


No matter what kind of business you have, or how small or large your business might be, having a blog for your business helps you stay in touch with your customers.
A blog will draw your prospects closer because they can learn about your business and what you sell. Blogs help build customer loyalty, and they also help you create a personal relationship with your customers.
But that’s where things get a little tricky.
Because you’re writing directly to your customers and letting them have a conversation with you but also doing so in a way that markets your business, you can’t follow the same rules as people who have personal blogs.
You need to be careful about the advice you follow on “how to blog”, because that information isn’t always applicable to business blogging. Most of it is written by people and for people with personal blogs – they have much more leniency about what they post, and how they post it.
If you’re here to do business, then you’ll have to blog a little differently.
For example, many bloggers tell heartfelt, personal stories infused with emotion, but that’s not going to work for you if you’re looking to improve your bottom line. You can’t write your opinion on controversial topics or vent in a rant on a matter that made you angry. You might end up hurting your sales if you did.
You also have to be careful about how much personality you pour into posts. Some bloggers curse like sailors or fling about sassy remarks, and that works for them because they’re not running a mid-sized business or large corporation. Imagine if the CEO of Nike began swearing avidly on his website! Would that make you want buy some running shoes? Probably not.
The point is, when you own a business blog, you can’t play by the same rules as other bloggers do. You have to be more careful about presenting your words in a way that leaves a good impression with customers and potential clients, and that helps you use your blog to market your business.
Here are some tips to help you do just that:
Never write about problematic clientsWriting about customers who skipped out on payment or who were rude to your staff with the intention of being ‘helpful’ to your readers actually sends a message to potential customers that you’re not on their side or willing to do what it takes to create satisfied customers.
Plus, would you work with a company that may bad mouth you? Or even worse, your business? Businesses don’t like negative PR, so don’t make yourself look like a drama queen.
Always sound successfulI’ve seen some business owners blog about their quarterly losses and the economic crunch they feel. That just lets potential customers know that your business isn’t doing so well and that they might be better off working with your competition.
And even if you were doing financially well, why in earth would you publish how much money you’re making? It makes you look dumb because all you’ll be asking for is more competitors. Because where there is money made, businesses will flock.
Be careful with controversial subjectsThis isn’t as easy as it sounds. Avoid sensitive topics like sex and religion, but also stay away from sharing opinions or personal stances on potentially inflammatory topics like recent laws or industry practices. The old saying stands: if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.
And if you happen to write about something controversial, make sure you have facts to back up your claims and try not to let your emotions get in the way.
Show valuesTalking about the values your business supports or upholds is a good idea. If you believe business should be ethical, transparent and environmentally conscious, then certainly post about that – but in passing, and be careful with your thoughts. Downplay hard stances or strong opinions and never speak ill of the competition.
One of the best places you can show the values your company believes in is your about page. And don’t do this in a boasting fashion, but instead do it by talking about the problems you can solve for your potential customers.
For example, if I were Southwest Airlines and had a blog, I would talk about how we believe in going the extra mile to help family members have a great experience by blogging about all the little things that make this possible, such as preferred seating for families. When you have a family, traveling isn’t easy and because Southwest doesn’t have assigned seating, a lot of families may decide to not book a flight with them, but that could change if people knew about the preferred seating for families.
Don’t write for yourselfIn business blogging, you’re always writing for your customers first and your business second. Your personal needs have to come way down on your list of priorities. Remember that your goal is to get sales, draw in new clientele and boost business by informing readers, not sharing warm fuzzies.
As you start blogging, you’ll notice that when you blog about things that help your customers you’ll get more of them. And when you blog about how cool your company is, you won’t get any new customers.
Put your blog in its’ placeMy first blog was a online marketing blog and I made the mistake of using it as a landing page. That meant visitors would land on the blog and think, “Oh, free tips on marketing, great!” I would have had them rather think, “Here’s an online marketing consultant that I can hire.”
