making really good money through non-traditional channels. This helps you in what I call your income security, which is an idea that I introduced to you in the Career Management course on Pluralsight. I think as a reasonable expectation that you could become a speaker because of your book. Some of you want to do this for money, some of you don't really care. Whether it's about the money or not, if you've written a book, people want you on stage. As my publisher suggested, being an author might get you consulting gigs. Once again, I don't know if you want to do consulting or not, but when you're recognized as the expert on your topic, it's a lot easier to get consulting gigs than when you're competing against everybody else who doesn't necessarily have their expertise established. As I mentioned earlier, I begged for media interviews, once I became the expert, they came looking for me. Just like the idea of writing a book was nagging at me, maybe it's nagging at you. I've seen statistics say the 60%, or 80%, or more people, want to write a book. If it's really nagging at you, maybe you just need to get it out of your system. Along those lines, maybe it isn't necessarily nagging at you, but it's on your bucket list. A lot of people say they want to write a book. Why not do it? Some people want the vanity of being published. I'm going to suggest that maybe you don't want to become published, but if this is something that's important for you, or your career, or your business, then it might be a reasonable expectation. An altruistic idea is that people want to write a book so that they can get their message out to a wider audience. A lot of professional speakers that I network with say that they really want to get their message out. They say this is a bigger motivation than making more money. They just want to empower people, and inspire people, and help people. Maybe you want to inspire and empower people also and take your message and get it out to an audience. If you're serious about career management and developing your personal brand or working on your corporate brand, being an author is an awesome way to enhance your brand. When you have a strong brand, you get introductions easier. People love to say, I'd like to introduce you to my friend, who wrote a book. When you get an introduction to somebody, they might be more open to talking with you, because you're the expert. You wrote a book on something. I've had a number of meetings with people who were simply curious because I'd written a book and they hadn't, although it was something they always wanted to do. Your book can be a great branding tool. A lot of professional speakers I talk to call their book their very expensive business card. If you think about it, a business card might cost, let's say a penny. If you self-publish, your book might cost anywhere from 2 to 5 dollars. That's a lot more than a business cared. But how powerful is it for you to go to one of your prospects and say, "Oh, by the way, I wrote a book on this topic, I'd love to share it with you. Here's a gift from me to you." Even if they don't ever read your book, they're impressed that you're the author. If the topic is relevant, they might only just read the title and think that's good enough. If they're ever asked for an expert on the topic, you're the person they're going to recommend. I love the idea that you already are an expert. The interesting thing is, you might not have credibility as the expert. Have you ever gone to a conference and heard somebody speak about something, and you're listening to their presentation thinking, man I totally know more than that person on this topic. Why am I not on stage talking about this stuff? Well, for some reason, they were recognized as the expert by the people who put the conference together. You might have more expertise, but you might not have done a good enough job with your branding or establishing your credibility as an expert. Writing the book on the topic solves that branding and credibility problem right away. Another expectation from being an author, is that you can really refine your thoughts on a certain subject. I'd been blogging for a long time before I started writing my book. I wasn't really worried about publishing a blog post that was kind of half way done, or if it had spelling or grammar or logic issues, my blog was kind of a living, breathing thing, and if I made a mistake last week, I could fix it in a new blog post today. However, when I sat down to write the book on LinkedIn, I found myself doing a lot deeper critical thinking. If I made a mistake in my LinkedIn book, it wasn't something that I could easily fix by writing a blog post about it the next day. This was something that was going to sit on people's shelves, maybe for years. I wanted to make sure that before I wrote something, I did a good enough job, and that meant a lot of deep, critical thinking. Some of you might loath writing. As I mentioned earlier, it's an outlet for me, I've always loved to write. I thought that I was a really good writer. In fact, I was such a good writer, that when I first started writing my blog, I wasn't surprised that so many people came to read it. Well, after writing almost daily for a couple of years, I decided to go back to my earliest blog posts. I could not believe the dribble that I put on my blog in those early months. I thought I was a great writer and blogger, but after having written and refined my skills over a couple of years, I saw a number of things that I'd improved in. If you want to be a better writer, or a better researcher, or analyst, or whatever it is, maybe forcing yourself to write a book and going through the exercise of writing a book, will help you become better at those things. One of the benefits that I've seen people talk about as authors, is that they can differentiate themselves way better because they're an author. In their book, they kind of show all of their expertise. They're showing their perspectives, they're showing their thoughts, they're showing their logic, they're really exposing themselves. As they expose themselves, they have the ability to show more depth and more breadth, and really help them differentiate themselves against their competition. This is one of the great reasons to write a book. One of my favorite blog posts that I ever wrote was called Substantiate Yourself. The idea is that instead of just telling somebody that you like something, or you're passionate about something, or you have expertise in something, show them. In my job search, I told people that I was a Project Manager, and a Product Manager, and a Business Analyst, but it wasn't until I launched my website that people said, "Oh, now I understand what you do." Words were just words until they could have something almost tangible to understand who I was. If you write a book it might be that tangible thing, even if it's an eBook, to help you substantiate what your expertise is. And finally, on my list of expectations, I suggest that being an author might be one more important credential. You might have a degree, you might have certifications, you might have certain job titles under your belt, but being an author does something magnificent for your brand. I was amazed in my early presentations, when people would introduce me on stage, not as a CEO of an amazing and cool company, but as the author of the book. I kept thinking, why are they not recognizing my other stuff, being a CEO, my degrees, all that stuff? They weren't recognizing that because being an author is so impressive. This is a great credential to add to your list of credentials. Now that's the end of my list, I want to know what's on your list. What is the thing that you wrote down, what is your expectation, or what are your expectations from being an author?

Topic/Audience Matching

I'd like to share a lesson that I learned from one of my friends, Laura Labovich. Laura's in Maryland, a little north of Washington DC, and she's been a career expert for a long time. After I wrote my first book, I'm On LinkedIn, Now What?, and had my second book out, I'm On Facebook, Now What?, my publisher and I started getting request from people to write, Now What books? I thought this was brilliant. I made a list of Now What books that I would want in my series, and one of them was, I'm A Return To Work Mom, Now What? I approached Laura to ask if she would be interested in writing this book. She was enthusiastic, she was excited. She worked with a lot of women who became return to work moms. She was passionate about helping return to work moms get back into the work force, and she knew that she could write an awesome book. We started going down the path of writing this book. However, a week or two later she called me up very apologetic and she said, "Jason, I can't write this book." And I said, "Why not? Is it too hard? Do you not have enough expertise or experience in this area?" And she said, "No, I can do this book, but this is not the right book for me." I didn't quite understand what she was talking about until she said, "Jason, my ideal client is an executive in transition. If I write this book, I will be the expert for return to work moms, but I need to be the expert for executives." Now of course, return to work moms could be executives, but she felt that being the author for that book would put her into a niche that would be very difficult for her to get out of. What she taught me, was that as an author you need to make sure that your topic and your audience match. This book would have been a mismatch for her and her prospects. This is a lesson that I learned a few years ago, but I think about it regularly, and I'm grateful that Laura taught me this lesson. I've seen this throughout the years. There's somebody who has a certain brand and expertise outside of their career space who wrote a book on how to get a job. The book was small, that person writing that book didn't make sense. It wasn't helpful in the person's career, and it might have been a hindrance. As you think about your book, I want you to think about what it could do for your brand, and here's my question. Will your book, and the topic of your book, be the right match for your audience and the objectives that you want to accomplish? Even though I was frustrated for a few minutes when Laura finally said, "I can't write this book," I realized it was the right answer for her. Make sure that the book you write is going to help you with your branding and other objectives that you have.

What if Your Topic is Already Taken

I know a common concern for people who are thinking about writing a book is, the book has already been written. You can go to the bookstore or go to Amazon and see that there is not only one book written on the topic, but there are dozens and dozens of books. Well go back to your goals and your objectives, and the objectives and benefits that I shared in a precious video, my answer is, it might not matter at all. It might be okay that there are two dozen books already on the topic. Here's why. Most likely your book will come at it from a different angle. Remember we talked about that speaker on stage and you're sitting there thinking, man I could do better than this speaker, I know more, I have more depth or I have more breath, or I can present it in an easier to understand format. All of those things can contribute to you having maybe, a better book. Well they might do certain things better, but the way you present it, or the material you present, might be better for a specific audience that they're not addressing. In your book you might be able to show your breadth and depth of expertise in a way that they didn't or couldn't. Like I said, either you have more depth or breath, or you have a different way of sharing it so that it's easier to understand. Your style might connect with readers better than the styles of the books that already on the market. You might be able to present information that's more current than what the other books on the market are presenting. Of course, there are some classics out there that you're probably never going to never write better than. For example, How to Win Friends and Influence People. A lot of people have written networking and social interaction books since that book came out, but that is the classic on the topic. Just because it's been done though, doesn't mean there haven't been other books that have been very successful. You might be able to take a topic that was written about 10 or 20 years ago, and put a fresh face on it. Additionally, some of the other books that were written might not be known. I didn't mention to you that my book on LinkedIn was not the first book on LinkedIn. Somebody wrote a book on LinkedIn and got it out, I think, a week earlier then my book came out. Many years later I still don't hear about that other book. In my circle of career coaches and resume writers, people who are trying to grow a business, solopreneurs and entrepreneurs, nobody's talking about that other book. You might find a book that's like yours and maybe even better than what you could do, but you might be able to implement a marketing strategy much more effectively than what the other authors did. In other words, you might not have the best book out there, but it might be the book that more people know about. Finally, let me throw what might seem like a foreign idea out there. Maybe it doesn't matter if you sell one book. Maybe you'll never be able to touch the other books that are already on the market, but that might not be your goal. If the purpose of your book is to enhance your own brand, sales might not matter at all. You might find yourself in a networking environment or a job interview where being an author of a book on a relevant topic is all that people want to know about. It gives you that authority, the credibility as an expert, and it helps you have a conversation that you might not have been able to have otherwise. Remember the idea that professional speakers say that their book is like a very expensive business card. What they'll do, is they'll print a lot of books and start mailing them to their prospects. They don't expect anything in return. For them, the book is a branding tool. If the topic has already been done, you might still be able to get to your objectives simply by getting your book done.

How Expert do You Need to Be

Another concern that I hear from people, is that they aren't the expert to write the book. When I wrote the book on LinkedIn I wasn't the expert either, in fact, I didn't know much about LinkedIn when I started writing the book. I actually knew of at least a dozen people who were making some pretty significant money training, consulting, and speaking on LinkedIn. They should have been the ones who wrote the book on LinkedIn, but they didn't. Even though I was not expert in the topic, I was able to become an expert in the topic. I learned, I studied, I asked other people, I interviewed people, where are you getting value, what do you like, what works for you? As I learned and as I studied, my expertise grew. Honestly, getting my first book done was a major accomplishment, but as the second and third editions of my book came out, it allowed me to prove my expertise on this topic. Now I have to share something, I usually don't call myself an expert. I let other people call me experts, but I don't refer to myself as the expert on LinkedIn. When they do call me an expert, even though I don't feel like I'm the expert, and there might be other people that I defer to, I don't disagree with them. I try to accept it graciously, and I'm thankful that they would consider me an expert. And one of the best parts is, I can write that other people call me an expert, or I can say I'm regarded as the expert on LinkedIn. The idea of being the expert might be kind of weird to you, but realize that you don't have to start out as the expert. Expertise grows because you put time and effort into learning, and once that book comes out, people will call you the expert on your topic. Even if you might have always been an expert, once the book comes out, that's when they'll recognize it and start referring to you as the expert. It's a pretty cool place to be.

