Welcome to the fifth and final instalment of our five-part article series on the Principles of Successful Business Publishing. In the previous article, I introduced you to the principle of Distribution and why a successful business book is dependent on utilising multiple distribution channels to ensure the widest possible reach.
This final principle is one that many authors fail to implement effectively, which is the Integration of their book into all aspects of their business ecosystem to get the most benefit from the remarkable tool they have created.
This oversight usually stems from a lack of perspective of what a business book actually is. Quite often, people view the act of writing and publishing a book as a stand-alone project and therefore see the resulting book as just another product to sell. This is very short-sighted and can cause you to inadvertently hamstring the success of your book by limiting it to a single role. The actuality is that your book is a valuable business asset that can be integrated into every facet of your business well beyond just sales of the book itself. Let’s look at some of the roles your book can play in your wider business.
Sales
Selling copies of your book – either directly to your readers or via a retail channel such as Amazon – is an important contributing factor to your book’s success. And this will of course remain its primary focus. But even within the role of a sales tool, your book can do more than just be a stand-alone product.
It can be used as a very powerful lead magnet to pull high-quality potential leads into your network. There is even a strong argument for giving copies of your book away for free to select individuals to boost this very point.
Your book can also form part of an upsell strategy to help convert warm prospects into paying customers, or as a gift incentive to reward the purchase of a high-ticket product or service.
Profile
I’ve talked at length in numerous other articles about how much impact a book can have on your profile as an expert in your industry. But just like buying a treadmill or a gym membership, it only works if you work it. You need to integrate your book into the overall messaging of your public-facing profiles for it to start having the positive effect of raising your profile.
This doesn’t need to be blatantly ‘salesy’; in fact, it works better when it isn’t so obvious. It can be as simple as adding a link to the book in your email signatures, social media bios, and the about you page on your website. Get professional and engaging photographs taken of you with your book to use in place of boring headshots and avatar photos to sublimely indicate that you are also a published author.
And don’t forget to work it into your standard networking introduction. The simple change of adding ‘author of…’ when introducing yourself can have a subtle yet dramatic effect on either a room of people or an individual. It took me a little while to get used to doing this and felt a bit awkward at first, but I now always introduce myself as “Sam Pearce, author and publishing consultant”. The addition of that one word changes people’s perception of you without you needing to be overt about the fact that you have written a book.
PR
A natural progression of using your book to boost your overall profile is to start using it as a PR tool; as leverage to get media opportunities such as interviews, guest appearances, and speaking engagements. A bonus of this is that your book can work both ways in these situations in that it can help you get the opportunity in the first place and then give you a platform in which to promote (or even sell) the book back to the audience of that opportunity. Twice the bang for your buck as they say.
Content
As part of the process of writing your book, you have invariably collected all your best material into one place. It would be a waste to only use it for that one purpose. Repurposing the content from your book for other uses such as blog posts, articles, webinars, and other marketing material not only saves you time but reinforces your branding and messaging.
Also, having multiple examples of the same content in several different places and formats increases the chances of the right people finding it and taking action to get in contact with you. Which feeds back into your sales funnel.
Marketing
Let’s not forget that your book is prime content for marketing campaigns across both social media and email subscription lists. Not only to promote the book itself and boost copy sales but as non-sales orientated content as well. For example: sharing updates on your book’s launch or success, sharing reviews or awards that your book has garnered, sharing quotes or short passages from your book to build interest in its content, or using excerpts from it to answer common questions posed in group forums or that you get commonly asked.
The marketing possibilities are only limited by your imagination if you appreciate how versatile a book can be once it is put to work within your business in a strategic and integrated way.
The best thing is that unless you are writing about very fast-paced topics such as law or technology, the shelf life of your book will ensure that it can continue to be of benefit to you for years – far longer than any other form of marketing asset.
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