The world of ‘the book’ is changing fast.
Not so very long ago, the accepted wisdom for publishing was that if you got accepted by a publisher, it would be 18 months before the launch of your book. Now, you can now get your content sold through Amazon or Apple (and other book websites) within 48 hours of you finishing your writing.
There are interesting implications to this. The new keywords associated with this kind of publishing that we need to have in the forefront of our minds are: speed, accessibility, low cost and volume.
Speed: your book can be on the Amazon Kindle store within 48 hours.
Accessibility: anyone can download your ebook, anywhere in the world.
Low cost: you can spend as much or as little on producing your ebook.
Volume: with no stock limitations, you can sell as many as is possible.
The old values no longer apply.
Your book does not have to be timeless. It can be bang up-to-date right now, for now. You simply replace it when it becomes out-of-date with a new book.
Your book doesn’t have to be the complete works, your life’s work, the be-all-and-end-all in the chosen topic. It can just be as long or as short as is needed to provide the information it’s supposed to provide.
There are no printing or other costs to cover so the price can be whatever you like, or rather whatever you think the target market will respond to to get the volume of sales you’re after.
This all means that ‘the book’ does not do quite the same job as a book of old. Yes, the book, any good book, properly targeted and marketed will help position you as an expert, but the new dimension is that they are able to serve a new role, that of content marketing.
Businesses used to do this with brochures, pamphlets and websites. All of those still have their place in the marketing mix, but not quite in the content marketing role that they would have been used in the past. People don’t value brochures unless they have glorious photos of desirable cars in them. Otherwise they’re regarded as litter. People don’t value pamphlets. They’re free, temporary and make are more likely to lower to perceived value of the offer they’re supposed to promote. With websites, people bore of reading lots of text on screen. They scan read to get the ‘gist’ and the data they want. Text on a website won’t massively increase your Kudos.
Books are still the best physical marketing tool and should be used to replace brochures and pamphlets and compliment your websites. But a book has to have over 100 pages to have a spine worthy of being called a book. A book needs a fair amount of content.
The new dimension in content marketing is using an ebook to replace the specific brochure or pamphlet.
The ebook has a similar Kudos to a real book. The fact that it can be bought, stored and read on a Kindle or iPad is real new bonus in making it feel like a valuable item.
A lot of people have been doing a similar thing for years of course, sending out ‘free reports’ and downloadable ‘ebooks’. But these have been just PDFs. I say ‘just’ PDFs when in fact a pdf is can be a very attractive document. It can be beautifully designed and branded. But people don’t like reading on their computer screen (either a laptop or a desktop) so ended up printing out the PDFs, using up paper and ink. Later, people stopped printing them because of that and therefore stopped reading them.
The new concept of ebooks designed for e-readers is the new dimension. Of course a pdf can be downloaded and read on any e-reader too, but the user can’t control it in the same way as one designed for the e-reader. An ‘ePub’ ebook has what’s called ‘reflow’. This means that the reader can chose the type of font and size for the text and the book ‘reflows’ accordingly. An ePub file has only the ePub default design (no clever columns or typography can be used). It can have pictures (in black and white on standard Kindles and colour on iPads and Kindle Fire).
You can price your eBook at whatever you want. You can put a high value on it or undercut similar offerings in the bookstores. You can even give it away for free. It’s up to you and the purpose of your material.
An ePub eBook allows you to get your timely content to your target market in a way in which they want to receive it.
It could make all the difference to your business.
Get in touch to see how your content could benefit from being turned into a book, or a suite of books as ebooks or physical books.
I’ll show you how it’s done.
Call today on +44(0)1865 779944
Book Ayd to speak at your event.
www.aydinstone.com
The Kudos Effect 