Type of Book and Your Writing Style

As we wrap up this module, I want to throw out a couple of considerations. These are things that you need to think about before you start writing your book. The first is, what kind of book do you want to have? Do you want to have an eBook, do you want to have a paperback, or do you want to have a hardcover, or do you want to have all three? The answer to this question will help you determine what kind of writing you need to do, the length of the book, as well as what kind of outside help you might want to bring in. EBooks have become very popular, as you know, although they're not always the right format for every book. A paperback book is probably the most common type of book. A hardcover is something that I've heard people say, this is the book, this is me, this is my best product. I want people to put this in their bookshelf forever, I want this to be on somebody's coffee table, it's almost more about having that book in hardcover than it is having a book or having a message. EBooks are going to be significantly cheaper to produce than a paperback or especially a hardcover book. Another consideration is, what's your writing style? Are you writing a technical book, are you writing a novel, are you writing something that's story-based, are you writing something that's going to need a lot of visual? I would define your style of writing for this book as early as you can. There's going to come time in the writing and editing process when you're going to say, I am outside of my style, I need to go back and make this conform to the rest of the book, because I've gone out of style, this part seems weird. Understanding and defining the style that you're going to write in will help you as you put your book together.

Can you Really Make Money Selling Books?

Before we finish this module, I really want to talk about the idea of making money because you're writing a book. You know you can make money as a consultant, or a speaker, or bring awareness to your company and use it as a marketing tool and make money that way, but I want to talk about making money from book sales. Can you really do it? I know I've been able to do it. I think a lot of people have been able to do it because of the way the publishing model has changed so dramatically. Here's some numbers that I've found that show how self-published authors are making money. Self-published titles have been buoyed by an explosion in digital book sales, that would be eBooks. EBook sales totaled $878 million in 2010 compared to $287 million in 2009. That's pretty amazing growth, isn't it? It goes on to say, some analyst project that eBook sales will pass $2 billion dollars in 2013. Here's the reference for that quote. As I poked around, I learned that they did indeed pass $2 billion, but they didn't do it in 2013, they did it in 2012. EBook sales in 2012 passed $3 billion. What I'm hearing is, the final numbers in 2013 are going to see no growth, or very little growth, but still, that's a lot of money that has shifted from paperback, hardcover, traditional book sales, over to the eBook market. And it's not that hard to take part in that. Getting an eBook produced and on the market is not that hard. You'll learn more about that in the case studies.

Wrap-up

Let's wrap up this module. We've talked about a number of things about the whys of writing a book. I hope that you're inspired. It is possible to achieve your objectives. I know that writing a book is not an easy process, and I'm not going to try to try to make you think it is. But the benefits of being an author, whether you're an eBook author or you have books out that you're shipping through the mail, can be grand. They can be financial, they can help your company or your career, they can introduce you to new types of income, or it might just be something you need to get off your chest. In the next module, we're going to talk about how to write your book. Let's get started.

Writing Your Book

Introduction to Writing Your Book

In this module, we're going to talk about actually writing your book. This is where we go from, I have an idea to I have a final product. Now, what you do after you have your final product, whether you do anything at all, is a topic of the next module. Right now, we're going to talk about a systematic or methodical approach to getting the idea out of your mind and into a book.

The Writing Journey

I'd like give you a high-level overview of what this writing journey looks like. Now, there's certain things that you do and certain things that you might not do. Here's what you do. You come up with the Title. If you go with the traditional publisher, they might change your Title, but I like having a Title at the beginning so that I know what kind of theme or topic I'm working towards. You would come up with the Table of Contents, I would suggest 9 chapters, and then you write. Isn't that an amazing word? It's only one syllable, it's not very long, but writing is the biggest part of what you're going to do to get your book done. Now you can do this in one or two weeks. I heard a story about somebody who went out to a cabin for a week or two, just to get her book done, zero distractions from family, responsibilities, email, she secluded herself in a cabin and after two weeks, she was done, she had her book. A friend of mine suggested that if you write 20-40 minutes every single day, then after 90 days, you should have a manuscript that's ready to go to the editor. These are things that you're typically going to do on your own. You might get a ghostwriter, but I'm guessing that most people watching this video are not going to go that route. There are a number of other things that need to be done. I'm going to suggest that these are Publisher tasks, you might take these on yourself or you might outsource them to a publisher. A Publisher will typically do something called Copy Editing. This is the editing of the words. They're looking for grammar, spelling, making sure what you wrote makes sense. There's another type of editing called Layout Editing. This is going to be the Designer that makes sure that the words are in the right places one a page. You'll also have somebody design the cover and things like that. Printing is typically a publisher responsibility. Most Publisher aren't going to print in-house, they'll outsource that to a printing company, but it's usually something that the author doesn't necessarily handle. And a Publisher would do distribution. When somebody makes an order, how do you get the book from the inventory, to that person or to that bookstore? When I self-published, I didn't do Copy Editing, or the Layout, or the design, but I worked with freelancers who could do those things. I also found a printing company that was able to take care of all of my printing needs and I already have a Distribution setup for my own organization, it's not very complex and it very inexpensive to put together, but it's something that I was able to handle on my own. The Publisher who put out my first two books, Happy About, told me that when they have an author come to them they handle about 250 individual tasks to help them get that book to market. I've only written four or five things in the Publisher column here, but there are definitely a lot of things that can be done to get your book out there. Publishers bring value for sure. Aside from some of these things, what you're going to do throughout the writing journey is brainstorm. You'll do a lot of brainstorming from the beginning all the way to the, well, there isn't really an end. You'll continually brainstorm through the writing process, as well as marketing and sales process. Additionally, you will do marketing from the beginning until again, there's really no end, you'll always be marketing. One thing that I found was before my book goes to market; I do a thing called pre-marketing. This is where I email people and I'll say, Hey I'm working on my book or hey, my book's going to be out in a few weeks or something like that. I'm continually putting my messaging, and my brand, and my announcements, and my requests in front of people, even if I don't have the book on the market. Of course, after the book is done, I'm doing a lot of marketing.

Perfect vs. Good Enough

I need to spend a minute or two on a very important topic. Some of you may heard of the phrase, analysis paralysis. This is where somebody does a lot of analysis to see if something is feasible and they get so consumed in the analysis phase that they never go to the execution phase, this happens with authors. You have to internalize the idea that you might not put out the perfect book, you need to figure out what is good enough. If you're always tweaking and trying to come up with perfection, you might have a multi-year hobby or project on your hand that never gets finished. My advice to you is just write the book; Just GET IT WRITTEN! Don't worry about perfection. As you develop the right mentality as an author, you should think about putting stuff on your computer or as they say on paper as a brain dump. In other words, don't act as the filter before you type stuff, you should get into the habit of just getting the information out there. What I've heard from professional writers is that you write a lot of stuff and then you go back and you edit. Some people say that in the first round of editing, you should delete or scratch out half of the stuff that you've written and then you go back and edit that and scratch out another half of that. So now, you're left with about 25% of what you originally wrote. That's pretty harsh isn't it? The idea is it's better to write and just let the flow happen, as opposed to think nah, I'm not going to write that because that will happen too many times and you're not going to end up with enough good stuff that you can edit from. If you worry about perfection as your writing, it will be a major hindrance to get a good solid flow of writing done. Don't worry about the perfection, just go for good enough and realize that you'll be able to edit it down later.

Your Book's Title

In the first column of your tasks, as the author, the first thing was to come up with the Title. Think of your Title as the idea, the concept, the theme, the thesis, the topic, the message, what is it, in one sentence or one phrase that you're trying to say. Now of course, there are some amazing Titles out there that have done very well that aren't descriptive at all of what the book is. You might choose to go that route. The titles that I've chosen however, all describe what the book is without trying to be jargony, cliché, or clever. Think of your title as what might be a one line summary of your book. If it something catchy, you're just going to have to do more and better marketing. One of the reasons I like a title that's descriptive is because you give it to somebody, they might not read your book, but they'll read the title and they won't have to read your book to understand what you're expertise or passion is in. As I say to my audiences, people might not read the book, but they can't help but read the title. Make your title good enough so that when they see your title they say oh, that's what Jason does. Understand that your title will probably evolve as your book evolves. This is fluid, this is not something you set in stone and then you have to make sure that you write to. During the writing process, you might choose to go a slightly different direction or with a slightly different focus. Your title can change and that's okay. As your writing, you might find three or four words that are better than the title that you chose and they're still as descriptive. Allow for flexibility with your title as your book evolves. Let me share the experience I had with my LinkedIn book. My publisher wanted my LinkedIn book to be the same title as all of the other titles that he had, which is Happy About, and then the topic. Well, the truth is I wasn't happy about LinkedIn, I'm still not Happy About LinkedIn. I felt like having a book titled Happy About LinkedIn would go against who I really was. I came up with what I thought was a very clever title and I really pushed for that. My title became, I'm On LinkedIn Now What??? The idea behind this is that at the time, there was around 8 million people who were on LinkedIn, so I figured there was 8 million people in the world who said, what do I do now? I'm On LinkedIn, Now what. I get compliments on that title all the time and I know I would not get compliments on the title, Happy About LinkedIn. The title that he suggested would have been great branding for him. As more of my books sold, it would have brought great awareness to the rest of his books however, I needed branding for me and I didn't realize the power at the time, but the Now What gave me room for growth. I was able to put out, I'm On Facebook - Now What???, I've Landed My Dream Job - Now What???, and a number of other Now What??? titles. Personally, I feel like it's critical that your title is descriptive. Let it be something that when somebody reads it, they can say, oh I'm pretty I sure I get what's going to be in this book. If that's their response, it's going to make it easier for you as you market, expand your brand, and try and get more sales. Remember, your title that you first come up with, not might be the title that you finally put on your book. Let it evolve with the book, but make sure it's a great title and it'll help you sale more books and expand your brand.

The Table of Contents

The second author's task in the previous video was to come up with your Table of Contents. Think of your Table of Contents as a skeleton that you'll eventually flesh out. That might be kind of a gruesome analogy, but I've always felt like it was something that I put in place and then I added more stuff later. In the first draft of my LinkedIn book that I submitted to my publisher, without any counsel before hand, I had around 23 chapters. He came back to me and said, Jason, you can't have 23 chapters in a book, you need to have about 9, 9 chapters is the ideal. Now, I'm not going to tell you that you have to have 9, but now when I write books I think about what are the 9 main things that I want to write about. If it's a lot more than 9, like 23, I try and group things together so maybe I can come up with 9 chapters. I would suggest that as you put together your Table of Contents try and keep it around 9 chapters, which are going to be 9 different topics. Once you have those 9 or so chapters defined, you would brainstorm and maybe mindmap what the sub-chapters or sub-topics would be. You can actually spend a lot of time doing this and it can help you create a lot of content at a very meta-level, before you do any writing. This is the same process that I go through when I setup a new blog. What are the main topics that I'm going to blog about? Who is my audience? And then, I take each of those main topics and say, alright, what are a few things that break off of this topic? For example, in your book you'll have your Title, which as we talked about earlier will be your topic, or theme, or message, or something like that. Come up with your Chapters. I only put 3 here, but you would have somewhere around 9 and then, go into each of those chapters, which are basically topics, and break those down into smaller bits. I go through this process multiple times. I get to the point where I can wake up in the morning, which is when I do my best writing, take one of the most defined, lowest level topics and write about that for 20 or 40 minutes. The cool thing about is, I'm not trying to write about my entire chapter in 20 or 40 minutes, I'm just taking a very specific idea and finishing that idea in 20-40 minutes. This way, when I do that daily writing, I can pick one new thing every day and usually finish that topic that day. This is a technique that I've used as an author and a blogger, you don't have to use this technique, but it something that makes a lot of sense for me and helps me manage my project over a multi-month period.

