Where do you go when you need the answer to a question? Where do you go when you need help from somebody else? Where do you go when you desire to be entertained?

In the past, your only real option has been through traditional media. But now, we can make up our own rules. We can find better answers because there is no longer a small group of gatekeepers telling us what we can and can’t know. Now, you can be the one to provide those answers.

My name is Blaine Moore, and I’d like to welcome you to the first episode of the Modern Publishing Podcast.

[Intro music]

John C. Maxwell wrote, “Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.”

Traditional media no longer has a stranglehold on what we can learn as consumers, and they are no longer the gatekeepers that can dictate what we as experts can share with others.

This is the inaugural episode of the Modern Publishing Podcast, and I’d like to welcome you to share my journey and to take part in the conversation about this new world that we find ourselves in.

Today I’d like to introduce myself and explain just what the heck Modern Publishing is and why it’s relevant, and we’ll take a quick look into one of the most powerful mediums for change in the world, the simple book, and what we can do to promote ourselves and our businesses.

My name is Blaine Moore, and I’m a marathon coach and the owner of a publishing company in Southern Maine. When I was a kid, I always figured that I would be an author when I grew up. I read a lot, learned to read at a very young age, and I used to write a lot, and I have quite a few stories published when I was still in grade school.

Then once I got to college, I discovered computers and got into what I felt would be a career I could actually make money at, and one of my regrets is that I only had one poem published while I was in college. But after I got out of college, I still do the computer thing, but I got into blogging.

I built a very popular running blog and began publishing books and some other products like CDs, DVDs, things of that sort, and I got into this whole world and kind of got back into where I was when I was a kid and what I was doing originally.

So Modern Publishing, what exactly is that? It’s a means to get your word out to those who want to hear it. Now, that can be a lot of different ways. That could be with a book or with an audiobook. That can be a podcast like you’re listening to now. That could be through e-books, whether that’s a PDF file on your computer or a Kindle book or a book on your Nook or some other e-reading device. That could even just be getting your word out through blogs and forums.

Now, books are very simple. It’s, at its core, a bunch of words that are just placed together in a single place, and that usually provide a coherent predetermined message.

Mass production and widespread literacy is a relatively modern invention. About 300 years ago, less than 10 percent of the world’s population could read, and that’s after a steep climb of literacy that happened after the invention of the printing press which was a few hundred years before that.

Before then, the only people who could read were basically the clergy because every book in existence had to be handwritten. It was copied out in longhand and that was a very expensive and a very time-consuming process, so the only people who did it were the people that had access to money or that were in part of the church.

Now, 90 percent of the population is literate. You don’t need to hire somebody to write a letter for you or to read a letter that you receive, and in fact, we kind of take getting mail for granted now.

Our collective experience kind of holds over from that though. We’ve evolved from being exclusive for who can read and write, to now it seems a lot more exclusive to just be a published author. So as a result, there’s nothing that can build credibility faster than having your own book.

I kind of noticed that with my own experience. I’ve had many different e-books that I sold as PDFs and I’ve had CDs and DVDs, but once I published my first print book, I just noticed that my own credibility and my own recognizability just skyrocketed from that point, and it made a really big difference, and you wouldn’t think that it would given how much easier it is to put a book together versus having a CD or a DVD put together.

Now, there are different kinds of books. The biggest classifications that you can find are going to be fiction and nonfiction, and while each have their place, they’re not necessarily separate places. Today I want to share five reasons why you might want to write a book, and I’m going to take that from a local business’ perspective.

Now, the first reason that you might want to write a book is just going to be for ego. I mean, who doesn’t want to have a book with their name on it? It’s always going to make you feel better to be able to look at something and say, “I did that.” It’s going to have your name on it. You can show it off to your friends. You can display it on your book shelf or on a coffee table. It just makes you feel good.

The second reason that you might want to write a book is to make money, directly from sales or through other means, but a financial incentive is not necessarily a bad thing. While making money directly from selling books can be, and usually is, very difficult, it can also be a very valid reason for why you might want to write a book.

A third reason is to just give back to the world. If you have something to share and you have some sort of expertise, you want to share that with the world and let other people know what it is that you know, solve their problems for them and make their lives easier.

