Book Writing Advice series
Why You Should Write a Book
23 Reasons You Should Write Your Book Now
Make money. You can make money not only by selling your book, but also by selling all the ancillary products and services you can offer.
Money is often the key motivator for many authors, but it certainly isn’t the only reason why you should write a book.
Change lives. Books can enlighten, educate, inspire, inform, and entertain. They can and do change lives.
Everyone has at least one story of a book that changed their lives. What book changed your life? Now, write one to change other people’s lives.
Sell a product. Use your book to help promote another product, whether a real world product or an online information product. Books can help you sell all your other products and services. Seed your book with the stories of your other products and services. Include case studies, success stories, examples of failure and success.
Books can sell your products and services faster and easier than anything else. Books allow you to showcase what you do, how well you do it, and how your customers benefit from what you offer.
Boost your credibility. Nothing establishes your authority better than a book. Your book instantly boosts your credibility as a doer, as an expert, as a celebrity, as an authority. Of course, it has to be a good book, a great book, an extraordinary book. The more extraordinary, the more your credibility will grow!
Support a cause. Passionate about the environment? Write a book! Passionate about inner city health? Write a book! Passionate about gun violence? Write a book! Whatever cause you support, you can support it more effectively by writing a book versus donating money or time.
Build a career. There’s no better way to build a career than to start by writing a book. Books open doors. Books get respect. Books get you promotions. And books get you job offers, again and again.
Share a message you’ve got to get out. We all have magic inside us that wants to get out. Writing a book is one of the best ways to get your magic message out into the world.
Build a tribe. If you want to create a fan club, a following, or a community, write a book! They’ll find you! They’ll find you not only on the social networks, but also in reading groups, meetups, conferences, and more.
Use it as a business card. Books are the best business card you can carry. Create a very big business card that will get the attention of your customers (and potential customer) and get you more business and sales.
Become a speaker. Speakers with a book get more visibility, more bookings, more recognition, and more response. Not only can you speak to outside groups but you can also present and market your own seminars, conferences, webinars, teleconferences, and more.
In addition to your speaking fees (up to $50,000 per speech, but typically between $2,000 and $10,000 per speech), you can build your prospect list super fast. Speakers get contact information from 20 to 50% of their audiences. One speaker reports getting contact information from 97% of his audience, time and time again.
Become an expert. There’s no easier way to become an expert in a subject than to write a book about the subject – or THE book on the subject (like 1001 Ways to Market Your Books). You become an instant expert, a recognizable expert, the minute your book is published.
Drive traffic to a website or blog. You can use your book to drive readers to different blog articles, online sales pages, email capture pages, etc. Be sure to include direct response calls to action in all your books!
Become a celebrity! People look up to and idolize book authors. Book authors are celebrities, the kind that can get the best tables in the best restaurants and still leave without getting attacked by the paparazzi.
Bypass the gatekeepers! Want to get in the door of major corporations, government offices, foundations, or think tanks? If you are a book author, you can easily get past the gatekeepers to the people you need to talk to. A book is the ultimate foot-in-the-door strategy to get attention from key decision makers.
Be free to live the life you want. Books give you the freedom to live where you want, work when you want, and have more time to cherish your family and friends.
Teach. As a book author, you will be offered opportunities to teach in schools and universities, even without a teaching degree, a PhD, or other credential. Your books are your credentials.
Serve others. Your books are one of the key ways to serve others by sharing the best of your talent and the best of your ideas.
Become a social media star. Book authors get more followers on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, and YouTube than do people without a book. Authors are celebrities! They are worth following, friending, fanning, liking, retweeting, and repinning.
Note, also, that your social media posts can become the basis for your next book. It’s easy to create new books as you continue to post, pin, tweet, and share.
Sell rights. Every time you write a book, you create a constellation of rights around that book that can be sold: movie rights, reprint rights, foreign rights, audio rights, multimedia rights, merchandising rights, and more. J. K. Rowling did not become a billionaire from writing books. She became a billionaire by selling the ancillary rights those books automatically generated: foreign rights, mass market rights, movie rights, merchandising rights, and more.
Develop as a writer. Someone who can write a book, can write almost anything: blog posts, articles, columns, etc. As a book author, you immediately qualify to write for websites that pay money for blog posts and articles. As a book author, you could be invited to write a column for a related magazine. As a book author, you can also ghost write for other authors.
Help more people. You can help a ton more people by writing a book that changes their lives than you can by donating your time at a food bank or by creating a new foundation.
Establish an institute. More than one author has created an institution to carry on their work originally inspired by the book they wrote. Jeffrey Smith, author of Seeds of Deception, founded The Institute for Responsible Technology to provide health information to consumers about the risks of genetically modified food.
Found a movement. Why stop at a book? Why stop at an institution? Why stop at a series of products? Why not create a movement? A movement that changes the world?
That’s why I founded the Billion Book Initiative: to inspire authors around the world to write and sell more books, to inspire storytellers to keep telling their stories, and to inspire risk-takers to change the world.
Are you ready to change the world? One book at a time. One story at a time. One person at a time. Mind to mind. Heart to heart. Soul to soul. Spirit to spirit. Universe to universe.
Remember: The most effective books tell stories of transformation!
John Kremer is the author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books and content creator at http://www.bookmarketingbestsellers.com.