The Writing Process

The third thing in the author's column in that previous video is actually writing. Now, I'm not going to lie here, this is where a lot of work comes in and I can't tell you much more than write the book, that's what it really comes down to. With that in mind, let's go over a few thoughts. Remember the example of the person that I said went out to a cabin and within a couple of weeks had her book done. I think this is a great option and I would love to do that for one of my future books. However, you might not be able to do that. You might have a day job or other responsibilities that don't let you take one or two weeks and completely seclude yourself in this project. More than that for me is that I cannot focus on one single project for that long, I need to do other things. I need to spend time on my company, not for the company sake, but because I can't focus that long on one particular job. Tom Singer was at that fateful dinner in Austin in 2007, where I met Scott Allen and he suggested that if you write 20 minutes every single day, then after 90 days you'll have a manuscript. A year or two after he told me that, I called him up and I said, hey I want to quote that, can you tell it to me again and he changed it to 40 minutes. The bottom line is, discipline yourself every single day and write something. This is where the Table of Contents is going to really come in handy. If you've done your brainstorming and mindmapping, you'll have something ready to sit down and say, today I'm going to focus on this one thing. I would suggest that you find out when your best writing time is, for me it's in the morning, for some people it's late at night. Don't make the 20-40 minute disciple exercise something that you just cram in wherever it fits, give your best efforts and let your freshest mind work on this. When I got my first book contract, the publisher had a requirement on the number of words and I've loved this requirement. I've actually thought about going through and counting the number of words in some of my favorite books or in books that are the size that I wanted my book to be. I never did that though, I think it would be a gruesome process. In the contract, it said I had to write at least 20,000 words. I don't remember how close I was to the 20,000, I think I was just over the 20,000 and my final product, first edition of that book was about 107 pages. That was big enough to be a book. Page count didn't make sense to me as a metric to know whether I was on track or not. The reason why is because I could have had it single spaced, double spaced, bigger font, wider margins, I didn't know how all of that would translate into a book that was actually printed. So the word count was the metric that I was really going after. A quick note on that, you can go way bigger. I know authors that do 60,000 or 80,000 word books. That's after all the editing. But understand that the bigger your book is it'll have a direct impact on number one, how much it cost to print the book and number two, how much it cost to ship the book. My early edition LinkedIn book was fairly lightweight, my 51 Alternatives to a Real Job book cost more to print than I was expecting because it was a bigger book and because it was a bigger book it cost a lot more to put it in the mail. Let's explore a few more ideas on the actual writing process.

Writing Thoughts and Tips

As I was researching the topic for this video course, I found some great ideas from other authors online. Some of these ideas are mine; some of them are from other authors. Whether these ideas are mine or from other authors, I would bet that, most authors would stand behind them. The first one I want to talk about goes back to the idea of perfection versus good enough. I love a comment that I found on the blog post below that said, "Get it written, then get it right!" I cannot emphasis this enough. Don't get stuck in perfection mode or analysis paralysis. Just write it, you can go back and fix things later. When I speak to audience around the country about being an author, one of the things that comes up is people saying, I'm not a good writer, well I wasn't a good writer either, I thought I was, but I really did get better with every single daily blog post that I did. You might not be as good of a writer as you want to be right now, my suggestion is start practicing. Why not write 20-40 minutes for the next year, just to become a better writer and then start your book. You can write a number of different things in those 20-40 minutes. You can write blog posts whether they're personal or professional. You can write in a personal journal. You can write letters to people. I don't care what you write, but the idea is practice, improve your writing by actually writing and there will come a time where you might think okay, I think I'm good enough to actually start writing this book. Another thing I mentioned earlier is to just get a lot of stuff written and then come back and edit your manuscript. Not only is this going to make the final work count smaller, it's going to ensure that you don't have too much fluffy stuff in your final product. This is one of my favorite lessons. I learned it in an internship when I was a programmer. I remember being on a phone call with my boss, another programmer, and our internal customers. They asked a question that I thought I was qualified to answer; my answer was absolutely. I don't remember if it was a could you do this or will the system do that, but my answer was absolutely. Fortunately, my boss was a lot wiser then I was and she came back and said well there are some exceptions. This was early in my professional career and that made a huge impact on me. I was sure that we could enthusiastically say absolutely yes, but what I learned is, I didn't understand that landscape enough to understand what the exceptions were. Now, when I read books, articles, hear speakers, and I see absolutes and guarantees, it always puts me on guard. I've learned that here are so many loop holes in scenarios that we can't make strong absolutes and guarantees. I don't want to discredit myself and have people think that I really don't understand what's going on by making those strong absolutes and guarantees. As an author, what I've learned to do is say something like, I think you can or maybe, or perhaps, or something like that. In most cases I want to say you can absolutely do this, but there are circumstances that are outside of my control, so I don't say that. For me, this concept it a credibility buster. In each of my writing projects, I sit down and try to understand what the style of the book is going to be. I have a few books that I've started that are not published yet, one is a dialogue between two people, another is children's book, that was really hard to write. Another is a book kind of like Who Moved My Cheese, so it kind of reads like a children's book, but the audience is for adults and then of course, I have my books that are already published. I would consider those to have more of a business style, kind of dry, not necessarily dialogue. When you define your style for this project, it will help you write the book better. You'll know when you're straying from the style of the book and you'll be able to come back and keep the style consistent. I definitely encourage you to cite your quotes. If you want to quote something or if you find something that's quote worthy, put it in quotes and tell people where you got it from. Give the right person credit, there's nothing wrong with giving somebody else credit for saying something really cool, even if you wish you would have been the one that said it. I would suggest that as an expert, there's a lot of value in bringing together what other experts and thought leaders are saying about this particular topic. You don't have to take credit for every great thing that was ever said or written, if you have your own great stuff to share and you bring in great stuff from other people, it shows that you have a broader understanding of your topic. Writing is a JOB, it can feel like a fulltime job. I would suggest that you treat this project as if you got it as an assignment from your boss. Keep yourself disciplined, writing can be very lonely, there's not necessarily somebody standing over you saying, hey where are you? Why aren't you doing it faster? When are you going to give me the next deliverable? It's kind of easy to slack off. If you slack off you're not going to get your manuscript ready for an editor and that means you're not going to get a book out. Speaking of which, I suggest you work towards a deadline. I was just reading a blog post where an author said, working towards a deadline helps you stay focused. I love it when I'm working on a project with somebody and they say, when do you want me to get this back to you? Even though there's no real hard deadline, they know that having a deadline helps them get the job done. If you're going to treat this like a real job, you should have a deadline to work towards. Something that can help you measure your progress and know if you're on the right track or not. A number of years ago, there was a huge debate online with thought leaders and subject matter experts who were saying, how many keys and secrets should we share online? If we do share something online, doesn't that allow customers to take our idea and implement it? Or competitors to take our idea and claim them as their own? My favorite response was, share everything. There really is no such thing a secret. Trust me, somebody knows what your secret is. If you have seven secrets, seven things that nobody's ever heard of, somebody's already heard of them and they've probably already written them. As you share your secrets, and tricks, and keys, and all these things that you feel like you might want to guard a little bit, it will make it more clear that you're indeed the expert that has the breadth and the depth that understands the topic clearly. One of the things that I've learned in my books and my informational products is the idea of evergreen. The idea comes from the trees that are evergreen trees. These are trees that stay green no matter the season. The greenness lasts for a long time. Other trees are green in the summer and they shed their leaves in the winter. The more technical you write your book, the more often you're probably going to have to update and change your book. My LinkedIn book is technical enough that I really should do updates about once a year. My 51 Alternatives to a Real Job book though is probably not going to need updates for a long time. There's pros and cons, if you always have a new book coming out, then you can be seen as the person who's always the most current on the topic, but that takes a lot of work. I like the idea of finishing a project and then benefiting from it for years to come. Finally, writing is really, really hard work. When it comes down to it, you just can't avoid the actual writing process. It takes a long time. Many authors have talked about getting their book done as if they were birthing a baby. This is a huge long process and it hurts to do. It takes time away from other things whether it's your family, or your job, or your hobbies. Maybe, writing a book isn't what you really need right now. Maybe having a professional blog is going to be the right vehicle to help you achieve your objectives. I'm a huge advocate of writing books, I've done three and I have more to come. The reason why I put this up is I want to give a little reality check and just make sure that you and I are on the same page, this is not going to be a very easy project.

What about Ghostwriters?

I said you weren't really going to get away from the writing process right? Well there actually are a few ways to get around the writing process. There's a profession out there that is known as Ghostwriting. I wonder if Ghostwriting might be right for you. Ghostwriting is basically, where you get somebody who acts as you, they write for you, they're not co-authors, they don't have their name on the cover, they might have their name in the acknowledgements if you want to do that, but basically you're outsourcing the writing process. They act as a sub-contractor to you and they write in your name. This is a lot more popular than I thought. As I was studying Ghostwriting a few months ago, I was surprised at the number of authors that use Ghostwriters. It's no surprise that celebrities and politicians, and people with much better things to do hire somebody to write their autobiography's for them. What I didn't know was that some very popular authors, who put out a lot of books every year, don't write their own books. I guess I kind of expected them to be holed up somewhere and they just crank out book after book after book. In reality, there are Ghostwriters that help them carry that load. Since it's so popular, of course there have been people questioning whether this is ethical or not. I think the idea of whether this is right or wrong or ethical or not is interesting. I'm not qualified to say absolutely whether it's right or wrong, but I personally don't think there's anything wrong with Ghostwriting. This really is sub-contracting out the writing process. I think I might feel comfortable with it as long as I work closely with the Ghostwriter to make sure that they are mirroring my voice and my ideas. This is what might be the showstopper for a lot of people, it certainly is for me. You could easily spend $30,000 to hire a Ghostwriter to write your book. I'm guess that this isn't something that you're interested in, but I wanted to throw this idea out there just so you can understand how it works. One of the questions that I would have is, if I were to outsource the writing to somebody, could I really feel comfortable claiming that it was my book? If I were in front of an audience speaking, I'm already the expert, but would I really feel comfortable if somebody asked me what a certain line or phrase or sentence in my book meant. I'm not sure if I would really even call it my book. This isn't really a solution for me, but again, some of you might have thought about the idea of finding somebody to help you Ghostwrite.

Should I get a Cowriter?

Another alternative is what's known as co-writing. This is where you have more than one person helping you write the book. I wrote, I'm On LinkedIn Now What??? by myself, but for my second book, I split the writing with my cowriter. Co-writing can be beneficial. It can help you with your accountability. Just knowing that there's somebody else who's working towards a deadline and you're working towards a deadline, can give you the incentive to make sure your disciplined enough to keep on that writing. I would suggest that if you get into a co-writing arrangement, there are going to be management issues. For example, what if expectations and deliverables are not met? What if they're not even well defined? If you don't get along with your cowriter or you don't like what their writing or how their writing it, you can't necessarily fire them. It's not like they work directly for you. I would suggest that before you get into a cowriting arrangement make sure you have a meeting and sit down and talk about what the expectations are. Who's going to give what? What kind of accountability should there be? How do you ensure that you're both contributing at a level that's comfortable for both of you? This is a real partnership and having these frank discussions early on can alleviate some of the problems that you might have later. One thing that Jesse and I did was we defined which chapters he was going to do and which chapters I was going to do. This was really cool because I didn't have to write an entire book again. In fact, I only had to write half a book because he was writing the other half. I love the idea of sharing those responsibilities with somebody else and getting something out to market quicker. Not only that, I was able to get his brain-share on the project, and not have it be simply another Jason Alba project. As you share the responsibilities, you're also going to share the profits. We talked about the idea that you can make money by selling books, but it's not necessarily a lot of money. At the most, you might make somewhere around $20 or $30 or $40 per book sold, depending on how you price your book. A typical $20 book might bring you around $15 a profit. If you have a cowriter, then you're sharing those profits, $15 isn't much to share from. For me one of the biggest challenges was merging the writing styles and grammar differences. I know that I have a very causal style. It's almost as if you and I are in the room talking to each other. Any other writing is probably going to have a different style. It's kind of hard to rewrite or edit those styles out or at least make them merge so it looks like it's one author. If you have this problem, one solution might be to take one author's writing and make it clear that, that writing is from that author. In other words, you're not saying, here's a book that we both wrote, you're saying, hey here's a book and here's what Jesse has to say. That's an easy way to put two different styles into one book. There are definitely pros and cons when working with a cowriter. Go back to your objectives, and what you hope to get out of the project, and you should determine whether this is something you want to handle by yourself or whether there's an expert that you think you want to bring into the project.