A fourth reason for writing a book is kind of going back towards ego, and that’s just to build credibility and to brand yourself as an expert on whatever you’re field happens to be.

Then a fifth reason is to promote some products or services that your business may have, and all that book is, therefore, to make sure people know what it is that you have available and what you can do for them.

Now, the best reason for writing a book is going to have some sort of mix and match of multiple of those reasons. Every book should have a goal. It doesn’t have to be to make money, it doesn’t have to be to promote your business, but there should be a reason that you’re writing a book because, otherwise, what’s the purpose?

So here are a few unique reasons that you might want to write a book that go a little bit beyond the obvious, and all of these reasons I’m going to be taking again right from the perspective of somebody who owns a small business that just does business locally or maybe does something on the internet, but it’s going to be from a small business perspective.

So the first reason you might want to write a book would be to create a fiction that you can use to help promote your business. That book can be a parable for good lessons that would help out your clients, for example.

If you’ve ever read The Richest Man in Babylon by George Samuel Clason, this was written in the early 20th century and it was a series of parables of financial lessons about a man in Babylon who basically built up his own wealth and learned to be frugal to manage his wealth appropriately. It was a very popular book. Banks and financial planners would give this book away to their clients.

So find something similar that you could write about that kind of takes a reader on a journey. It doesn’t have to be hit the person over the head with what it is that your company does, but make it obvious that they can learn something from it and that it will help them and entertain them.

Because all of the best books, even if it’s some sort of a dry nonfiction book, you still want to have some kind of entertain value, and the best way to provide that is to tell stories while you’re going along.

Another type of book could just be a direct resource that your clients might need. So let’s say, for example, you’re a wine importer and you sell wines to restaurants in your area. You could create a book that would be a wine pairing guide for what are the best types of foods to go along with some of the wines that you’re bringing into the country that you’re going to be selling to your clients.

Then that could be just a gift that you could give them as a thank you for being a customer or you could give it to prospects to help them to see which wines would go best with which foods that they offer on their menus.

You could even give it to individual people. If your wines are available in local stores or it can be bought from the restaurants, it might be an interesting thing for them to look at. They can say, “Okay, tonight I’m going to eat this particular food,” and they can look in and see what wines might taste good with that, and if you happen to sell most of those wines, well, that’s just another advantage on your part.

A third reason for writing a book would be to get yourself in front of potential clients. So you have a book, it could be the direct resource or it could be some kind of book that just talks about your expertise that solves this specific problem, whatever the case might be.

But one way you can use that to get in front of somebody that you want to have as a client would be to mail that book to that client. If you send it to them through FedEx, it’s probably going to get through whatever gatekeepers they have, any secretaries or whoever they use to sort their mail, and they’ll open it up and you can include a little post in there and write a note with what you think would be useful for that person out of that book.

Maybe leave a couple of sticky notes with some specific passages that you know would be relevant for their business to help them out, and include your contact info, and chances are pretty good that they’re going to look at that book and they’re going to want to get in touch with you.

If they don’t hire you, you’re still going to have done them a favor and they might say something nice to you to another person, and you can use that for getting not just a client directly, but it’s also a good way to build goodwill in the community to get your name known and to get a lot of referrals.

In a similar vein, another reason that you might want to use a book is, let’s say, you are a college student or you’re getting your Masters and you’re about to graduate, the job market has been tough recently. It’s getting better, but the last few years a lot of people graduating haven’t been able to find any kind of relevant work.

One way that you can really set yourself apart from everybody else who’s graduating and from all of the people that don’t have jobs that are in the same field as you and have a lot more experience than you and are willing to work for the same wage because they can’t find anything else is to write a book based on some research you did in college or about some of the basics of whatever field it is that you want to get into.

So for example, let’s say you get a degree in Chemistry, you could write some sort of a book that’s relevant to whatever field you wanted to be, and whether that was in the pharmaceutical industry or it might be something that would go from more of a consumer goods industry relating to plastics or whatever the case might be.

