In my previous blog, Write a Book, Build Your Brand, Part 1: Leverage your Authority, I talked about my book-writing experience over the past 30 years and how a book can enhance your overall marketing strategy. I shared that I’d written and self-published a short workbook that had the positive effect of boosting my credibility on the seminar circuit back in the mid-80s, while also generating additional income. Ten years later, I saw the benefit of including books in my overall marketing strategy at Trillium Health Products, which added to the credibility of the company spokespeople (also the authors) and generated new opportunities for our business. After a 20-year gap, I returned to books again to promote my consulting business.

I’ve consistently relied on multiple marketing channels to build winning brands. Writing a book, I’ve learned, is one of the best things you can do to grow your business. A book gives you the space to tell your story, and it opens doors in terms of other marketing opportunities, like PR, podcasts, and email notifications. Books help enhance your credibility, too, and you can leverage the vast content of your book for other purposes, like blog content, social media postings, and online courses, to name a few. With each book, I’ve utilized different publishing models depending on available resources and the specific marketing objectives for creating a book in the first place.

Instead of prescribing a series of steps, I’ve shared the unique circumstances for each of my books, and I’ve included some pros and cons of each of three major publishing models to help get you started on your way to becoming an author!

Traditional Publishing

It used to be that the traditional publishing model was the only way to get your book into the market. To get published this way, you typically need a track record of selling books and a massive marketing platform behind your brand. I had the latter in the form of Trillium Health Products, my first company featuring Jay Kordich (The Juiceman). Jay’s message really resonated with people in the early 1990s, and his charisma helped launched one of the most successful seminar businesses in the country. With the success of the business, the popularity of our spokesman, and built-in audiences across the country, it was natural for us to approach major publishers to create some books about juicing. The first book deal was with Simon and Schuster for The Juiceman’s Power of Juicing. It was full of delicious recipes and, when released in 1993, quickly became a New York Times #1 Best Seller, with more than a million copies sold. A second book, Juicing for Life, by Trillium spokeswomen Cherie Calbom and Maureen Keene, sold more than 800,000 copies. More books on juicing and bread-making followed.

Fast-forward to 2010, where I found myself in a position to use the traditional publishing channel again, this time for my own book. At the time I was running a direct response marketing agency, called Cesari Direct, helping other businesses launch their products with the Direct-2-Consumer model for which I was best known. Since selling Trillium Health Products, I’d helped create brands like Sonicare, Clarisonic, George Foreman Grill, OxiClean, Rug Doctor, Momentus Golf, and others. My new business director at the time convinced me that I had a story to tell, and he connected me with his friend who had published several books. We got some interest from a publisher named Thomas Wiley and Sons, known for publishing business books. They even provided a small advance. This book was created by recoding a series of one hour interviews with me, then transcribing the interviews and turning that material into the chapters that followed our outline. Once the rough manuscript was completed, it was sent to our editor at Wiley to get it ready for publication. Finally, in 2011 my first published book, Buy Now: Creative Marketing that Gets Customers to Respond to You and Your Product was released. It was an especially exciting day for me. I was able to leverage the release of the book to get a several major local and national talk shows.

One marketing channel I pursued on my own was to pay to have Buy Now! showcased at airport bookstores around the country. Shortly after the books went on display, I got a call from a man named Omar, who’d purchased my book at the Miami airport. Turns out his dad was one of the largest real estate developers in Egypt. His company was creating time-share resorts on the Red Sea, and he wanted to use the direct response television marketing principles, like the ones I’d outlined in the book, to help market his development. I won’t go into detail here, but this turned into a project worth several hundred thousand dollars. Not a bad return for the time spent on the book!

What I like best about working with an established publisher is the support you get during the creation of the book; things like access to good writers, editors, and a design team. The finished product always looks great and is something to be really proud of. A traditional publisher typically has large distribution channels, too, although, with the rise of Amazon, this is not as important for authors as it used to be. The downside of using a traditional publisher is the cost of buying books from them, which narrows your profit margin, making it harder to do much self-marketing.