Publishing Options

By this time, you should be asking yourself about the publishing options. What's the right option for you? Here are three considerations that I take into account when I think about how I'm going to get my book to market. The first is Royalty, who's going to make what money? For example, if I sale a million dollars worth of books, how much money do I get out of that? I'm hearing that traditional publishers are starting to give 50% royalty, which is a lot. I have a friend who wrote a very popular book, he said he gets around a quarter $0.25 of every book sold, that is significantly less than anything I would ever accept. The second consideration is Control. Do you want to have control over image, layout, branding, title? One of the control issues in my contract, with my publisher for my LinkedIn book is that if the book ever becomes a movie, which I find laughable, then we would split royalty on that movie. I can't even imagine my book going into a movie, that doesn't make sense at all. But by signing the document, I gave away certain things. There are definitely pros and cons of having a publisher, you need to understand where you're at on control and decision making. Let me give you an example. I've heard that people who write children's books are not supposed to send any artwork with the children's book, isn't that kind of funny? If you're writing a children's book, you probably have an idea of what kind of art you want to go in the book, but I've been told that publishers of children's books don't want any artwork coming through, they just want the writing. They have their own staff or their own contractors that take care of all the artwork. The third consideration is, what tasks do you want to do and what tasks do you not want to do. Let's jump into a spectrum and see what this kind of looks like. So on the left hand side we have self-publishing. Over towards the right side we have traditional publishing. I put the three main considerations on the left hand side, Royalty, Control, and Duties, don't forget about those as we go through these tasks. As a self-publisher, you have complete responsibility, it's all on you. You will manage all of the contractors, the people who are doing the copyediting, the graphics, all of that stuff. You have to find and manage your printer, which honestly, is not that hard. If you sell well and do a great job marketing, you'll make more money, not just a quarter per sale, or $0.50 of the royalty, you get all of the profit. The flipside of that is, if you don't sell well then you're probably out $2,000 or $3,000 and whatever time you've put into the project. It's all on you. One of the things that I enjoy about my publisher is that if somebody steals something or there are any lawsuits or anything, it goes directly to him. He basically, is a shield. I am not worried at all about any legal considerations or lawsuits, he takes care of all of that. If you self-publish, you're putting all of that responsibility on you. If you deal well then you reap all the benefits, which is really cool. If you don't do well, then you pay for it out of pocket. Another consideration of self-publishing that you might get your book out faster. When I asked my publisher in May if I could have my book by September for a conference, he made it sound like publishers don't get anything out under a year's time. If you're self-publishing, and you have your own printer and you're managing your contractors well, you could get the book out as fast as you want too. Another publishing option that you might have heard of is typically referred to as Vanity Publishing. This is where you basically pay a company to be your publisher. You give them the manuscript and they're going to take care of all the other stuff. From what I've read, this costs thousands and thousands of dollars. The benefit is that you get to say that you have a publisher. Back in the early days of being an author, when I had interviews they would always end with and who's your publisher? Because they liked to write that this was published by Penguin or Wiley or something like that. For the last few years, I've never been asked who my publisher was. If you feel like you need to have a publisher and an agent can't get you into a traditional publisher, maybe you can find a vanity publisher. This publisher is going to take over some tasks. I did a podcast with my publisher, he's not a vanity publisher, but he's on the smaller side of being a traditional publisher and he said that him and his team sat down and figured out that when they get a book put together, they will do a approximately 230 tasks that the author isn't going to do. So your publisher will take some of that burden. However, you still will have a lot of responsibility. You'll pay the vanity publisher to do their job, but they're not necessarily going to go and sell the book for you or make as famous as you want to be. You might share a portion of your sales with them and they might retain certain rights. Just the same as I gave away some control with my publisher, you might give away some control with your vanity publisher, even though you've paid them. One of the things I've seen online about vanity publishers is that they essentially own the ISBN number. It's kind of like a skew or an identification number. If they own that number, they have a lot of control over the direction of your book. On far other end of the spectrum are Traditional Publishers. I have a gray arrow coming out from the left side of traditional publishers because my publisher, Happy About, is a traditional publisher, but they're much smaller than the Wiley's and the Penguins. The thing I loved about working with a small traditional publisher was that it was a lot easy and quicker to get things done. If I had a problem, I talked to the owner of the company. I didn't feel like I had to jump through a lot hoops and I actually could have a conversation, like the one I did about wanting a certain title and I felt like my voice was heard. In a traditional publishing environment, the royalties could be extremely low. For example, the $0.25 per book sold. On the other hand, like I mentioned earlier, I'm hearing more and more that traditional publishers are giving a lot more of the royalty back to the author. As we've mentioned before, you're going to retain much fewer rights with a traditional publisher. They're typically going to want complete control over the title, the design, the layouts, and the final words that go in. If their editor says this is the way it should be, you might not get the final word on that. One of the things they really bring to the table is resources they have. Jesse and I did our first book on Facebook and then he went on, to write some books for O'Reily and other publishers. He said that with O'Reily it was so easy. He turned in a manuscript and it got peer reviewed a number of times and it didn't have to come back to him. That was a different experience than what we had with Happy About because O'Reily had a much better process in place to help an author get the right book out. Don't expect a traditional publisher to do any marketing for you. You kind of think they would help you because if they sell more books, then they'll be more successful. But the reality is they really lean on the author to do the marketing. Typically, you would expect what's called an "advance" on your book. I put down on "advance" on royalties. It's important to understand, this is not a grant, it's not a gift, it's not a payout, if you get a $15,000 advance it means that you have to sell enough books, where you would have gotten $15,000 of royalties before they start giving you royalty checks. Usually, you're not going to have pay an advance back if you don't sell enough books, but make sure you read the fine print in your contract. Unless you've done a really good job branding yourself, you're probably going to have to pitch your book to an agent and the agent will take that to the publisher. This was probably the step for me that I was least interested in. I didn't want one more hand in the pot on the royalties and I didn't want to have to play the game where somebody, me or an agent, had to pitch a bunch of publishers on my book. I was really quite fortunate to fall into a small publisher and the process to get there was very easy. There are actually quite a few small publishers out there. If you're looking at a traditional publisher, maybe you don't need to go to the very big, well know, well respected publishers, you might find a smaller publisher that's willing to take on your book project.

Self-publishing Thoughts

Let's dig a little more into the idea of self-publishing. If you choose to self-publish, here's what you're looking at. Of course, you're going to finish your manuscript. This is something that you're going to send to an editor. You could do your own editing, but I've never had enough brain power to do the gargantuan job of writing the book, and the go back with a fine tooth comb, and do all of the editing. It's not too hard to find experts that can help you do all the things you need to do to get a book ready to go to a printer. You can use the very popular systems like odesk, or elance, and look for people that specialize in copyediting, layout editing, cover design, things like that, you definitely can tap into your own network. I have a number of friends who would love to edit books. They've edited magazine articles and other things and I'm sure that they would do a good job. Notice at the bottom on the footnote, I caution you, be careful as you go into your personal network to find help in a professional job. The last thing I want to do is have a problem with the person that I choose and have that impact a long-term friendship. Of course, sometimes you might impact a long-term friendship if you don't choose to use your friend. As a self-publisher, expect to manage the experts. Help them understand your expectations and you'll have to manage the payments and make sure they get paid on time, which might mean it comes out of your pocket before you even have the book at the printer. You'll also find and work with the printer. I suggest you call a couple of print shops in your local town and ask them if they print books. If they don't, ask them who does. I'm guessing that most people live close enough that they could drive to a print shop, that is qualified to print your first run of books. Once you get your books from the printer, you're going to have to figure out where and how to market your stuff. Notice in the footnotes, you should expect to do this whether you go with traditional publishing or self-publishing. Nobody has a responsibility to market more than you. There's actually a lot to figure out. You might market online; you might choose to sell your books on Amazon. You might choose to find partners, or affiliates, or people who could sell for you. Each of those channels brings their own challenges. You'll also figure out how speaking and networking will play into your marketing strategy. Again, whether you self-publish or not, this is something that you'll have to do. Finally, what if somebody orders your book? Well, if it's face to face, you can just hand them your book, but if you have a tangible book it's typically going to be something that you stick in the mail. Here are two tools that I've found to be very beneficial for me in my distribution. On the left is a Dymo printer. I love my Dymo printer. On the left hand side, I can print out a mailing label on the right hand side, I can print out a stamp. What this means is that I don't even have to go to the post office. If you order a book from me right now, I simply put it in an envelope, print off a label for your address, print off a stamp and I walk it out to my mailbox. It's as easy as that. Because I have various things that I put in the mail, I also bought a meter. This helps me know whether I should buy postage for 2 ounces or 8 ounces, or 13 ounces. I use my meter a lot more than I thought I ever would. Here are three more considerations if you're going to self-publish. First, talk to an accountant or a lawyer. What responsibilities do you have as somebody who is selling a book? Remember, I said I could kind of hide behind my publisher when there are any legal considerations, if you self-publish, you can't do that. Make sure you have all the right disclaimers in place and make sure that you're not violating anything that can get you into trouble. Also, you might have to have a local business license setup. Do not mess around with images and copyright issues. There are watchdog organizations out there that would love to sue you for copyright violation. This is something that I try to stay far away from and as I mentioned earlier, cite everything, not just for legal reasons, but for credibility. It's better to bring in a lot of expert voices and cite them, then to have a lot of great stuff that's not cited and have people find out later that you basically stole ideas and words and phrases from other people.

My Favorite Author Tools

I'd like to share three of my favorite tools as an author. The first one is the Cloud and I represent this with Google documents. I love having my stuff out on the Cloud so I can access it from anywhere. I make good use out of Google documents as I'm writing and for my other creative projects. One of the reasons why is because I tend to go through computers rather quickly. While I do backups, I typically don't go and pull from my backups. No matter where I'm at or what the status is of my current computer, I love the ability to go into my Google documents and pick up right from where I left off. Another tool that I just can't get away from is Microsoft Word. The reason why word has become so essential to me as an author is because it is the perfect tool for me to do my formatting. Now I'm not talking about formatting that you would do for a newspaper or a magazine or something like that. There's special software to take care of those and of course there is special software to take care of formatting for a book, that's what I could call layout editing, but for my purposes, all I need to do is Microsoft Word. I've actually given my final manuscript to my editor in Word and she was able to take that Word document and import it into her layout program. I find I have better and more control over formatting in Word, than I get from a Google document. Another tool that I use all the time is the online dictionary. I love going into Chrome and typing in define: and then a word, I do this all the time. I find that as I write, I second-guess certain words and phrases or uses of words. I'll regularly go into this function and look it up online. Those are three of my favorite author tools; another one that I had to mention is EVERNOTE. People love EVERNOTE. The ability to pull in ideas and snippets and screen shots into one place is really powerful. I don't work this way, but I know a lot people swear by it. If you're looking for a place to accumulate all of your intelligence in your research, check out EVERNOTE as a tool that might be able to solve your problems.

Wrap-up

I hope that this module has been helpful and inspirational. The message in this module is to write your book. Start out with the topic, the idea. This is going to be your title and it can be fluid throughout the writing process. From there, develop your table of contents and then discipline yourself to sit down and do the writing over a period of time. Flesh out the table of contents. I've given you a number of ideas and tools and tips to help you become a better writer, but what I can't do is make you a better writer, that's something that's up to you. If you want to have a book, you can't avoid some of stuff that we talked about in the module. Let's go to the next module, which is on marketing your book.

Marketing Your Book

Introduction to Book Marketing

In this module we're going to talk about marketing your book. Now the good news is, your book's done. I know it was a big, gargantuan project. The bad news is, writing your book was easy compared to what I've found to be long-term marketing. Let's jump in and understand what this means and what we're going to do next.