A blog is an add-on feature, and you should treat it as such, marketing your blog and your business is just spreading yourself thin. You need one brand and not two separate brands as it will create confusion.
Remember your purposeA business blog has one main goal: to get customers and sales. Blog about your products, your services, case studies, satisfied customer stories, specials, promotions, new releases… Your blog is a marketing tool for your business, so go ahead and promote in your posts.
Don’t be boringHaving a business blog doesn’t mean you need to be stiff. It’s okay to connect with potential customers on a personal level. Just be sensible about sharing, maintain a good balance of business information and shy away from writing whole posts about your kids or your favorite sport.
Try not to give away the farmBlogs make it easy for people to pour out tons of free information, but free doesn’t make your business more money. Give away just enough information to demonstrate your knowledge and credibility to your readers, but reserve the actual techniques or how-tos for those who hire you, buy your product or sign up.
And if you decide that you want to give away some of your “secret sauce”, do so by releasing that information in a free ebook or whitepaper. And before people can download it, make them give you their name, email address, company name, and phone number. This way one of your sales people can follow up with them and convert them into a customer.
Don’t be afraid to askFeel comfortable telling people what you’d like them to do, because in many cases they won’t think of contacting you or clicking the buy button or signing up for more blog updates until you put the idea in their head. Use call-to-action in every post, if you can. Just change the wording so that it looks new and different.
Quality over quantityDon’t market your blog to peers and colleagues as these people aren’t your ideal customer. Having them as readers might help boost your RSS subscriber numbers, but that won’t help you make sales. Find where your targeted prospects hang out and invite them to your blog instead.
You can also participate in relevant forums and blogs by commenting. Every blog that you are commenting on will ask you for your website URL. So as long as you are adding value to the conversation, people will click on over to your website and hopefully start reading your blog. Or better yet, become a new customer.
ConclusionWhen blogging for business, your ultimate goal is to convert readers to buyers, so make sure that you put effort into helping achieve that conversion. Link to your sales pages within blog posts, talk about what you can do for people and play up that you’re a business with something to offer.
Remember that your blog shouldn’t be the main attraction. It’s just a gateway to help readers discover your business and get them excited about the bigger and better things you sell.



There is an art and science to getting blog posts to travel like wildfire.
This post will look at both, based on number crunching with 281 posts, 39,000+ comments, and almost 2,000,000 click-throughs via my Twitter profile and Facebook fan page in the last six months.
Here’s what I’ve found to work well…
The ArtIn this context, more than anything else, the “art” is coming up with good headlines.
I presented the above slide to a Fortune 100 company that wanted to encourage employees to blog. The problem? Their employees (mostly high-end engineers), as brilliant as they were, had no idea what to write about. My suggestion was (and always is): focus on an obsession that makes you a bit weird. Then tie it to something that interests more people.
Just invite a few friends to dinner, look at the graphic, and follow the instructions. It’s fun.
Into trapeze or German techno? Our starting headlines might be “How to Perform 5 Tricks on the Flying Trapeze” or “German Techno 101.” That’s just a starting point. Then we expand to what your wider circle of friends or co-workers might be interested in. For example:
“How German Techno Can Make You a Better Agile Programmer”
“5 Principles of Flying Trapeze for Better Hiring Decisions”
See how that works? This recipe works, and it’s a plug-and-play format for getting started, and getting traffic.
Once you’ve had a bit of practice, it’s oftentimes easier — and more scalable — to imitate what works elsewhere.
The ScienceThe “science” is borrowing headlines or testing them. Determining pass-along-value by the numbers.
How do you know if you have a good headline?
There are several simple ways. One indication: a tweet gets retweeted hundreds of times in less time than it would take to read what you linked to. People retweet without reading where the link leads?!? All the time. Plan accordingly.
My last five posts have been retweeted 931, 508, 343, 683, and 813 times, for an average of 655.6 times.
