Your book is not your business!

Transcript

Hi there, it’s Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and here’s the idea I’d like to share with you today: your book is not your business. What do I mean by this? In my work over the last 20 years with hundreds of authors, speakers, and academics, I’ve observed patterns. One of the patterns I see is that when you’re in book mode—whether that’s finishing up the writing, getting ready to release it, and then the whole marketing phase—authors, thought leaders, and such will make endless investments into the success of the book. Digital marketing, PR, designers for the cover, parties—the list is endless. If the line item on the P&L is for the book, the answer is typically yes.

But then I take a look and ask, ‘What are you investing in for the business? What are your marketing efforts? What are you doing to elevate the brand? What are you doing on a product development standpoint? What are you doing to help better position yourself?’ Make sure that you have what you need on the business side of the house. Maybe it’s a technology upgrade, maybe it’s making sure you have some systems and resources. All too often, I get answers like, ‘Well, there aren’t resources for that,’ or ‘I haven’t thought of that,’ or ‘We haven’t spent the time on that.’

So what I would ask you to think about is when making investments, don’t confuse your business with the book or your book with the business. They’re separate. They’re definitely connected but they’re separate things. And how you allocate resources to them should be against a different set of metrics, not the same set of metrics. Love to hear what you think.