Marketing vs. Sales

I think a lot of people confuse marketing and sales. Let's have a quick dialog about the difference between marketing and sales. This is not meant to be an in-depth analysis and comparison of marketing and sales, but you need to know the difference between the two. The purpose of marketing might be described as building awareness and branding. Branding is building awareness. But I want you to understand that what we're doing in marketing is we're helping people become aware of what we have to offer. As I've mentioned in other Pluralsight courses, personal branding is how others perceive you. We also want to build trust. We want people to think, "okay, he puts stuff out, I trust him, I like what he says, I'm going to go look at his other stuff." Marketers create systems so that it's easy for somebody to make a purchase. I've battled this many years with mine own offerings. I'll look at the purchase process and think, why does it take four steps to make a purchase? Can't we do it in one or two? Marketers look at the barriers or the friction to make a purchase and they try and make it easier. Marketers want to find and keep customers. Finding customers might be referred to as prospecting. Once you have the customer, how do you keep them and can you monetize on them any more after that initial purchase. And pretty much every marketer will tell you that the purpose of marketing is to drive sales. Everything they do is to support that final transaction. Here are a few marketing tasks. You might reach out to prospects. You might reach out to customers. You might write blog posts or tweets or any of the social media things. A marketing task might even be to read blog posts, tweets, and things like that. You would do this to understand what's happening in the market place with competitors and to find opportunities. One of my favorite defined marketing tasks is to brainstorm. I think it's funny to think about a bunch of marketers sitting around and brainstorming all day. Of course, this could be a beneficial exercise, but it's really hard to measure as opposed to what salespeople do, which hopefully is close a deal and bring in money. Let's switch over to the purpose of sales. Like I said, you want to bring in money. This is really it. I remember in business classes in school we talked about revenues and profits and things like that. Most business owners will tell you, "Cash is King." Cash comes before revenues, it comes before profits. If you don't have cash flow, even if your books show that you're profitable, you might end up closing down your business. Sales is the thing that sustains your business. If you don't have a formal business then it sustains your efforts. Nobody wants to spend dozens or hundreds of hours working on a project like writing a book and not get any compensation for it. Because sales brings in money it makes it worth it. The next time you think about doing some kind of book or something like that, you can think, well, maybe this will generate X number of dollars in revenue. Some sales tasks might include making phone calls to prospects, building and nurturing your prospect list, a lot of times this is called your pipeline, a very specific sales task is to ask for the sale. You might have a number of scripts that you use in different scenarios, but eventually you're going to get to the point where you say, "will you buy this product?" There's also the monotonous paperwork aspect of sales, sending orders in so they can be fulfilled. And then the fun part is closing the deal and all of the stuff that goes around that. Marketing and sales are both really important, but they're not the same thing. As an author I think you'll spend a lot more time marketing than you will actually closing a sale. The sales on my books are pretty much closed without me being involved. In other words, I don't ask an individual for a sale. I don't make phone calls. I don't have a prospect list of prospective buyers, but I do a lot of marketing to build evangelists and awareness and stuff like that, and then create the tools in the language on a website to make it easy to close the deal.

Use a CRM for Marketing and Sales

In the relationship management course in Pluralsight we talked a lot about CRM, customer relationship management software. On the right-hand side you can see some examples of CRM tools including JibberJobber, which is my tool, but there are hundreds and hundreds of CRM tools that you can choose from. As a professional marketer, which you'll become as an author, you should choose and use a relationship management tool to help you with your marketing. Let's talk about three things that you'll do with your CRM. One is that you'll manage. You're going to manage prospects. You're going to manage customers. You're going to manage evangelists. Those are three different types of people that you're going to have relationships with and nurture those relationships. You're also going to manage opportunities. This is going to be along the lines of when do you need to go somewhere, when do you need to follow up on a potential sale or speaking engagement or something like that. Trust me. Trying to manage this with sticky notes, an Excel spreadsheet, or in your head, just doesn't work. The more serious you are about marketing, the more you need to use a real CRM. Another thing you'll do with your CRM is messaging. I was at a presentation a few years ago with Mark Leblanc and he said that there was a "killer, killer, killer, killer" marketing strategy. That killer marketing strategy was very simply to create a message that was specific to a certain type of audience. For example, on the last slide we talked about prospects, customers and evangelists. What Mark was saying was that you wanted to send a very certain message to your prospects, which would be different than the message that you sent to your customers, or a very certain message to your evangelists, which would be different than the message that you would send to your prospects. You don't want to send one message out to your entire audience, because that message might apply only to the prospects or the customers or the evangelists. He said the killer strategy is to craft the exact right message for the audience that it's going to. You can do this with a CRM very easily. All you do is make sure you tag your contacts in your CRM. You would tag somebody as prospect, customer, or evangelist, and then when you're ready to send a message to your evangelists, you just pull out your evangelists and write the right message for them. A CRM facilitates the "killer, killer, killer, killer" marketing strategy. So we've talked about managing and messaging, and the third M is missing. Actually I couldn't think of another way to put this, but it's NOT missing. A CRM helps you not miss follow-up opportunities. As we network and put out proposals and bids and communicate with people, we're going to have a lot of opportunity to miss following up with opportunities and people. Use a relationship management tool to help you not forget to reach out to people. Whether it's a scheduled follow-up that you need to do, say, next Friday, reply back to this email or phone call, or it's more of something where you don't want to fall out of touch with somebody. For example, let's say we met and there's really nothing that you and I have to talk about, but once a quarter or every six months I want to reach out to you just to maintain and nurture our nascence relationship. I've been using a CRM since 2006, and there is no way that I would be where I'm at in my business without using a CRM. Choose one and use it.

Understanding Your Platform

Throughout this course we've talked a lot about your platform. Let's spend some time and really dig into what your platform is. With marketing you need to really understand what your platform is. How deep and wide is your reach? I remember when I lost my job in 2006, I sat down with a counselor and he said, "okay, here's a blank piece of paper. Let's write down everybody you know that's in your network." I think I was scared to death to start that exercise. As I picked up the pen to write down names, I went through names in my mind and I started disqualifying everybody I could think of. No, they're family, they probably can't help, they're not in the IT space. No, I can't talk to that person, they're a past customer and it would be embarrassing if they knew that I lost my job. Well, I can't talk to those people because they were prospects and there might be some kind of issue with me reaching out to them again. I was disqualifying people that should've been on my network even before I wrote them down. I invite you to skip that part. Don't disqualify people. Just start writing people down. If you want, you can start by categories. For example, write, people that I went to school with, people that I've worked with, family members, neighbors, people I go to church with, and then start drilling down in those categories and write down who you know. You really want to put together a list of people that become your platform. These aren't necessarily people that are going to buy your book or be interested in your message. They might play a completely different role. To be honest with you, if I could list 100 people on a piece of paper, I wouldn't necessarily want all of them to buy my book. What I would really want is for those 100 people to be my evangelists. Don't disqualify people from your audience or your platform before you write them down. Just brainstorm and put them all down on the piece of paper. You also need to have a realistic expectation of your social media connections. If you have 1000 Twitter followers, what exactly does that mean? How many of them on Twitter? How many of them will see what you say? How many of those 1000 are actually robots? How many of them like you or would become evangelists? Let's say you have 1000 LinkedIn connections. Same questions. Are they real connections? Are they really going to help you? Will they be a part of your evangelist pool? Will they become customers? Don't look at your numbers alone and think that you have arrived at success. One thing that you really want to do is grow your platform. You're always looking to grow your platform. As we talk about throughout this module, we want to give our network and our audience something to talk about. That means we continually put stuff out in front of them and we ask them to share it with their audience. We want people to become evangelists, and once they become evangelists we want to nurture that relationship. We'll talk about evangelists in another video in this module. Recognize that evangelists are a big part of your marketing strategy.

Your Marketing Plan

I've seen a lot of negative talk about marketing plans. Should you write down what your marketing plan is? If you're going to work with a traditional publisher they require that you tell them what your marketing plan is. They want to know details. I'm not going to go into what a marketing plan is in this course. You can Google that and find examples of marketing plans. Many of them are many pages long. You're going to talk about things like who your target audience is, who your customers are, who your competitors are, what your pricing is, how you're going to communicate with them. A marketing plan has a lot of detail. I would suggest that if you have to do one to pitch a publisher that you should do one for yourself. Even if you're going to do something that's only one or two pages, put these things in writing. As you flesh out your marketing plan, you're going to get dates and ideas and tactics and things like that written down that should help you stay focused. I'm guessing many of you are not going to become full-time authors. You're going to have a day job or you're going to have multiple contracting gigs that you're managing. Having a marketing plan can put in some deadlines and things like that to help you stay on track to achieve your annual goals that you should have because you're an author. Your marketing plan will also give you numbers. You'll have metrics and systems that you can measure by. If you're not where you think you should be, go back into your marketing plan and figure out where you thought you would be by now and see what you need to do to get there. If your plan has not been fleshed out at this point, start to flesh it out. Let's say you want to have sold 1000 books in the first six months. Did you do that? If you didn't do that, what are the things that you need to do in order to do that? I don't want you to spend a lot of time on your marketing plan. I know people who have spent months or even years putting together a marketing plan and they never go to market. I don't want that to happen to you. As I've said before, analysis paralysis. Don't let that happen, but create a plan so that you can have metrics and systems to help you stay on track and achieve the goals that you're after.

Components of Your Marketing Plan

I know you can go to Google and research how to create a marketing plan. I want to share some ideas with you of what you might want to have in your marketing plan. Recently I was watching some YouTube videos and the advertising that came on was from somebody who put together some marketing plan solutions. They said that the typical marketing plan takes 100 hours to create. Once again, I don't want you to get stuck in the analysis paralysis phase. Let's create and use a marketing plan as a tool, not something that keeps us away from getting a book done or getting it sold. So maybe we should think of your marketing plan as an abbreviated marketing plan. In other words, something not so comprehensive that it would be worthy of competing against marketing plans that other marketing professionals have put together. I'm talking about just what you need so that you can get your book marketed and sold. Here are a few thoughts on your marketing plan. It should be a structured strategy. I put this in because like I said before, I'm kind of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants guy. I have a strategy, but it's usually in my mind. When you put it down on paper you give it structure and I've found for me that's very helpful to actually act on it and measure what I'm doing against my plan. Your marketing plan will help you focus. We talked about this earlier. Your marketing plan will force you to create metrics. These metrics will be used throughout the months and maybe even the years as you do certain marketing activities. Are you meeting those metrics? Your marketing plan will also help you understand the landscape. In business classes I was taught that the landscape means who your customers are, what your competition's like, all the things to help you understand exactly where your product or service, or in this case, your book, fits into the market. When we talk about components of the marketing plan I want you to think about what you've probably heard of before, SMART goals. SMART is an acronym that represents five different ideas. On the left-hand side you'll see a SMART goal that I put together. Let's break this down. The S stands for specific. I didn't say I will sell a lot of books or I'll sell some books. I specifically said 1000 books. The M stands for measurable. If I say that I'm going to sell 1000 books I should be able to measure and track my sales and measure that against what I said I was going to do. The A is for achievable. I said 1000 books. I think that's pretty reasonable by December 31st. If I were to have said something like 1,000,000 or 1,000,000,000, that wouldn't be achievable or realistic. The R is for relevant. If I sell 1000 books that will give me about $10,000 in revenue or profit, depending on your pricing and your margins. That's relevant to me. That helps me achieve my annual financial goals. And the T stands for time based. I'm not just selling 1000 books some time, I'm selling them by December 31st. If you look up SMART goals online you'll see that the SMART might stand for other things. These were the ones that I thought were most applicable for creating our marketing plan. Let's talk about a few things that are going to go into your marketing plan. Again, this is an abbreviated marketing plan. You don't have to copy a 30-page plan online and recreate that. Here are some of the things that I think are the most important. You should have a description of your book. In a marketing plan this would be the description of your products or services. The reason why I love this in your marketing plan is because you will regularly be asked what your book's about or you will have opportunities to talk about it. If you can create a short, concise description, you'll probably use this in a number of places. Here's an example of a description from my 51 Alternatives to a Real Job book. It is a book for people who are interested in developing other revenue streams, which might include people who already have a job and they aren't leaving their job, or are sick of the rat race or the job search. Your abbreviated marketing plan should also define your customer. Who are they? Where are they? Why do they buy things? My book is designed for people who are in a job search, those who are entrepreneur-minded, recent graduates, as well as their parents and loved ones who might buy the book as a gift for them, and baby- boomers, who I've found deal a lot with age discrimination. Define every customer that would be interested in your book. You should have an idea of what your budget is. For example, I might want to buy LinkedIn ads. There's a minimum spend of $10/day so I'm going to budget about $300/month for LinkedIn ads. I might do some of the free press releases, but I'm going to spend a little money on this and do a press release for $300 and then I'll pay somebody to create a flyer for me for $150. If I understand what my budget is then that helps me understand how many books I need to sell to break even. You should have a good grasp on what your pricing strategy will be. You might go to Amazon or a book store and look at prices of books. Look at prices of your competitors. Definitely look at prices of similar books. For example, I might say that my paperback will be 19.95, which is pretty comparable to other books like this one. My eBook will be priced at 9.95, which feels like it's on the high side of Amazon, although outside of Amazon there are plenty of eBooks that go for $47 or $97. And then as part of my strategy I'm going to have a January sale where it goes all the way down to 3.99. These are some of the more important components of your abbreviated marketing plan. Again, you don't have to do a full-fledged marketing plan, but you should put some of these things on paper. You'll want to refer back to what your strategy and your plan was at the beginning. Feel free to adjust it as needed, but use it as a tool to help guide you and give you more focus.