For clicks, the pay-off can be handsome. In my case, these retweets can often drive 10,000+ unique visitors to a post. Here are a few popular blog post titles, tracked using SU.PR from StumbleUpon:

Click here for large, more readable size.
How do you learn what works? Headlines are as old as writing itself.
There are many sources, but rankings and data sets (often prolific bloggers) are what you want. The simple version is: study Digg (look at “7 Days” or longer) and Seth Godin (look at the most retweeted).
Seth is a brilliant copywriter and outstanding headline craftsman. I notice one of his repeating headline patterns appeared to be “The Difference Between [A] and [B]“, which I tested successfully with “The Difference: Living Well vs. Doing Well.”
What the hell does my post title mean, exactly?
Precisely.
Never tell the whole story in the headline if you want optimal click-through. “Home Prices Drop 47%, Largest Single-Quarter Drop in 50 Years” isn’t nearly as good as “Largest Drop in Home Prices Since 1960: The Reasons, Numbers, and What You Can Do.” There’s another element in the latter that makes it superior: it’s prescriptive instead of merely descriptive. People don’t want more information about their problems; they want solutions to their problems.
Piquing curiosity can be done with questions instead of statements, and my question-based post titles are some of the best performing (such as “Why Are You Single? Perhaps It’s The Choice Effect“), unless used more than 20% of the time, at which point, it appears that readers suffer “question burnout” and click-through plummets. This is a common problem with (over)use of lists (“17 Things You Can Do For…” etc.).
Would “Why Are You Single?” have worked well by itself? I don’t think so. But what the hell is “The Choice Effect”? Once again, this is exactly the point. I want that question to bother you enough that you click on the link and, most important, read the piece.
Which of these two posts from Seth’s blog do you think did best, as measured by retweets?
How long before you run out of talking points?
How big is your red zone?
Which has a WTF?
The red zone, of course, which got 685 retweets vs. 392 retweets for talking points. WTF FTW! (Yes, I just judo chopped your brain with a palindrome)
But, is the headline the only factor contributing to retweets? Of course not. I’ve purposefully written bare bones posts on other experimental blogs of mine, but crafted headlines by the numbers, to prove (to my satisfaction, at least) that headlines rule in online word-of-mouth.
You can test it yourself: split test on Twitter. But… um, you can’t split test on Twitter, as much as it’d be cool to send version A to half of your followers and version B to the rest.
Or can you? Kind of — you can test headlines with time-zone cohorts who are unlikely to overlap. Huh? In simple terms, this means that I like to publish blog posts at around, say, 2am PST and tweet out the working title at the same time. I did this with “The Rebirth of Seth Godin and Death of Traditional Publishing: How Authors Really Make Money” to hit the US-based night owls.
I then like to tweet out a new version B at around 8am PST the following morning (not yet changing the blog post title itself, and I never change the permalink once published), when the night owls will be mostly asleep. I schedule this tweet in advance using SU.PR, as I’m also a night owl. Last, I compare results and stick with the winner.
This is how “The Rebirth of Seth Godin and Death of Traditional Publishing: How Authors Really Make Money” was switched around and became “How Authors Really Make Money: The Rebirth of Seth Godin and Death of Traditional Publishing.” You’ll notice the latter version is in the “most popular” screen shot above for the last 30 days.
It’s an imperfect process, but I’ve found the results replicable.
The exact timing of publication is less important than ensuring that most A cohorts are sleeping when you test the B version, or vice-versa. In my case, non-US/Canadian readers (Brits in particular) can throw the numbers a little, but more than 60% of my readers are from the US and disproportionately located on the east or west coast, based on Facebook Insights.
The Hail Mary SolutionLast but not least, you can always do a Hail Mary blog title. What, pray tell, is that? It’s a title that pays homage to Twitter and becomes recursive.
A good example would be “How to Create Headlines That Get Retweeted.”
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Odds and Ends:
1) Is this helpful? Please let me know in the comments what you’d like to read more of.
