In these times when anyone can publish and distribute a book quite easily, would it be an asset for your business? A guide – whether to gift-buying, cooking with cheese or entertainment ideas for kids – can help establish trust, credibility and reputation with your customers, and who doesn’t want these?
It is cheap and easy to make both e books and physical books these days and a grand way of building customer relationships through saying ‘ this is what I know and think’. In short, it’s your business card with bells on!
And it doesn’t have to mean a nasty looking e-book on Kindle written by a deluded get-rich-quick-prospector…You may not even need to publish on Amazon, creating instead a focused and incisive white paper maybe, on pdf, which goes to a small niche group of readers who will like its relevance and usefulness.
So where to start?
With your customers… I’m sure you know. What is pressing for them currently? Or an evergreen problem? Is there something they could master, a problem they could solve that would quickly give them competitive edge? Immerse yourself imaginatively in their world, through online forums, conference programs and reading specialist newsletters. Investigate through googling ‘forums: + your subject matter’, Eventbrite and Meet Ups and Inside.com.
Please don’t overlook how much some of us love to give advice and steers. It may be worth a pick-your-brains lunch with your favorite customer , to get down to the real nitty gritty of their concerns.
Once you’ve totally immersed yourself in your customer’s world, then ideas should bubble. One of the quickest ways to organize book content is just to prioritize most pressing questions and then set about answering them. You may want to run your content through a simple analysis of to what extent your book will inform, educate and entertain your readers. And it’s always worth asking: what are the reasons someone would read this? plus: what emotions does this book help with?
Any sort of writing can be a creative and fulfilling exercise – even the most technical – if you consider what other media you could use to support your messages. So how would this book work as a series of quizzes, a video series, a podcast or presentation maybe? Before you know it, you may realize you have an embryonic Pokemon on your hands… a theme that may be able to reinvent itself regularly in different formats.
Self – publishing may be a set of skills with which you can widen your reach of services in your offer. If you support big professional service businesses who use great client service to standout, then imaginative service extras like e-books can only help.
Three of us who are experienced self-publishers are running two workshops this autumn in Carmarthen and Cardiff, details here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/self-publish-with-confidence-tickets-36639060416
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/self-publish-with-confidence-tickets-36638814681?aff=erelpanelorg
And looking forward to hearing the tinkling of your bells on business card as your e book comes into the world…
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