Selling on Amazon.com

We can't talk about marketing a book without talking about Amazon. Let's go into something called the Amazon seller account. If you have a book that's already on the market, for example a book that you could actually find on Amazon, something that somebody else has written, then you can re-sell that without having an Amazon seller account. But if you want to sell, for example, your own book, something that nobody else is selling, something that has a unique ISBN number that you own, then you might want to have an Amazon seller account. Here are some thoughts on selling on Amazon. Amazon is not the main place where people buy my stuff from. I think they've marketed themselves very well and the idea is that you need to be there or you're not going to sell anything, but I sell more things outside of Amazon than I do within Amazon. As an Amazon seller they take a portion of my profits. It's actually a pretty healthy portion, plus fees. I play $40/month to be able to sell an unlimited number of items. I can choose to pay less if I'm only going to sell a handful, but they'll charge me per purchase. One of the greatest things about having your book on Amazon is that you can get Amazon reviews. Those are typically more trusted than a review that you might put on your own website, simply nobody knows if you made that up or not. Another pro is that selling on Amazon seems to validate you. I remember I saw somebody tweet that they got my book from Amazon. In fact they didn't get it from Amazon, they got it from me and my distribution center, which is basically a printer on my desk, but the package they received looked professional and they were pleased to get it. Supposedly one of the pros is that they are the biggest mall in the world and they have an extensive reach. Again, go back to my first point. They might be the biggest mall in the world, but they haven't necessarily been a big sales channel for my books and products. If you choose to sell through Amazon here are a few other ideas. Complement it with other channels. Sell your book on your own website. That way you can keep all of the profits if people buy it from your website. Go into your book's page on Amazon and optimize the profile. Find out how you can add more information about you and the book. If somebody leaves a review on your book page, take those reviews and share them elsewhere. Amazon has been known to delete reviews. If there is something that you especially like I would back it up. Amazon has a solution called CreateSpace. The competitor is Lulu. This allows you to upload a PDF or a Word document and essentially have them print and ship the books for you. This might be a great option if you don't think you're going to sell many books. You still get a paperback book, but you don't have to worry about working with a printer, spending a whole lot to create an inventory. Let CreateSpace or Lulu do the print on demand for you and not worry about any inventory. The reason why I haven't done this is because I knew that I would sell more than just a handful of books and I wanted more margin per book. If you're going to put your stuff on Amazon, consider offering free eBooks. In my research I've seen a number of people say that when they give free eBooks, their sales go up dramatically. Also, understand there are number of restrictions. Amazon doesn't want you to price your book lower anywhere else. Read the fine print and understand that those restrictions are so you don't get your products pulled off of the website.

Book Trailers

Have you thought about doing a trailer for your book? I didn't know this was going to be so popular. A while back I saw a book trailer for Tim Ferriss' book. I thought it was brilliant. Tim has a great audience, in other words, a big platform. You can see on the bottom left he's had over a million views of this particular trailer. Another one that he put together has over 1.5 million views. I wanted to share these two images because they're just so cool. In this video the image of the brain superimposes over Tim's head in a really cool way. It looks like Tim spent a lot of money on his trailers. When I first saw these my thought was, "this is going to be great for somebody like Tim who has a big budget to put into something like this, but I can't do that." Actually I could do a book trailer. Here's an example of a screen shot of a book trailer for Jim Kukral. You can't tell, but in the background is a typewriter. He basically has some stock images and then on the front he has some basic lettering. I can't imagine this cost anywhere near what Tim Ferriss put into his book trailers, but it's still a book trailer. If this is interesting to you, I suggest you go to YouTube and search book trailer to see a whole bunch of different examples. Notice on the bottom left, Jim only has 126 views of the trailer. I don't think that's reflective of the budget he had or the quality of the trailer, as much as how well he's marketed this trailer. Creating a book trailer might be a good marketing play, just be careful that you don't spend a lot of money thinking this is going to be the silver bullet and then only get 126 views.

Becoming a Best Seller: Why and How

What you do you think about becoming a best seller? There are number of best seller lists, including the New York Times Best Seller List, the Wall Street Journal list, USA Today has their own list, Amazon has a list. There's a list for Indie best seller, indie being independent. There's a Christian best seller list. I've seen regional best seller lists, and even publishers have their own best seller lists. When somebody says, "I'm a best seller," they don't necessarily say which list they're on, unless they're on a list as prestigious as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today or Amazon, but you can be a best seller on any list and say that your book is a best seller. Let's talk about some ideas behind becoming a best seller. First of all, is it worth it? I think some people have the idea that if you're a best seller you're making a lot of money. That's not necessary true. You might have enough sales to get on best seller list, but it doesn't necessary mean you're getting a lot of revenue or profit from book sales. Also, revenue might be fleeting. You might get a small amount of revenue or profit from being on a best seller list, but that doesn't mean you're going to get big royalty checks in the future. While the revenue might be fleeting, the status of being a best seller could last a long time. I would suggest that you use the status as a best seller in all of your marketing. You can put this on your business card. You can put it in your email signature. You can put it on your LinkedIn profile. Let people know that your book was popular. You don't have to say when it was a best seller or what list it was on. Simply being a best-selling author is a pretty big deal. How do you become a best seller? In my research, I've found that it doesn't take much. Depending on the list that you're trying to get on, it might take only a few hundred or a few thousand sales. Now you need to have those sales within a short period of time. For example, on a particular day or in a particular week, but you don't have to have tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of books sold in order to become a best seller. What you could do is ask your audience or your platform or your network or your friends and family, to buy the book on a certain day. Have you ever received an email from a friend saying, "hey, I wrote this book, will you please buy it on the 18th of the month--everybody's going to buy it on the 18th." The reason they do that is so that they could have a whole lot of sales on a certain day or within a certain time period. Another popular thing I've seen people do to become a best seller is to say, "if you buy $20 book you'll get X-hundreds or X-thousands of dollars in gifts." I've seen authors successfully solicit their network and say, "hey, if somebody buys my book would you be willing to give them something of yours?" Authors can easily put together a package valued at hundreds and even thousands of dollars. This is a popular incentive to help people pay $20 for the book, knowing that if they do it on that day they're going to get a lot of extra value. There's no way from getting around this. You need to email your network and let them to know when you want them to buy and what you want them to buy and then you need to remind them again and again and again. Do it in such a way where each time you remind them you're providing value as opposed to begging or always asking. Maybe you'll going to announce something new or something new in the package or maybe you're going to give people a free chapter excerpt or something like that. Becoming a one-time best seller is not that hard. Simply figure out when you want people to buy, give them incentives to buy on that day, and then let them know about it and remind them. Of course, you would ask them to forward that on to their friends in their network and leverage your network so that you can get even more sales. Remember, if you become a best seller, it's not about the little bit of money that you might make from sales on that day. Use your status as a best seller in the rest of your marketing tools.

Pricing Your Book

We can't have a discussion on marketing without talking about pricing. Coming up with the right price for your book is going to be important. It could also be very challenging. As I've studied the different pricing models online and learned about what authors think about pricing their own works, I've found that it's a very complex issue. In fact, all you need to do is come up with one or maybe a few different prices, but getting to that magic number could be quite a journey. Let me share some ideas that might help you come up with the right price for you. If all else fails, just go with what a standard book might cost, 19.95 or something like that. My first question is, what is your goal? Is your goal to sell books? Is your goal to profit from book sales? Those aren't necessarily the same thing. Let me throw one more idea out there and then we'll talk about all three. Is your goal to distribute your thoughts and brand? So here's my big question. Do you want your book to get out to a lot of people, or do you want to make a lot of money from book sales? There's not a right answer for everybody, it depends on what your objectives are. I want my book sales to be an income stream for my company. I certainly want to share my brand and my thoughts, but I want to profit on that also. If you don't care about the profit, for example, if you're marketing a book to help brand and market your company or your consulting services, maybe you give away your book for free, or at least the eBook version. You have to be honest with what your goals and objectives are to come up with a pricing model that will work for you. You don't want to lose money on every transaction, but whether you want to make money on every transaction or not is an important question to answer. What kind of book is it? Is it only an eBook? Is it only a Kindle book? Is it a paperback or a hardcover? Different types of books typically have different pricing. Some of you might think about writing a fiction book. I've found that fiction books are priced considerably lower than non-fiction or self-help or technical books. What are other like books priced at? Again, go online or go to a book store, browse through the books, and find books that are like your book, whether they're a similar topic or a similar size. Can you find consistency in the pricing on those books? One of the most important ideas that any entrepreneur needs to understand is, what is the end value to your audience? In other words, if you're providing people with thousands and thousands of dollars of value, should you charge 2.99? There are a lot of information marketers online who would never dream of selling a book for $20. They sell their eBooks online for $47 or $97. What they're selling is a solution to your problem, not necessarily a work of art to be compared with a bunch of other books at the bookstore. Are you providing value to your reader? Can you help them save money or earn money? If so, maybe you should price your book accordingly? Another question is, what brand are you reinforcing with the price that you've come up with? I've seen a number of people say if you price your book too low then even you agree that it's not that good. In other words, pricing an eBook at 99 cents online might seem to make sense, but the message that you're sending with that price is, this isn't a very good book. Here's some simple thoughts on making sure that you get the right margin when you're pricing your book. Your margin is simply the price that people pay minus your expenses. This is pretty simple, right. Let me talk about some costs that you might not have thought about. There are things you might consider "sunk costs." It's not a transactional cost. In other words, if somebody buys a book from you, you don't incur new fees in these areas. These are things that you've already paid for. For example, editors, printing, consulting, your own time. This is stuff that's all paid for before somebody buys a book. You might have distributor fees. This is if you're trying to get into book stores or something like that. They're pretty expensive fees and it takes a lot out of your margin. When somebody buys any of my books I have various fees that come along with each transaction. For example, a credit card fee, or an Amazon processing fee. I also have costs to put the book in the mail. I've significantly lowered my shipping costs by getting my envelopes by Costco instead of a local office supply store. Even that though lowers my cost only by, let's say 50 or 70 cents, that adds up over thousands of sales. Having done this for a few years, I've figured out different ways that I can get my mailing fees down and keep more money from the sale as a profit. If you're offering discounts or you're getting returns, you have to factor that into your pricing. You don't want to set your pricing where you have razor-thin margins and then have a few returns make the whole venture unprofitable. Make sure you factor in other costs. For example, if you go on a book tour, spend money on advertising or publicity, or any of those things. As I mentioned earlier, if you're having a hard time with this, you're probably safe to pick a standard price like $20. However, if you don't understand what your expenses are, you might make a lot less per book than you thought.