2) Here’s a sneak peek of a goodie from the “Becoming Superhuman” book: Athletic Greens, which I’ve been using for the last year. I have no financial interest in the company or product.




It always surprises me to hear about how few business-people implement strategies of doing what they can to make their customers feel good. I know that trying to keep customers happy is a generally unspoken rule when you’re in business, because satisfied clients are usually always the goal.
But do you actually implement best practices to get customers smiling?
Here’s good reason to work on making customers smile more: When Harris Interactive conducted a poll a few years ago, 88% of people felt that good customer service beat out hot deals and offers. That’s a nearly unanimous statistic, and I’m pretty positive that not much has changed were you to ask people the same question about how they feel today.
Plus, it just makes logical sense… smiling customers make for successful businesses.
Let’s start with a very easy tactic you can implement starting right now.
Little trick #1: Smile warmlyYou’d be surprised at how much of a difference a smile can make, whether you’re reassuring a customer he’s making a good choice or trying to defuse a sticky situation. A smile shows that you’re calm, in a good mood and willing to help do what you can.
Little trick #2: Bring smiles into your phone conversationsYou may not realize how much the tone of your voice changes when you smile, but it’s actually very noticeable – people can hear smiles even if they can’t see them. If you rarely talk on the phone, use emoticons in emails and text messages. Some people say that emoticons aren’t really professional, but one well-placed “smiley” takes the tone of the text to a whole new level.
Little trick #3: Say your customers name twiceSpeaking of making sure your message is well received, get people paying more attention to what you’re saying by using their name. We tend to focus when we hear our name, and you’ll find that customers seem to listen a little more to what’s just been said or what’s about to be said if you use this tactic. The best way to use this technique is to say a person’s name twice in any conversation. It shows you’re highly aware of the person, tuned into the conversation, and it creates better personal rapport.
Little trick #4: Touch a customer while smilingAn effective way to create more rapport is to actually touch someone briefly as you smile at them. One of the best ways to brighten moods is to give someone’s shoulder a gentle squeeze while you say something reassuring or complimentary. And yes, offer them a smile – they’ll automatically return it to you.
Little trick #5: Tell a customer he’s specialThis is so easy to do, and it costs nothing to boost someone’s morale. People love to feel accepted and liked, so telling someone he’s a special customer can go a long way towards making him feel awesome about himself – and that’s definitely going to make him feel good about you as well.
Want to add some extra punch to that last tip? Tell someone else that you think someone is special… while that person is standing right there listening. Think about how you’d feel if you hear someone you’ve hired or bought something from tell another person that you’re a great person. You can’t help but want to smile when you hear compliments like that!
Little trick #6: Treat your staff and employees wellSpeaking of good feelings, don’t forget to spread smiles amongst the people who work for you. By doing so, they’ll treat your customers the way you treat them. If you’re always smiling, happy, and glad to talk with your staff, you’ll find they reflect that treatment towards people who buy from your business. Imagine the results!
Little trick #7: Follow up with clientsMany buyers have a great experience but find that once the purchase is over or the contract ends, service stops there. Keep up contact, because it lets people know you were thinking of them – without trying to sell them on anything. Email or call the customer just to ask how it’s going and whether the person’s enjoying his or her purchase. Don’t pitch your services; just be nice.
Nothing brings a smile to someone’s face more than feeling appreciated and remembered, so send a thank-you note to customers. Avoid generic cards; pick something unique that fits the person’s personality or that relates to a conversation you’ve had. Mention you’d enjoyed working together. If they’ve just accomplished a business goal, send congratulations. A birthday? Wish them joy.
Little trick #8: Give the customer what they wantHere’s a way to turn a frown into a smile – or at least, into a satisfied customer: give the customer what he wants. This is especially useful in the case of client complaints. Offer the customer the benefit of the doubt, ask which solution is desired, and do everything you can to make it happen.