If you’ve done any kind of research in college, then obviously that’s the best type of stuff to write about because that will be something unique to you, and if not, then you can still provide a primer related in some way to the layperson, why is it important for whatever your field is.

Then take that book and mail it off to the head of Human Resources or to the CEOs of companies that you want to work with. If it’s a smaller company and if you have somebody asking the recruiters and asking the people that are doing the interviews to look into you and to give you a fair shake or to straight hire you, you’re going to have a lot better chance than if you’re just sending another resume that looks like a thousand other resumes and may not have the same amount of experiences of some of the other people you’re competing against for that job.

You may find that you’d be able to get into a company that may not be actively hiring and they might just be impressed and want to bring you in along with your go-gettingness and you built yourself a level of credibility that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to have.

The fifth reason is to just use your book as the ultimate business card. It’s the best way to bring in prospects and referrals, whether you’re mailing it to someone or just handing it to them. I mean, in all of these cases, who really cares if the book ever sells. I mean, that’s obviously nice. It’s a great bonus and you’re getting paid for lead generation if you do have a business.

But the great advantage of having your own book is keep production and high quality product, your book has to look good, has to have good information, has to be helpful, but that all equals a big impact for customers and prospects or whoever it is that you’re trying to get in front of.

You can buy business cards for 5 or 10 cents a-piece if you’re buying 250 or 500. You could probably get them for about a penny a piece if you’re buying multiple thousands at once. But the majority of business cards are looked at for a couple of seconds and they’re put into a wallet. They may be filed and looked at one or two more times in the life of that business card before it just eventually gets thrown away.

There’s no differentiation between your business card and everybody else’s, and if there is, it may be a little bit annoying if somebody gives you a business card that isn’t the same size as everything else because it won’t fit whatever it is you put in your business cards, even though you’re never going to look at them again.

If you have a book: • First, that provides immeasurable impact for your reader. • Second, it’s probably not going to be thrown away. • Third, it maybe referenced years down the road. • Fourth, it can passed onto new prospects and referrals.

Unless you’re specifically going to an event and handing to somebody business cards for the purposes of networking and they already have their own clients that would be good referrals for you, chances are pretty good your business card is not going to get passed on to somebody else.

But if your write a book and that book solves a real-world problem that people that are in your field have, that book is going to be mentioned to other people, and it’s going to be handed around, and that’s going to do a lot to build your brand and to get you some notoriety in your local area.

So for the same price, you can probably buy 20 or 30 books and you’ll probably get a much better conversion rate from a book versus a business card, so I highly recommend that you consider creating your own book, finding what it is that you can help people with, putting that book together and then getting that book out in front of people who can use it and that it will really positively impact their life.

In the book you’ll have your information for how to get in touch with you, and if it’s a good match for them and it comes at a good time for them, hopefully you’ll get some business out of it, and if not, you’re going to build some goodwill and they may come back and hire you down the road. They may refer somebody, and worst-case scenario, you’re just making somebody else’s life a little bit better by helping them to solve a problem that they have.

So this has been the first episode of the Modern Publishing Podcast. Please let me know what you think. You can find the website at ModernPublishingPodcast.com, and this episode specifically will be ModernPublishingPodcast.com/1.

Now, if you would like in the future, I can do a little brainstorming, give me different fields, leave a comment in the show notes for this episode, and in the future episode I’ll take those comments and brainstorm how can you use a book in your particular field or for your particular circumstances.

Because there are very few circumstances that I can think of where you can’t find some way to build your expertise and your credibility by having a book, and sometimes you have to think outside of the box a little bit, but it can usually be done and you can find some sort of a resource that you can give to people that will be helpful to them. So I’d love to help people out with that.

We will be back on a weekly basis, and in the future, I plan on having episodes similar to this where we will take a topic and talk about it.

I also plan on doing interviews with authors who have their own books and learning about what that process of getting their books published was and how they’re leveraging that to build their own book empires or build their own businesses.

We will also be speaking with various experts for actually creating your books and for topics such as copyrights and things of that sort, and the sorts of things that you need to know in the modern publishing landscape.

[Outro music starts]

So again, thank you very much for listening to this episode, and I will catch you next time.

End of Audio