Why Anyone Can Be a Publisher

First, an announcement. The latest updated version of Simple Story Selling is now live on Amazon! The updated book contains:

• An expanded section on roles, and the critical interaction between business owner and copywriter
• A deeper discussion of the 4 story types and how they should be used across the customer journey
• A deeper examination of Christopher Booker’s 7 Basic Plots, and how each plot translates to business storytelling

If you already own Simple Story Selling (in any format), email me and I’ll send you a free PDF copy of the updated book.

If like me you prefer paper books to digital ones, the paperback version is 27% off on Amazon for this week only.

Why 27%? That’s the lowest I could drop the price! Ends Sunday 31st July.

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The process of updating Simple Story Selling got me thinking about book publishing. For many years publishing was a black box, closed off to anyone outside the industry.

Even to self publish, you needed to buy your own ISBN number. You needed a printer to print the thing. To make the print run viable you needed to order about 5000 copies, which often would sit in your garage gathering dust. Of course, as soon as you took delivery of the books, previously hidden typos would jump out at you, taunting you every time you sold a copy. Oh, you then had to send a box off to Amazon, or ship everything yourself. If indeed you had any hair left.

Amazon has turned all this on its head. Amazon’s print on demand service (Amazon KDP) makes it easy and free to publish a quality book, maintain control of the manuscript and iterate as many times as you like.

(Since I first published it in 2017, Simple Story Selling has been through two big revisions and two minor ones).

You’re in control. You can go high spec and hire a typesetter, cover designer and promotional agent. Or you can publish ‘Version 0.1’ yourself, tomorrow, get feedback on the book and iterate from there.

I generally recommend the latter approach. Speed and feedback is everything. An unpublished book can do you no good whatsoever. Most prospects will simply be impressed that you have a book!

So, am I now a publisher? Technically yes, I guess. But not really.

What I really do is plan and construct marketing follow-up systems centred around a self-published book.

Your book should align closely with your paid offer, or explore a specific problem related to your paid offer. Inside the book there needs to be an opt-in incentive. People who opt-in should be shown a paid offer and added to an email sequence (maybe even a direct mail sequence too). In fact, maybe even an SMS sequence! (For high value prospects, why not go to town on the follow-up?)

The nature of this paid offer may depend on a segmenting question placed on the opt-in form. Maybe you don’t show the same offer to everyone.

All these elements constitute your ‘book marketing system’. So yes, I help people publish books, but there’s more to it than that.

Want to discuss a project? Hit reply and we’ll go from there.