Reasons to Write a Book

I didn’t write the book but Shep wrote the books and we always say that a book is really an expensive business card.

Yep.

So we don’t write books to make money but you write it for a lot of other reasons.

Let’s talk about the other reasons. Right. So if you’re not doing it to make money, I mean, one is there’s obviously the intellectual, curiosity, the codification.

Credibility.

Credibility…yeah. So what’s the benefit? Cuz Shep’s a busy guy. Got things to do. What’s the outcome? what the benefits?

The benefits of having a book. Well, it’s really when people want to hire you to speak, or to do training, or whatever you do. If you have a book, that really lends a lot of credibility. They like that. It gives them something they can touch and feel. And then they can also, you know, get it and give it to their people. They like that.

Yep. And it’s a differentiator because if they’re looking at Shep they might be looking at four others. And in the customer experience, if he’s the only one that wrote a book, tiebreaker he won. Right. So The trick is from a timing standpoint when you’re writing a book, it’s all encompassing. It takes a lot of energy and effort. And most people, most of the time think, “Okay. Glad I got that over with. Now, let’s go into marketing and whatever.” The piece to think about in terms of marketing the book is the content that is derived from the book in other formats like video based training, like assessment tools, like train-the-trainer, like whatever that can be pulled by that. Pulled from that same content. That’s how you get the most juice out of the lemon. And the time to think about that is not four months after the book when you shift gears and say, “Now I’m in the marketing mode.” because then you look back and go, “Oh geez! I wish I would have asked these couple of questions in here I would have done a case study on a manager, or a leader, or my industry, or whatever the case may be.”