This doesn’t mean breaking the rules. It means it’s okay to break the policies and create an exception to help restore good feelings. That can definitely earn you points; the customer will tell friends about what you did… not what you wouldn’t do.
Little trick #9: Show that you are tryingAnd if you can’t give the customer what he wants? At least show you tried and that you were willing to accommodate the request. Sometimes just the fact that you cared is all it takes to help people smile again.
Little trick #10: Do the unexpectedPeople guess at what you might say, and they tend to think they know what you’ll do before you even do it. Surprise them – in a good way. Watch for opportunities to please clients out of the blue when they least expect it. When you hear of a small “wish” the client doesn’t expect to become true, you’ll know that’s the perfect moment to reply, “Actually, it’d be my pleasure to help you with that.”
Little trick #11: Give a giftAnother pleasure you can offer customers is to give them a little gift. Surprise customers with a gift card or send them a token of appreciation in the mail. It doesn’t have to be much. $15 to spend at Amazon or a free book you think they’d enjoy always brings a smile. You could also offer them a discount on their next purchase or toss in a little extra on their order, or maybe even give them a coupon code to a product or service unrelated to your business that you know they might find useful.
Little trick #12: Have good mannersAlthough this may seem obvious, it’s often overlooked. Say please, thank you and you’re welcome often. Get into the habit of being polite. A meaningful “you’re welcome” goes a long way towards cultivating positive feelings, and your customers will remember that you treated them well.
ConclusionI’m sure I’ve left some great tips to get people smiling off this list, so help me out. How do you make your customers smile? What do you do to get that happy look on their face?




What do the economics of publishing look like… really? (Photo: thinkpanama)
(Special thanks to my agent, Steve Hanselman, and my anonymous sources within the world’s biggest publishing houses)
Print is dead!
This has become a popular headline, and a great way to get quoted, as Nicholas Negroponte has shown. Iconic author Seth Godin, after 12 bestsellers, just announced that he will no longer pursue traditional publishing, and the writing seems to be on the wall: the e-book is the future, plain and simple.
But what are the real concrete numbers? How are established authors actually making money, and what should new authors do? Go straight to e-book?
In this post, I’ll look at real-world numbers to discuss some hard truths of publishing, explain economics and pay-offs, and provide a few suggestions for aspiring authors.
To start, some contrasting numbers…
- The 4-Hour Workweek is one of the top-10 most highlighted Kindle books of all time.
- The 4-Hour Workweek was the #1 business book when Kindle first shipped after November 2007, and is currently around #116 in the Kindle store.
- In my last royalty statement, December 2009, digital book sales (all formats, including Kindle) totaled…. ready?… a mere 1.6% of total units sold.
My own book has been on the bestseller lists for more than three years, and I’ve tracked most multi-month bestsellers for all of those 36+ months using Nielsen Bookscan (among other tools) which covers about 75% of all retail book sales since 2001, including Amazon but excluding discount clubs such as Sam’s Club. Titlez has also been useful for looking at detailed trending on Amazon.
This all gives me a good pool of data, and I feel like I have a good grasp of what authors are selling and… realistically earning directly from books. If you’d like to get a basic idea, just subscribe to Publishers Lunch to see what authors are getting paid as advances. Enjoy.
We’ll come back to the Kindle numbers, but first, here’s a sketch of book economics, incentives and options:
- For a hardcover book, authors typically receive a 10-15% royalty on cover price. This means that for a $20 cover price, the author will receive $2-3. If you have a $50,000 advance, a $20 cover price, and a 10% royalty, you therefore need to sell 25,000 copies (“earn out” the advance) before you receive your first dollar beyond the advance. This is the basic rule, but several quietly aggressive outfits — both Barnes and Noble’s in-house imprint (Sterling, acquired in 2003) and Amazon’s in-house print arms, AmazonEncore and AmazonCrossing — could prove to offer more attractive terms. Then there are the fascinating rogues like Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie.
