When your book becomes your business card
Business or Pleasure Self-Publishing: Becoming an author can be a useful marketing tool
By Rhymer Rigby
Financial Times (UK)
Dee Blick, founder of the Marketing Gum, had long had an urge to write a book. Earlier this year she achieved that goal with the publication of Powerful Marketing on a Shoestring Budget for Small Businesses.
“There seemed to be a gap in the market,” she says. “All the marketing books seemed very complex and aimed at larger organisations. I’m very glad I did it – the doors it has opened for me have been amazing. It’s been in Amazon’s top 50 business books and had some great reviews. My book is the best business card I’ve got.”
Ms Blick says that since publication, her marketing company’s business has boomed. “I’m having to turn down work and my husband has taken a year’s sabbatical to support me.”
Peter Hutton, founder of the consultancy Brand Energy Research, agrees that a book helps you get noticed. “I had worked as director at Mori [the polling group] – and when I set up my own in 2009, I realized that I’d spent 29 years building the Mori brand but none building my brand.”
He says he wrote the book What Are Your Staff Trying to Tell You? for this reason and because it as an area he wanted to explore. “In some ways, it was almost therapeutic, it helped clarify my thinking on the area of employee surveys. But it also gives you a bit more credibility. Most people don’t buy the books, but it’s a way of waving a flag and saying: ‘I’m here.’”
Both Ms Blick and Mr Hutton self-published their books, the former with Authorhouse.com and the latter with Lulu.com. Self-publishing – sometimes called vanity publishing – used to have a rather embarrassing reputation. The stereotype was of the unpublishable novelist who pays a small fortune to a local printer and winds up with 1,000 books sitting in their garage that are slowly distributed to family and friends who never read them. However, Daniel Cooke, Authorhouse’s business development director, says the internet and on-demand printing has changed all this.
Self-publishing books now “look like any other book that’s been published”. Packages (such as Authorhouse’s which start at £796), usually include design and marketing advice. The books have ISBN numbers and many self-publishing companies will ensure the book is available via websites such as Amazon and even in some physical book stores. Moreover, as they are printed on demand, you don’t end up with a garage full of books.
One crucial difference, however, is that those who self-publish retain ownership of all the rights, which can be useful if the book is an extension of your business.
Of course, self-publishers do print many works of fiction that would not otherwise see the light of day. But Mr Cooke says it is rather different with business writers as it is not borne out of a passionate belief in one’s artistic worth.
“It’s usually as much about the business as the book,” he says. “You can almost look at it as a way of entrepreneurs investing in marketing and branding – it adds a level of depth to the proposition, boosts your profile and can work very well.”
There are other reasons to go down the self-publishing route. Stephen Sutherland, author of Liquid Millionaire, says that self-publishing his book on investing gave him control of the time scale, which was very important as he runs an investment business.
“It’s quite hard to make money selling books,” he says. “The real value is driving people towards the business.”
However, there are downsides to self-publishing a book as a marketing tool. Bypassing the quality control of a traditional publishing house carries a higher risk of embarrassing yourself with spelling errors and the like.
In addition, although self-publishing is not as expensive as it once was, it is still a significant investment of money. But perhaps more important than the financial investment is the investment of time. Writing a book can be an incredibly long process, - taking up valuable time that could be spent building up your business.