I enjoy writing and I hope one day to write a book. While it’s not quite the same as creating a business, writing a book and publishing it for profit certainly have many similarities. Authors like most creative artists often struggle to make a living from their craft. An author that treats their book like a business person treats a product can leverage the same marketing techniques and tricks to spread the word.
Business author Seth Godin writes,
The return on equity and return on time for authors and for publishers is horrendous. If you’re doing it for the money, you’re going to be disappointed.
which does not paint a good picture for the struggling authors not lucky enough to be J.K. Rawling or Dan Brown. Seth continues by explaining an author should work on personal branding as much as possible in order to spread the personality and ideas of the author.
So, what’s my best advice?
Build an asset. Large numbers of influential people who read your blog or read your emails or watch your TV show or love your restaurant or or or…
Then, put your idea into a format where it will spread fast. That could be an ebook (a free one) or a pamphlet (a cheap one–the Joy of Jello sold millions and millions of copies at a dollar or less).
Then, if your idea catches on, you can sell the souvenir edition. The book. The thing people keep on their shelf or lend out or get from the library. Books are wonderful (I own too many!) but they’re not necessarily the best vessel for spreading your idea.
And the punchline, of course, is that if you do all these things, you won’t need a publisher. And that’s exactly when a publisher will want you! That’s the sort of author publishers do the best with.
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Well, first of all I admire your shot for becoming a succesful author, reading a little here I believe you can do it.
My comment however is a recommendation of a funny/sad website where I wrote all my to-do and not-to-dos while launching an online business. Part of the reason tried it is because i REALLY Wwant to get to Australia, and I hope this can fund part of my trip.
The best example for this personal branding are the numerous internet marketing gurus who all publish ebooks, set up newsletters and run their own blogs.
All these gurus invest heaviley in personal branding and at least some of them seem to be quite succesfull with this.
I have self-published successfully for over 15 years. It takes hard work but I have become a full time publisher and published others authors as well. The biggest key to becoming successful is to “have a platform” (a term used to mean you are a public speaker). That has tremendously helped with book sales. My latest work is a book serie (another good tip) and the first book is Information in a Nutshell: Writing and Publishing. It is a quick how-to book to get you started. I have friends who have successful companies (multi-million dollar range) who are self published and not multi-marketers online. It all depends on your niche and your drive. I just wanted to say it can be done!