- For a trade paperback book, authors typically receive around half the royalty of a hard cover. If you are making 15% on your hardcover, you might get 7.5% when it goes to paperback. Guess what? This means you now need to sell twice as many books to break even. I think going to paperback is a bad idea for almost all authors, unless you want to double your work for the same income. Do you really need the people who won’t buy a $20 book hardcover that’s already discounted to $12-14 dollars through Amazon or Barnes and Noble? I don’t think so, yet most authors follow the hardcover-to-paperback progression without question.
- Electronic books, including Kindle, do not count towards the most famous bestseller lists, such as The New York Times bestseller list. I suspect this will change within the next two years, but for now: print is what will make you famous in the mainstream.
- If you choose to self-publish but stick with print format and retail distribution, you might double your royalty earnings. This is based on conversations with friends who own their own boutique publishing houses, all of which have distribution in large chains like Barnes and Noble. It’s fun to imagine that you could print a book with a $20 cover price and pocket $15, but that isn’t how the math works out. Once you factor in retailer discounts and distributor percentages, you might end up netting 30% of cover price vs. 15%, if you’re lucky and have a print run of 20,000+ units (Can you afford the upfront cost, especially if retailers are paying net-30, net-60, or beyond?). Keep in mind you also need to manage things as a publisher, which could make your dollars-per-hour earnings less than with a traditional publisher. There are a few promising companies, like Author Solutions, trying to solve this problem for authors.
- If you choose to go digital only as an e-book, this is where profit rules and amazing numbers can be achieved. How amazing? I know one man who nets between $5,000,000 and $10,000,000 per month with a single e-book and affiliate cross-selling to his customer lists. I’m not kidding. The downside is that you need to be a world-class marketer and understand affiliate and CPA advertising better than anyone else in your niche (since there is little barrier to entry, and therefore plenty of competition). Prepare to be an uber-competent CEO or fail if you choose this option.
The Kindle Phenomenon — How Press Releases Are MisreadAmazon is incredible and I expect nothing but more innovation from them. Putting aside their coming bloodbath with Apple, though…
What of this announcement that Kindle sales have now passed hardcover sales on Amazon? I believe this to be true, but there are a few things I suggest we keep in mind:
1) Kindle books selling well does not mean that print books are selling poorly. In fact, it appears quite the opposite. From the Wall Street Journal coverage of the announcement:
Still, the hardback comparison figure doesn’t necessarily mean the end is near for paper books. Amazon said its hardback book unit sales also continued to increase.
It will be fun to see more precise Kindle sales when they are shown as a separate line item in Nielsen Bookscan, which should happen in the next year.
2) The top-five Kindle selling authors of all-time, over 500,000 copies each, are all fiction writers (including Stieg Larsson, Stephanie Meyer, and others). In the top-50 Kindle bestsellers right now, I counted just three (3!) non-fiction books. If you’re a non-fiction author, I’d think carefully before jumping the gun to all digital. Remember that comment about print being dead? What if we ask a high-level exec at one of the “Big Six” (explained later) about how print sales are declining?
Hardcover trend is mixed and dependent on hot books. If you are wondering about ebooks, commercial fiction is where you’re seeing the erosion. Paperbacks are ok. Mass markets are taking a hit.
What are “mass market” books? The NY Times describes them thus:
Mass-market books are designed to fit into the racks set near the checkout counter at supermarkets, drugstores, hospital gift shops and airport newsstands. They are priced affordably so they can be bought on impulse. There are other production differences in binding and paper quality (historically, paperbacks were printed on “pulp” and could fit in the consumer’s pocket). The format is often used for genre fiction, science fiction, romance, thrillers and mysteries.
Is it a coincidence that print impulse purchases are also the biggest sellers on Kindle? I don’t think so.