Distributing and Selling ebooks

One thing you want to do is make it easy for you to sell books. If you have to do something every time somebody purchases a book, it could get messy, especially with eBooks. Here's some ideas on how you could distribute eBooks. First you could choose Amazon service, Smashwords, Lulu, or something like that. These are services where you can upload a Word document or a PDF and then they make that into an eBook and can also do print on demand and other things like that. They can do all the distribution for you. They'll take money out of each transaction for their own compensation, but it's a hands-off system for you. Another option for eBooks is something like 1ShoppingCart.com or Infusionsoft.com. These are two of many systems that allow you to take a payment online and then the system does the distribution electronically. You don't have to touch it at all. I've found FetchApp.com and PulleyApp.com to be very interesting. These are systems that seem like they're plug-ins to a website. They allow you to sell electronic goods on a variety of platforms, of course including your own website, but also other places. They cost a few dollars a month and they take care of the transaction and the distribution. If you're a WordPress blogger you can find plug-ins to do this such as PayPal Responder. There are a lot of ways to distribute eBooks automatically. This is something that you don't need to worry about once you have it set up. It's not going to cause you any extra time per sale once you have it set up the right way. Another really cool idea that I came across is Kindle Singles. In the link at the bottom I learned about Kindle Singles and I was intrigued. Here's what I learned. Shorter e-books, typically 5,000 to 30,000 words (5,000 is a really small book) can be accessible vehicles for short fiction and other types of work that no real lucrative counterparts in the print marketplace. In other words, books that traditional publishers are probably not going to pick up. They can also be an attractive way for writers to release more material more quickly. I kind of think of Kindle Singles as very extended or in-depth blog posts that people might pay for. Singles might be appropriately priced at 99 cents because they could be so small. If you're a good writer and you like to write, maybe you should consider putting out a series of singles as opposed to one full, comprehensive book.

Leveraging Social Media

If you read anything online right now about marketing you're going to see a lot about social marketing. I've written a book on LinkedIn. I've co-authored a book on Facebook. I do a lot of social marketing and I'll tell you right now, you can spend a lot of misguided time social marketing and not get anywhere. However, there's a lot of merit in social marketing. Let's talk about a few reasons why we would use social marketing. You would use social to attract. You're attracting new prospects with articles, posts, testimonials, things like that. It's important that this is not just you posting things. You want to leverage sharing. One of the big words in social has always been viral. When you put something out, you want other people to share it with their audiences. Let's say for example, you have 100 people in your network and 10 of those people share it with their networks of 100 people. Your reach has gotten exponentially bigger. You want to use social to increase. You want to increase your brand recognition. You're doing this because you repeatedly put out value-add information. In other words you can't just write one blog post and call it good. You can't just put one Facebook update or Tweet or LinkedIn status and think that you're good. You have to figure out what value you can give to your audience and repeatedly give that value. As you do that your brand recognition will increase. You want to use social tools to ask. You're asking people to do something. You might ask them to share a blog post or a tweet or something like that. Basically share your message and become evangelists for you. You might ask them to purchase. It's time. Purchase my book. Purchase my program. You might ask them to sign up. I'm having a webinar next Wednesday. Sign up here and tell all your friends about it. Yes, you should definitely share value-add information, but also ask people. Once you have an audience and they trust you and they like you and they know you give value-add, it's time to go to them and say, hey, I know you want more information, here's a way you can get it, do you want to buy it right now? Use social to announce. This is anything to keep you top of mind. If you fall off the grid for a few days or weeks or months then people forget about you. You always want to put something out there, but make sure that it's within the brand boundaries. In other words, you don't need to put something out there that has to do with your dog throwing up on the carpet or something completely irrelevant, but you do want to put stuff out there that keeps you top of mind with your audience. This could be news. It could be announcements about where you're going to speak or when you're going to speak. Or it could be testimonials. Let's say you don't have any news to announce but somebody wrote in and said that they read your book and they loved it and they wrote you a testimonial. That's something that you can share and it will keep you top of mind. Social tools can be great. They're not the silver bullet, but you definitely can get value out of them. Use them to attract, increase, ask, and announce.

Finding and Empowering Evangelists

Evangelists should be a significant part of your marketing strategy. You can't be everywhere. You can't go to all the networking events. You can't be online all the time. And you talking about your own product or message is not as effective as somebody else talking about you. Please go out and find people who love and/or appreciate your message and are willing to talk about you. You might have to work with them. They might not understand what it means to talk about you and they might not understand the value of them opening their mouth to talk about you. Train them. Teach them. Help them understand what to talk about. Empower them. When I talk to small business owners about growing their business and creating evangelists, I make it clear that sometimes evangelists are excited to talk about us, but they might not know they have permission to talk about us or they don't know how to talk about us. They'll miss opportunities to evangelize on our behalf. So, what does empowering evangelists mean? First of all, they need to understand what the right language is. For the first couple of years of my business, my mom would call me up and say, "Jason, I was talking to talking to somebody about JibberJobber, but I wasn't quite sure how to phrase it. How do you talk about JibberJobber?" and I wasn't sure either. It took me a few years before I knew to easily and succinctly talk about what my software did and who it was for. If I didn't know how to do that, I certainly wasn't helping the people who were ready to become evangelists. Think about some words and phrases that you can give to them that they can use when they are talking about you and your book and your offerings. Give them a reason to talk. Some of them will be incentivized by money. Others won't. I really like to find the ones that don't care about money. They're looking about sharing the message passionately just the same way that I am and they're not worried about collecting a few dollars here or a few dollars there. Sometimes the reason to talk might be that you spend some time on the phone with them or that you share certain things with them. You tell them things that other people aren't going to know about or you give them introductions. They might just want to be in your circle of trust. Help your evangelists feel like they're special. Give them a reason to like you and your message. Also, give them something to talk about. This is where having something that's newsworthy comes in handy. It's not just for you so you can talk about things and write about things, but if you tell your evangelists something new that's coming up, it gives them a reason to go back to their audiences and say, "oh, by the way, Jason, I've been telling you about him, he wrote that book, remember? Well, he has a thing coming up." If you give your evangelists something to talk about, they'll talk about it. Make sure that you nurture your relationship with them. If you go too long without nurturing your relationship then you're not going to be top of mind for them. They might like your stuff, but they might forget how much they like it. If you have a strong relationship and you're top of mind and they're thinking about you regularly, they're going to be talking about you regularly.

Mark LeBlanc: Enders and Repeaters

By now you know that I have a thing for Mark Leblanc and his "Growing Your Business" book and strategies. Mark was one of my mentors and helped me grow my own business. In his book he talks about two types of marketing strategies. One is an ender and one is a repeater. Enders are one-time things. In other words, if you have a to-do list your enders are things that you can cross out and they probably aren't going to show up on your list any more. For example, a marketing ender might be to set up your email signature. That would be first name and last name and then a URL that goes to your website. That's something that you're going to do once, but you'll get value out of it for a long time. A marketing ender might be writing a press release or setting up your LinkedIn profile, writing your Twitter bio, or writing a 30-second elevator pitch. These are all things that you're typically going to do one time. You're not going to do them daily or weekly or monthly. You'll do them one time and then you'll get value out of having done them. Of course you can revisit these enders, but it's not like you have to reschedule them regularly. A repeater on the other hand is something that you're going to do repeatedly or regularly. For example, you might send a message to your LinkedIn contacts every week or every month. An ender was to write a press release. A repeater might be that you write quarterly press releases. A repeater would include the network meetings that you do regularly. What groups do you attend? Who do you talk with? What's your role with them? One of my repeaters is to regularly reach out to the hosts or hostesses of the networking groups where I want to speak. Now I can't get on the plane and go everywhere I want to so I'll reach out and say, "hey, by the way, I've started doing webinars for networking groups, let's talk about that." This is something that I want to do monthly or at least quarterly. Understanding and knowing what your enders and repeaters are is important. Cross off the enders. Get them done. Have a great list of repeaters so that you're continually doing what you need to do. Staying in front of people and staying top of mind.

The Value of Traditional Media

In the repeaters example in the last video I talked about writing press releases. Well, I'm actually kind of on the fence about press releases. I haven't done them for a long time. The reason why is because I've gotten some really good and interesting press. I've been on TV. I've been on radios. I've been interviewed. I've been on blogs. I've been in magazines and newspapers and I'm not convinced that those things have necessarily helped my business. For example, in 2008, I was in a really cool article in U.S. News and World Report. I couldn't believe this. This was something where not only was I interviewed, but they had a photographer drive out to where I was speaking outside of San Francisco and take pictures for their print magazine. I had a full-page article with my picture in a print magazine. Really, I had arrived, hadn't I? Well, here's the interesting thing. As exciting as that was and as cool as it was to brag about it, this resulted in zero increase of book sales. I didn't get any new users on JibberJobber. I didn't get any new transactions that I could measure. It was really interesting to see that a lot of effort and excitement went into this one-page article. The magazine paid a lot of money to have this done. This was not an advertisement that I paid for and I got zero value out of it. It made me think that if I were to have paid for all that I would've not been happy with the results. So, as cool as it is to be able to talk about it or brag about it, the question for me is, does it bring results? Now in all fairness, I didn't get users, I didn't get book sales, or anything like that, but I did get a speaking engagement for about $3000 or $4000, so it was okay, but I really was surprised that there was no increase in book sales. As I was researching for this I saw a really cool comment in a blog post in that you can see at the bottom of your screen. The comment was, "and when you're finished writing your book, don't waste a lot of time on promotions." As the author of the blog post pointed out, book tours, interviews, getting the word out to the media, blogging, all that stuff, doesn't necessarily translate into sales. Think about that. Think how much time you're going to spend on book tours and interviews and media and blogging and stuff like that. Book sales for most writers still come from word of mouth. That is the evangelists, people going to their friends in their network and saying, "hey, you need to check this guy out and you need to get his book." This ends with the bottom line being writing good books that people like to read. I agree that you need to write good books, but I don't think it's the deciding factor on whether you're going to sell books or not. I think it really comes down to how many people are going to talk about and recommend your book.

Wrap-up

In this module we've talked about marketing. Marketing is not sales. Marketing is different, but it supports sales. The idea is don't write a book, order a few hundred or a few thousand and have them sitting in your closet, basement or garage. How do you get those books out there? Tap into your existing network and the contacts of your network. Be strategic about this. Create a marketing plan. Move forward on that plan. Have metrics. Create a reason that you can get in front of your audience again and help your evangelists get in front of their audiences with phrases and reasons. Marketing is not easy, but it can be fun. If you can master some of the stuff that we talked about in this module, I know it can carry over to other projects that you work on.

Conclusion and Case Studies

Introduction to Career Relationship Management (CRM)

In previous modules we've talked about the whys of having a book, the how to write your book, and how to market it and get it out there. In this module I want to talk about some people who have already done it and see what we can learn from things they've done. Let's get started.

Learning from Mark LeBlanc

My friend, business coach, and mentor is Mark LeBlanc. Mark LeBlanc wrote a book many years ago called, "Growing Your Business." I love talking about Mark LeBlanc's book. I actually love his book. It seems like every single sentence has purpose and power. His book is packed with so much wisdom. From what I've seen, his book has been critical to making his business successful. Here's what I love about his book. It is small. It's not just small, it's really small. I think I can fit it in my shirt pocket, it's that small. From Amazon I can see that it's 80 pages. That's not big at all. It's 4.5 x 7.5 inches. Very small. And I emailed him and said how many words is this, 7000 words. Remember in a previous video I was talking about some kind of benchmark or a goal. It was 20,000 words. Mark's is about one-third of that. I love Mark's example that we can get success as an author and sell a lot of books even though it's a very small book. Doesn't 7000 words seem a lot more achievable than 20,000 words?

