Leveraging Your Thought Leadership
An excellent book for first-time Kindle authors, covering the basics of getting your book on Amazon.com.
This is very much a step-by-step how-to book on how to get your book published. It doesn’t say much about marketing and promotion, but it’s extremely useful for getting your book published in the first place.
This short book describes a detailed, step-by-step process to protect your intellectual property from copyright infringements.
Although it’s annoying and upsetting to have your work copied and used without permission, most authors don’t worry about this if it doesn’t affect them too much. But sometimes it can harm you – for example, if your paid material is widely available elsewhere free or for a lower price, thus damaging your earnings. In that case, this book might be just what you need.
It covers a number of different approaches, including: registering your copyright for important works, contacting Google to get the infringing Web sites removed, and event contacting the infringers directly.
Expert Gold Radio brings you monthly ideas, information, interviews and insights into the world of Internet marketing and e-learning.
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I share a simple but powerful goal-setting process, which I use myself every year, and something I have shared with clients, colleagues and friends. It doesn’t replace any of the other goal-setting processes you might be using, but it’s a useful framework to take stock of where you are, and identify where you’d like to be in 2013.
Rachel Staggs, from SRS Coaching and Consulting, is a business consultant for financial advisers, and helps clients with one area they often need help with: marketing. In this interview, we talk about online marketing and offline marketing for experts and business owners, and how to position yourself as an authority.
Find out more about Rachel Staggs here.
The world of marketing has changed in nine ways, and you need to adapt to stay in touch with these things: you, reputation, tribes, value, what they need, niches, experiences, frames and connection. In this coaching segment – based on the ideas in my book “Fast, Flat and Free” – I ask you 27 questions to help you create your own Internet marketing plan for next year.
Expert Gold Radio brings you monthly ideas, information, interviews and insights into the world of Internet marketing and e-learning.
Listen to the episode here:
The Positioning Matrix is an elegant tool for creating a flexible way of positioning yourself in many situations – at a networking event, on social media platforms, in writing sales copy, on your Web site, and more.
Find out more about Matt Church here.
You can use the Positioning Matrix for many things, including a script for a short welcome video to use on the home page of your Web site. In this extract from the audio book version of “Fast, Flat and Free”, I explain how to do that.
Get the book “Fast, Flat and Free” here.
This is the best book I’ve ever read about personal branding. Ginsberg himself uses a bold gimmick to stand out from the crowd (if you don’t know: He always wears a name tag), but this book has ideas for everybody, even if (like me) that sort of extroverted stunt isn’t your style. This book isn’t about your gimmick, it’s about finding your uniqueness and then making it shine – in the way that works best for you.
If your social media strategy is floundering, and you’re not getting a return on the time, money and effort you invested in it, don’t try harder and put more effort into it. Instead, revamp it altogether.
This is a comprehensive book about writing and publishing your own book.
Obviously, there are many books on this subject, but I particularly like this one because Sumsion goes into the publishing process – especially print publishing – in depth.
She starts by grouping authors into three categories: best-seller hopefuls, make-a-buck authors, and writers for posterity (Most experts and thought leaders fall into the middle category, although they probably won’t like the term “make a buck”!) Throughout the book, she breaks down her advice into specific points for each of these categories, which is very useful for readers.
The book is in three parts: writing, publishing and publicity. The first section is the shortest, but that doesn’t matter because there are plenty of other resources about how to write well.
The other two sections are longer, and very valuable because they do offer advice and insights you won’t easily find elsewhere. For example, in the publishing section, Sumsion talks about how to find an agent, how to work with distributors, and how to avoid publishing scams. Similarly, the publicity section is not just about promoting the book yourself (although that is covered in detail); it’s also about working with a publicist.
All in all, this is an excellent book if you’re interested in getting published.
If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty details of formatting your book for the Kindle, this is the book for you. It describes in detail exactly how to format your HTML, CSS and other codes to get your book looking exactly the way you want for the Kindle.
