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While many people love the idea of writing their own book, just the thought of spending hours and hours and hours in front of a computer is quite often too much to bear.
But when you see that a business person has published their own book, you immediately regard them as an authority in their industry.
Wouldn’t you like the same?
Over the past few months, we’ve been sharing some pretty amazing chapters from David Jenyns’ book Authority Content. If you’ve been keeping up, then you would have learnt so much already about how to create plenty of content to establish yourself in your industry.
You may have asked yourself – what’s next? What more can I possibly do to gain the respect and growing customer base that I deserve?
The answer is simple: Write a book that shows your knowledge and passion for your area of expertise, so that you can become a recognised name.
But don’t just take our word for it… we are sharing another chapter from David’s book, which may just give you that push you need to get that book you’ve been dreaming about publishing out into the marketplace.
CHAPTER 16: WRITE YOUR OWN BOOK
Take a moment and go to the Amazon website, search the names of any well-known, successful business people you can think of and see if you can find one who HASN’T, at some point in their career, written a book or had a book written about them.
You’ll struggle.
Virtually every businessperson of note has either become successful by writing a book or has capitalised on their success by writing a book. Why? Because it’s a universally recognised way of identifying someone as an expert in a particular field.
It’s even entered the English language as an expression. When we say that a person “wrote the book” on a particular subject, we’re basically saying that this person knows more than just about anybody else about this topic.
Writing and publishing a book is the ultimate symbol of authority and can propel your expert position faster and with greater longevity than just about any marketing strategy. Even before you’ve read someone’s book, the fact that it exists often elevates your view of that person.
There are lots of reasons this effect exists, but I suspect a major factor is that people imagine – and quite rightly – that writing a book takes a lot of hard work and commitment. People imagine sitting at their laptop in front of a blank WORD document and wondering how they’re going to put 30,000-80,000 words into some sort of logical structure someone else would want to read.
If the challenge of actually producing a book is the only thing stopping you, then think for a minute about how far you’ve come in terms of producing the content for a workshop and turning it into hours of video and thousands and thousands of words of transcripts and articles. How difficult would it be to take a transcript of your entire workshop and turn it into a book?
Okay, it’s still pretty challenging and there’s a hefty amount of work involved, but having completed your workshop, you’re in a much better position than if you were going to write a book from scratch.
If for instance, you were to hire a ghost-writer to put your book together, you would normally have to spend hours and hours being interviewed to get all the information out of your head and into a format that the writer can work with. You’d also need to spend many more hours working out a theme and structure, so everything comes together in a logical order.
By putting together the workshop, you’ve already done this work. Any ghost-writer worth her salt should be able to take a complete transcript of your workshop and produce a book that delivers your knowledge in your voice.
Of course, given the level of work required to write the book, there is a greater amount of expense involved than, for example, getting a writer to produce a few guest posts. But the end result, in terms of the credibility that this book will add to you and your brand, makes this well worth your consideration.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering if it’s really feasible to turn a workshop transcript into a book…
You’re holding the proof of concept in your hands.
The information and advice that David’s book holds is truly invaluable, and will really help you on your way to becoming an authority in your industry.
You’ll notice that David mentions using a transcript from your workshop in this chapter. To understand what he’s talking about, we’d recommend you take a look at Chapter 5, 6 and 7 of his book. To do that, head on over to the Authority Content website, or you can purchase a copy of the book from Amazon.
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