3) I believe (conjecture, yes) that the figure we are missing is Books-Per-Person. If you have a Kindle, as I do, how many books did you buy in the first week or two? How many unread books do you have on your Kindle? Unlike with print books, you don’t have to look at a stack of unread material like undone homework. Ergo, you purchase more digital books than you would ever purchase in print. If Amazon is selling 180 Kindle books for every 100 print books, I wouldn’t be surprised if 10-20 people are responsible for the former, whereas 80-100 people are responsible for the latter. This reflects that Kindle owners are buying more books per capita, not that paper purchasers are buying fewer.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There has to be some cannibalization of sales, and much of print will die eventually, but it will take a long time. Print is far from dead… and far from unprofitable. Despite the industry-encouraged myth that print has no margins, a hardcover book sold for $20, assuming no graphics or color, can often be produced for less than $2 a copy. With the proper economies of scale (unavailable to most individuals), the publishing biz can be quite a little cash cow.
Let’s cover some basics of traditional publishing next.
What “Traditional” Publishing Looks LikeTraditional publishing looks something like the following for non-fiction authors. For fiction authors, you need to write the entire manuscript first. Here are the five steps:
Step 1. Get an agent (best done through a referral from one of their authors).
Step 2. Put together a book proposal, which is like a business plan. It will contain marketing plans, your existing “platform” (who you can sell to or reach without publisher help), an executive summary of the book concept, and 1-3 sample chapters, among other things.
Step 3. Pitch to specific editors at different publishers through the agent and schedule meetings.
Step 4. Sell the book. The editor will probably have signing authority up to a certain advance amount, but higher ups will need to sign off on larger advances. If you don’t have a great platform for selling books without publisher help, don’t expect anything more than $50,000, and that’s being optimistic. The $50,000 will not be paid all at once, but in several installments, something like this: 1/4 upon signing the deal, 1/4 upon publisher acceptance of manuscript, 1/4 upon publication, and 1/4 upon paperback publication (assuming you start with hardcover).
Step 5. Write the book. Keep in mind, you’re not getting paid the advance all upfront, and writing a good book will probably take at least a year if you’re hoping to have good word-of-mouth and some longevity. I’ve been working on my new book for more than three years. I’ve spent this time because I want it to sell like mad for no fewer than five years after publication, preferably more than a decade if I update it on an annual or semi-annual basis.
For more detail and recommended books, which I used as guides, read “How to Sell a Book to the World’s Largest Publisher,” which explains exactly what I did.
Below are the “Big Six” publishers — most of the bestsellers you see come out of one of their divisions (called “imprints”). In no particular order:
Lagardere (owns Hachette)
Harper Collins
Macmillan (owns St. Martin’s)
Penguin Group
Random House (the largest, and where my book lives within the “Crown Publishing” imprint)
Simon and Schuster
All of these publishers have iBook agreements with Apple except for one… Random House. Why? Is Random House just unable to see the obvious future? Nah, I don’t think that’s true. There are plenty of smart people working at Random House, and that includes their legal department.
The paragraph that follows is all hypothetical:
What might happen if the iBooks agreements of the other Big Five all have suspiciously similar terms? If there were a federal investigation, might that lead to charges of collusion among the publishers and have terrible financial consequences for an already fragile industry? It certainly would. By distancing themselves and coming in late to the game, Random House — again, hypothetically — would be playing a very smart hand, indeed.
For those of you who are devoted to your iPads (I do like mine), you can always use the Kindle app to read Random House books on them pretty screens.
So What Should Authors Do?First off, writing books is a terrible revenue model for authors.
Precious few books sell more than 25,000 copies, so it’s unlikely you’ll make even $75,000 a year from book royalties. In rare cases, you might have a perennial bestseller, but this is less than 1% of all books sold and not a good bet to make.
There are still a few reasons you might consider writing a book and going through traditional channels:
- Speaking: Particularly in the business category, if you target your Fortune 500 audience well enough, you can stair-step your way into $20,000 per 60-minute keynote without needing a miracle. Hundreds, if not thousands, of authors earn this kind of money. The higher echelon can make $80,000 or more per speaking engagement. Needless to say, this adds up fast.