Learning from Timothy Ferriss

Tim Ferriss is one of my very favorite authors out there. He is amazing. His blog posts are amazing. His thoughts are amazing. I like everything I see about him. I even like this picture. The first time I saw it I thought, "Why he is he holding up four fingers?" And then I remembered, everything he does is about four hours. What I've learned from Tim Ferriss is the value of being strategic. Time is extremely strategic in everything he does. Go read his blog to learn about how he does things better, faster, smarter, whatever. Anything he does he wants to optimize it and he's very strategic at that. That type of mentality has helped him become a very successful business owner. Tim has a series of 4-hour books. I'm not sure if he envisioned that when he first wrote the 4-Hour Workweek, but it's worked out really well. Tim puts a lot of time and effort into each of his books. He also does some serious marketing. Fortunate for us, he shares his marketing tips on his blog. His blog has become an amazing way for him to keep in touch with his readers. He's built a community that most people would die for. Maintaining that strong community gives him a big platform that when he comes out with another book he can put it in front of a warm, receptive audience. Tim also knows his limitations and brings in experts to help him do things that he either doesn't want to do, or knows that he should pay money to have done better. What I learned from Tim is to not just try it out and hope that you're successful, but to have a very strategic action plan and work toward that strategy.

Learning from Jason Fried

I'm definitely a fan of Jason Fried of 37 Signals. I don't use his software and one of his packages is actually a competitor to JibberJobber, but I love learning business from him. Not only do I regularly read his Ink magazine column, I love his blog posts. There's a lot to learn from this man. Right now Jason has three books out and he has what I would consider a cult following amongst graphics artists. He has a huge platform. I'm sure he's made money from his books. I'm guessing this isn't the main money maker though. His business model from his software should be where he's making most of his money, but the book money couldn't have hurt. Since he's such an interesting thought leader, putting a book out there allowed him to be more authoritative and give him expertise. Just being the founder of 37 Signals might have been enough to keep him on the stage and in front of audiences, but I'm sure that having multiple books has helped him stay relevant and all of his writing including the Ink column has surely gotten him new prospects and customers. If you already have an audience, which we might call a platform, maybe writing a book will help you stay relevant and engaged with your audience.

Learning from Seth Godin

Speaking of having a platform, Seth Godin is the master of having a platform. According to my research, Seth has 17 best sellers, but he has a lot more books than just 17. These aren't necessarily big books. I remember getting one of his books when he came to speak at an event that I helped put on and it's not that big. But it sold really, really well. Seth is a professional marketer and he's very, very good at getting his books out there. Instead of resting on one or two or three or four books, Seth has dozens of books. He actually has used various publishers. He hasn't stayed with one. A few years ago he announced he was moving away from publishers and was going to publish all of his books on his own. Seth does a lot of speaking. When he came to speak at the event that I was helping with, he flew in, did the event, and flew right out. I think he sandwiched us between two other speaking engagements that day. Seth is also really good at moving books in bulk. At the speaking event that he came to, he didn't want people to buy one book, he wanted them to buy five books and so he priced it appropriately and told people to give away books as gifts. I have a feeling that's one of the reasons why he has 17 best sellers. He's good at moving books. But the message here is this. If a book helps you, maybe multiple books will help you more.

Learning from Jesse Stay

Jesse Stay is the guy that I met after I did my first book. He had just sold a Facebook application to another company. I asked him if he would work with me on my second book, which was "I'm on Facebook, Now What." This was Jesse's first book. He'd been blogging for a while and he continues to blog to this day, but he had never had a book to his credit, so he did the first book with me, which led to speaking engagements, and also gave him credibility to do consulting and land a few jobs since this first book came out. He was very good at networking within the industry and it wasn't soon after that he got a contract to write at least one book with O'Reilly and and more books with Wiley. Jesse's done a very good job taking that very first book that we wrote together and allowing that to launch his brand. He was an expert. Like I said, he created and sold a Facebook app many years ago. But I think the book helped establish his credibility as an expert since he was now writing about it. What've the other books done for him? Definitely more speaking opportunities and the ability to network with people that he might not have been able to network with before. Many opportunities have come from that first book that we did together a few years ago.

Learning from David Meerman Scott

Here's something that I saw that David Meerman Scott do and I loved it partially because it's same thing that I did. I'm sure he was more planned and strategic about this and mine was a little bit more of a lucky mistake. The middle book you see there in blue says, "The New Rules of Marketing and PR." What a tremendous title. This title is so good. It's clearly for marketing professionals, it's clearly for PR professionals, and it's not just how to do it and be successful, but it is, "hey, the world is changing, here is the definition of all the new rules that you need to know." He had an awesome, descriptive title and he absolutely had great timing. I've never seen him in person, but I know within the industries, marketing and PR, that he's very highly regarded. From what I've heard he's an excellent speaker. I think that speaking all over the world has helped him sell more books. I know when I get on the plane and go somewhere I sell more books. I go somewhere where people have never heard of me, but once they see the emails or see me speak, they'll go pick up my book. I'm sure that selling more books has also helped him get more speaking gigs so they both kind of feed each other. What a great example of getting the right title with the right timing. I should say everything I've heard about that book is that it's awesome, so it wasn't just the title and the timing, it's a great book, but I know the title and the timing helped.

Learning from Nathan Barry

At the time of this recording, Nathan Barry has written at least the three books that you see on the bottom of your screen. He has a great blog where he's talked about being an author and the success of writing books and stuff like that. When I first came across Nathan's name I knew he was successful at selling his books. Recently though I saw a blog post that talked about the second edition of the app design handbook where he sold $36,000 in 24 hours. You can read how he did this by going to the URL that's on your screen. This is a phenomenal post. He gives a lot of information, a lot of statistics. The reason why I wanted to bring this up though is because the money is there. They say you can't make money selling books, but I bet Nathan Barry has something completely different to say. How would you like to make $36,000 in 24 hours? What a phenomenal story. Why did he do this? I'm sure timing has everything to do with it, but also the topic. He's developed and audience, or a platform, and put out the right content, the right topic, the right format, and his audience responded.

Learning from Marc-André Cournoyer

I love Marc-Andre's title. The title could have been "How to Create Your own Programming Language" and that would have been fine. It was descriptive, it was clear. If you want to create a programming language, it's obvious that that's the book for you. But what he did was he put in "freaking" and "awesome." When you write your book, it's your book. Take ownership of that and own the title. Your name and your brand and maybe your company will become associated with whatever title you choose. If you want to be overly creative, do it. Of course, I would suggest that you get feedback from people, but don't shy away from using words like "freaking" and "awesome" if it really makes sense. The cool thing about putting "freaking awesome" in the title is it kind of sets the tone for the rest of the book and he's not just saying make any old programming language and it's not going to be that good, you're going to make a freaking awesome programming language. Not only is he putting his personality out there, he's setting up expectations for whoever reads the book. I love how he owns it.

Learning from Mathias Meyer

Here's another lesson that we can get from this author. You can literally own the space. I went to Amazon to see if there were any other books on Riak and I couldn't find any. He literally has no competition. Remember, when I first wrote my LinkedIn book I hardly had any competition at all. There was one other author, but not many people had known about him and he was marketing in different circles than I was marketing in. When people needed "the expert," or they needed "the speaker," they would call me. It was awesome to be the author of a book in a space that nobody else was in yet. Within a year or two it became overcrowded, but for that first year it was really cool being "the expert" in that space. I would guess that he is "the" Riak guy. I imagine that's helping him get new contracting and consulting gigs, or at the very least enhancing his personal brand. I love how simple the title is, "Riak Handbook." It's not just a book that tells you the what, but because it's a handbook, I'm expecting a lot of how's. If the topic that you want to write about has already been written about, even if it's been written about a lot, don't let this idea scare you away. But if nobody's written about your topic, why don't you work on being the first person in the space.

Learning from Jesse Storimer

Jesse Storimer wrote some very niche books. It's not just working with UNIX, it's "Working with UNIX Processes." It's not just working with Ruby, it's "Working with Ruby Threads." He goes deeper than just a general level. Notice that all of his titles are "working with." I like all of that. But the thing that I learned from Jesse that I love the most is who should sell your books? In a blog post that he wrote at the link you'll see on your screen he said, "Getting other people to sell my book has a huge ROI." If you're interested in selling books I encourage you find evangelists, affiliates, people who can sell your book on their websites or when they speak. I have a friend in the industry who has a more updated LinkedIn book than I do and she sells a lot more copies of her book than I ever have. The reason why is because she's networked with dozens and dozens of career professionals who always push her book to their customers. Why? Partially because she offers them a very generous revenue share. If you want to make money selling books I strongly encourage you to build a network of people who can be your evangelists and sell your book to their audience and be generous with the revenue share that you offer to them.

Learning from Peter Cooper

Peter Cooper wrote "Beginning Ruby." In a very entertaining blog post he talks about what he learned from being an author. Towards the middle of the blog post he talks about the marketing effort that he wanted to do that his publishers didn't agree with. He wanted to do the new and trendy idea of offering the PDF for free with the idea that it would sell more paperbacks. His publisher didn't agree with him and he wasn't too happy about it. In his blog post he doesn't blatantly say, "you should pirate my book," but he kind of tells people that he's okay with that. As he goes on to talk about his relationship with the publisher, it's clear that he learned a lot and he's okay with having gone with them, but his parting advice is to avoid the major publishers and go with somebody who's not as big, somebody who you might have some negotiation power with. If you have some ideas they're going to at least listen to you. You might get more of a royalty from them. Thinking back on the publisher spectrum where we talked about self-publishing and vanity publishing and traditional publishing, Peter's definitely an advocate of going towards the left and having more power and control over the things we talked about like royalty, in that video. Here's the link to the blog post that I've been referring to. It's quite entertaining.

Learning from Robert Kiyosaki

I don't know what your purpose is for wanting to write a book. I'm guessing if I could poll you there would be many, many different purposes for wanting to write a book. I remember hearing a speaker once talk about Robert Kiyosaki and why he wrote "Rich Dad, Poor Dad." I don't know if this is true because I couldn't find any information online, but Robert had a game board that he was trying to market and he decided to use a book as marketing tool. That's it. From what I understand the game board was supposed to be the big money maker of his business. Fast forward many years later, Robert has a lot of books out and the last figure that I read said that his books have sold over 26 million copies. Some people write a book for vanity reasons. Some people think they're going to make money from it. But if you have a business, I would suggest that writing a book could do wonders for your own business marketing. Not only can it help you stay relevant, but it can also help keep your business in the limelight.

Learning from TJ Holowaychuk

The final author that I looked at is named TJ. I couldn't find a picture of his book or him online, but in the blog post that I read there was a very important message. He wrote a book called "Advanced JavaScript." This is an eBook. It's only 60 pages long and he only sold it for $4. It was easy for people to make a $4 decision. Wouldn't you pay $4 to have a 60-page manual on advanced JavaScript? There's no risk. It's hardly any money at all. He said it only took him three to four hours to write. I love the idea of pricing your book at a point where people don't even think about the price when they're going to make the purchasing decision. As we talked about in the marketing course, you could price it really, really high and you're going to make a lot of money per book, but maybe your objects are more in line with moving a lot of books and being able to say that you've sold thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. That can happen if you have a lower price point. Somebody I used to work with wrote an eBook and put it online for free and had over 100,000 downloads. While he didn't make any money from the book, he was able to say that he had over 100,000 downloads on his book. That was a pretty impressive marketing and branding strategy. If moving books is a big part of your strategy to help your brand or marketing, or get more consulting or speaking, consider pricing your book a lot lower than it might normally go for.

Wrap-up

In this module we've talked about people who have done what maybe you want to do. There's different reasons, different strategies, different books, different pricing. There is no set formula for success. You can create your own success formula as an author. I hope that this course has been inspirational for you. Now, being armed with strategy, with tactics, with examples, with successes, go forward and write your book. Shoot me an email, jason@jibberjobber.com. I would love to see what project you're working on and I'd love to see the book when it's done.w