This book is not for everybody! If you’re a typical author, you shouldn’t care about all the finer details of Kindle layout and formatting. Just write your book using fairly simple formatting, and it will probably be good enough for the Kindle. But if you really want to have finer control over the formatting, this book could be useful. But be warned – it’s quite technical!
I recently finished reading a fascinating little book, “How They Did It: 25 bloggers, authors and writers share all their secrets about earning a living and how you can do it too.”, by Diana Bocco. Bocco has asked 25 full-time writers to share their experiences, methods, work styles, and – more interestingly – income.
What I found fascinating – and I must admit, disappointing – was to see how little money most of these people are making from full-time writing. A couple of them said they were making a six-figure income, but most were well short of that amount. I calculated the average, and it was about $32,000 (the median, which is the “middle” number, was also about the same).
These numbers seem depressingly low! Remember, these are people who claim to be full-time writers, authors and bloggers. And this is just their income, so it will be much less after expenses and taxes.
Of course, I’m sure they are doing something they are passionate about – and I really do respect that, and I’m not criticising these people in any way. But personally I wouldn’t be happy with that, especially as a long-term prospect.
[pullquote]The Kindle and iPad open up huge opportunities to get your name in digital print, but that’s not the same thing as earning good money from it.[/pullquote]
I think this is one of the biggest traps for anybody who wants to be a writer or author. It’s true that the Kindle and iPad open up huge opportunities to get your name in digital print, but that’s not the same thing as earning money - good money – from it.
One of my favourite writing experts, Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn, reported recently that she’s making much less than she expected after a year as a full-time author/entrepreneur. To quote Joanna: “It’s much easier to have a day job … This may be the dirty little secret of being an author and an online entrepreneur!“
Yes – if you’re already a speaker, trainer, coach, consultant or other thought leader.
By all means, write and publish books and e-books – they help to establish your credibility and authority. But instead of aiming to make a full-time – or even part-time – income selling them to strangers on the Internet, use them more strategically in these two important ways:
Neither of these is a new idea. But I do want to remind you of them again, because it’s easy to be distracted by the ease of self-publishing and the popularity of e-readers.
By the way, this is exactly how Joanna (Penn) is running her business. Although she’s now a well-established and successful author, only half her income comes from her book sales. The remaining 50% is split between speaking and training.
There’s nothing wrong with having a goal to become a best-selling author, and perhaps turn that into a full-time income. But that’s not the easiest way to start out – especially if you’re already delivering your thought leadership in other ways.
This is an interesting book about how to raise money for publishing a book. It’s a quick read, and like in his other books, Kukral has a no-nonsense writing style that gets to the details immediately.
This is a book about crowdfunding, but I think it’s much more than that. It’s also full of many other marketing and entrepreneurial ideas that you can use beyond just publishing and funding. For example, Kukral explains that he asks for donations at different amounts, and offers certain rewards in return, depending on the size of the donation. Just seeing the list of amounts and rewards is valuable in itself, as an exercise in understanding pricing, value and marketing.
So I would recommend this book to anybody who’s launching a new product, whether or not it’s a book.
Expert Gold Radio brings you monthly ideas, information, interviews and insights into the world of Internet marketing and e-learning.
Listen to the episode here:
Dan Poynter is a world-recognised expert on non-fiction publishing. In this interview, he talks about recent changes to the publishing world, e-books vs printed books, the power of being a published author, and more.
Find out more about Dan Poynter here.
Chris and I used a number of different online collaboration tools in writing our book. In this conversation, we talk about them, including: outsourcing for transcribing and ghostwriting, working on a shared manuscript, incorporating comments from reviewers, and more.
Everybody who wants to use a book to leverage their thought leadership should know about Dr. Liz Alexander. She’s an expert in helping experts turn that expertise into books. It’s not just about books, either. Liz understands what it means to “publish”, so she can help you with e-books, reports, “manifestos”, articles, and other published forms that go beyond the typical full-length book.
She recently reviewed my book Fast, Flat and Free, from her unique angle of “thought readership”. You can read the review here: Why Savvy Authors Never Fear “Giving Away the Store”.
She offers a wealth of material (not all written material, either) from her Web site, Facebook page and blogs.
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