- Reputation and audience: Money is a means to something else. Not unlike wampum, income is traded for either a possession or an experience. If you use your book to build a reputation as a thought leader, and if you can establish a direct line of communication to intelligent readers (through a blog, for instance), it is possible to bypass income and get almost any experience for free or next-to-free. The middleman of currency is removed, and you also have access to things money can’t buy, whether it’s interesting people or unusual resources.
Though I have done high-level speaking and enjoy it with the right audience, I typically do fewer than a dozen engagements a year. I prefer to focus on connecting with my readers and having fun with cashless adventures.
How do you build a base of fans or supporters and build a high-traffic blog? Here are two detailed closely related case studies:
How Does a Bestseller Happen? A Case Study in Hitting #1 on the New York Times
How to Create a Global Phenomenon for Less Than $10,000
So what of self-publishing versus the more traditional route?
Reputation, at least in the mainstream and for the next few years, is difficult to build if you self-publish. In the below five-minute discussion, NY Times bestselling author Ramit Sethi and I discuss the pros and cons of self-publishing vs. getting a “real” publisher:
For established and successful authors, like Seth Godin or Jim Collins, self-publishing in print or digital is a supremely viable option. Jim Collins self-published his last print book, How the Mighty Fall, and was featured on the cover of BusinessWeek magazine to help push it up the bestseller ranks. Seth could do the same.
Why is this possible?
Because they have incredible reputations that were built, in part, on top of the traditional publishing machine. The Big Six and their close cousins are in real trouble. Some of them might adapt (which will include massive lay-offs), but most will not. In the next few short years, there will also be many interesting publishing alternatives for aspiring authors.
But, all that said, there is still real value in having the rare stamp of approval that a “traditional” publisher provides. I don’t think this will change much in the next 12 months, perhaps even 24 months.
Now, a handful of first-time, self-published authors hit the New York Times list, that’s an entirely different story…
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Recommended reading – Below are the three books I’ve suggested to a dozen or so aspiring-author friends. Almost half of them later hit the New York Times bestseller list. Reading these doesn’t guarantee that outcome, of course, but it will help:
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (to help you craft the right message and themes)
Bird by Bird (to help you write the damn thing and not shoot yourself)
Author 101: Bestselling Book Publicity (to help you reach and excite big media)
Afterword: Book Format and Multimedia Books, etc.
In the comments below, I was asked the following question:
“Tim, I have a question… Before I decided to self-publish, I got a couple decent offers from traditional publishers, but they all involved 10+ months of lag time between when everything is ready to actually print and when they would actually print. I’m not nearly patient enough for that much delay. Is the world of “real published authors” really limited to people who are comfortable waiting around a year for their book to manifest?”
My answer addresses a few other common questions I get:
Hi Jeff,
With the big boys, yep. That’s the lag time in production. I actually kind of like it. Allow me to explain:
It forces you to think about your material and attempt to make it perennial. Which advice will be obsolete in 12 months? Delete. Which advice would be obsolete in 24 months? That means it will only be good about 12 months after pub date. Delete.
I find that it helps refine your thinking, just as having the content in a fixed form (print) forces you to consider your writing and editing more seriously than if you could change it willy-nilly like a blog post. There are certainly benefits to the multimedia books on the horizon, but I wouldn’t call them “books”, and I think the bells and whistles of video, hyperlinks, etc. will be used to mask sloppy thinking as often, if not more often, than they will be used to create a more compelling argument or presentation. The wordsmithing and precision of the language will suffer with the crutches of embeddable video, etc. Will they make perfect sense for some books? Absolutely. Will they distract and detract from the flow of the prose, story, or argument in most cases? Absolutely.
To me, “timely” books are a bad bet for writers. If the content delivers value based on timing near recent events, other media have it beat. I think long-form books should have a longer shelf life, and therefore require harder thinking throughout the process to ensure the content has value 1 year, 5 years, even 10 years down the line.
Hope that helps!
