There are a lot of reasons to write a book in business. Many entrepreneurs use it as a way to re-examine their careers or create a historical record, to explain and educate their audience about their product or service, even to advance their careers by establishing themselves as an expert in their field. Whatever the reason for doing it, writing a book (a good book) is often hugely beneficial to you as an individual and to your business.
Before looking at why writing a book can help your business, it’s important to note that any book you write should tick these five crucial areas. Your book needs to have:
- A striking cover design as people do judge books by their cover
- A catchy title that will appeal to your target market
- High-quality print to represent the quality of your business
- High-quality content that offers great value to your potential clients
- A solid marketing strategy to make a memorable impact
Once your book has all of these things, you can be sure that you’re giving yourself the best chance of success. Whether you’re a self-publisher or entrepreneur trying to self-market, writing a book will be great for you as an individual and for your business. Here are 10 reasons how.
Why Writing a Book is Great for Business
1) Sets you up as the expert in your field
Writing a good book is one of the best ways to gain authority and credibility to set you up as the expert in your field. Not only does it show that you’re committed and dedicated to following things through, but it also shows that you know what you’re talking about and you want to share this knowledge which starts to build customer confidence and trust in you and your brand. As writing a book is still not the norm, you will become known as a smarter and self-assured individual and this credibility will transfer to your business.
2) Makes you stand out amongst your competitors
Want to be at the top of the pile when it comes to new potential customers choosing you over your competitors? Then writing and publishing a book is one of the best ways to get there. Not only does a book raise your credibility and establish you as the expert, but it is also one of the best ways to get attention as it is incredibly under-utilised by entrepreneurs at the moment.
If you’ve watched the news and they are discussing a particular topic, who do they get to come on to comment? An expert in the field. Experts write books and books get you visibility, so next time you think you know more than the person getting a lot of attention, write a book and show people why you deserve to stand out.
Read: Book Sales Rise as We Rekindle Our Love Affair with Print
3) Tells your story in a unique way
Writing a book is your way of being able to engage more with your potential clients and tell your story your way. You have more time to explain why you do what you do, what drives you, and what is your purpose. Add to this clearly stated and useful ideas and your readers will be drawn in, interested, and engaged with the mix of personal and valuable content.
When you have a unique story that adds value to your readers, this is a surprisingly strong foundation in which you can start to build trust and develop a relationship with your new potential clients. At the end of the day, people buy from people, so your book gives you the chance to be more personal and sell yourself as well as what you do.
4) You can use it as a lead generator
If you have a particular call-to-action that you want new potential customers to take, such as see our website, sign up to our newsletter or book on to our training course or workshop, you can use your book to attract people there. If your book teaches something for which there is a high ROI for the reader, they are then more likely to pay a lot more for an advanced version of that same material to learn more. As well as providing people with value, this is also establishing a loyal customer base to all of the products and services that you offer.
As well as using it to sell a product or service, you can also use your book to help people find you. When people go searching online to make a decision about buying a product or service, you can bet that at some point in their search, they will find themselves on Amazon. Amazon is actually the third top-ranked internet search engine for general information and No. 1 when searching for products and services, so when people go looking for the expert that literally wrote the book on the topic that they are looking for, finding your book will lead them to your website.
5) You can use it to up-sell
You can use your book to up-sell by adding it to an existing product or service. For example, you could offer this book to potential customers when confirming a job at a discounted price or as an addition that would enhance the service. For you, this means that you can increase the price of that product or service, and for your customer, this adds even more value to that product or service so everybody wins.
If you are a trainer, coach or consultant, this marketing method can also be used after you have provided your service. After a training course, presentation or workshop, you can use your book to up-sell to the customers that attended; they should be much more likely to purchase this after service sale as they have already gained valuable knowledge from your session and are starting to build trust in your brand.
6) Provides you with content
Writing a book that contains clearly stated and useful ideas can be hugely beneficial in other areas of your business, especially to your online marketing material. Most people have a scattergun approach to social media, but using your content you can now bring structure, direction and coherence to your approach. You can also use it to create short blog posts to really emphasise your key messages. You can use them to generate discussions on LinkedIn groups and social boards.
The benefit of this is that you’re giving people something of interest to think about and discuss, something of value that they can take away, something that is yours and engages people to come back to you for more advice or information. Your social media and website content is another tool that you can use to reinforce your stance as the expert in your field and give yourself as much exposure as possible.
7) Gives you a focus
Like we said at the beginning of the article, many entrepreneurs write a book to re-assess their careers which can be hugely beneficial to the business. Spending the time getting all the information on paper can really make things clear in your mind like how your business is performing if it is still adding value to your clients, and whether you need to re-brand to accommodate how your business has developed or update your missions and goals to keep the business moving forward.
Reflecting on your performance so far can only improve your business operation and by writing a book that lays out all of your key models and principles that you run on, this can only help you, your staff and perhaps, more importantly, potential clients, understand what you’re about and how you can be of value.
8) Makes you smarter
When writing your book, you will need to do some research to develop your ideas which can only lead to you learning more about your own field. When you think about it, it’s obvious: the more you think and write about something the better you will be at it and more importantly, the better you will get at explaining it to others. This can only help grow and establish you further as an expert, plus it will make you a better entrepreneur.
Expanding on your current thinking and service to produce a book will simply help you expand your knowledge base and, therefore, your business should improve for it.
9) Attracts attention
There is no better marketing than word of mouth and you can’t get much more social than books. People talk about books, they share books, they meet up in groups to discuss books – what better way can you think of to get people talking about you? Anything that gets people talking about you and your ideas is good for business and what’s even better is that they will be talking about what you want them to in your own words.
Imagine someone who has read your book talking to someone else who needs your product or service. If your book is good, they will tell them about the things they learned from your book in your words and how you solved their problem. In a lot of cases, these new people may even end up reading your book as well or reaching out to you directly just because of this one conversation. Recommendations are the best referrals, so put your story into people’s mouths and they will do the marketing for you.
10) Creates opportunities
Have you ever thought about becoming a professional speaker? Have you wanted to branch out into consulting or launch a coaching business? Whatever your desires for self-growth or expanding your business, you can use your book as a platform to do just that.
A book is a multi-purpose marketing tool that creates attention and generates interest. You may find that more doors are open to you and opportunities just come your way after you’ve written a book, even if you just wanted it initially as an additional revenue stream, but you can use it to create your own opportunities too. If your book is really good, it will whet people’s appetite for more in-depth knowledge or consulting from you, so think about what you want it to achieve and you can make it happen.
Related Read: Top 10 Tips: Save Money and Time When Placing Print
For many entrepreneurs, a book is the best multi-purpose marketing they can have; it is their modern business card, something they can hand out at events and networking functions to make them stand out and have an impact. So what are you waiting for? Writing a good book should broadcast your best-curated thoughts to show your potential customers your expertise and attract them to you. With all of these invaluable benefits that a book will offer you and your business, it is definitely worth the time and effort to do it, the hardest part is just getting started.
Self-publishing a book can become easier with the right help…
I think a printed book is much more credible than just an e-book version. There are lots of people just pushing e-books out because the quality isn’t great and a physical book is simply just not “worth” the print costs to them, but in reality, a printed version, an e-book version and even a pdf download all make a great combination for lots of different uses in different situations. If you need help getting your book into print and it’s much cheaper than you might think then give us a call.
Not only can we print your book but we have contacts that we work with that can help you write, develop, design, edit or layout your masterpiece.