Hybrid Publishing

For my third book, Building Billion Dollar Brands (Advantage, 2018), I partnered with a company called Advantage Media https://advantagefamily.com. In this hybrid scenario, I paid Advantage a fee and they provided the writer, editor, book cover design, and book distribution upon completion of the book. While the financial risks fall largely on the author, the upsides are worth considering.

The idea behind my third book was to pick up where I left off with my second book, “Buy Now.” My company had just helped launch The GoPro camera, helping to build that business into doing a billion dollars in sales in just a few years. Meanwhile, several other products I’d helped launch also surpassed a billion dollars in sales. Why not write a book about what all these products and campaigns had in common? I came up with the title Building Billion Dollar Brands: Spectacular Successes & Cautionary Tales. I wrote this book with a co-author, Barb Westfield. Barb was the CMO at Salton, during the era of the George Foreman Grill, and she’s one of the sharpest marketing people I know. Her insights and experience enhanced the book; plus it was great fun writing with someone I so admired. We were able to share many marketing “war stories” from being in the trenches together on many consumer product launches.

While book sales for Building Billion Dollar Brands have been decent, the primary motivation for writing it was to generate new business. Like the Buy Now book, this book helped land another major client, Real Time Pain Relief, www.rtpr.com. The owners read the book, liked it, and they were looking for a spokesperson to help grow their business. I helped them hire George Foreman to represent their pain relief product line. So far, it’s been a great fit, and it has led to other opportunities with them, including webinars and speaking engagements. They even purchased several hundred copies of my book to distribute to their vendors—another example of the marketing value of a good book!

In my experience to date, the hybrid model combines the best of traditional publishing, and it offers a financial model that gives you enough margin to create more sales, as long as you have some marketing capability. The downside of this model is the cost involved to pay for publishing services. This can be prohibitive to many first time authors.

Self-publishing

By the time I wrote my fourth and latest book, I was completely out of my marketing agency and working as a full-time consultant. Having more spare time, I got the urge to write another book, this time on my own. Publishing had changed since the success of my earlier books, so I decided to hire a coach to bring me up to speed. I discovered Susan Gilbert through LinkedIn. Susan lives in Seattle and has been successful writing and publishing her own books and helping others do the same. She also runs a digital business called Online Promotion Success, through which she and her team would help promote my book when finished. My idea for this book was to leverage my 25+ years of video marketing experience in a book called, Video Persuasion: How to Create Effective High-level Product & Testimonial Videos that will Grow Your Brand, Increase Sales and Build Your Business, now available on Amazon.

Susan’s process for writing a book gave me the support and structure I needed to be successful on my own. She had me create an outline for the entire book before I started writing. She then offered an invaluable tip to help avoid the dreaded writer’s block: Don’t worry about writing your story in sequential order! Instead, she suggested I start with the easiest chapter first, regardless of where it falls in the progression. This got me into “the writing flow” much more quickly. Following Susan’s advice, I got through 300 pages in a just a few months. At the launch, my book hit #1 in two categories on Amazon, in part due to picking the appropriate categories to be listed in—something else Susan educated me about. I will be doing a future blog on launching a new book soon, with more details about the marketing steps involved.

Tips for writing on your own:

• Give yourself a deadline for when you want to launch your book
• Create an outline
• Pick the easiest chapter first
• Write fast, edit later
• Schedule time to write every day

The Marketing Caveat

No matter which publishing channel you pursue, marketing is key to your success. For all the benefits that come from getting picked up by a traditional publisher, it’s false to assume you’ll get much help. On the contrary, they depend on their authors to create sales. Knowing something about marketing, or even better, having a back-end marketing channel like we had with The Juiceman, is essential for more book sales. With self-publishing, you will be on the hook for all of your book sales. Susan taught me here that it’s all about the launch. Pick a release date; then focus your marketing efforts on creating as many sales as soon as possible. The early sales momentum helps gain awareness and ranking on Amazon, which leads to more sales. Having a big mailing list helps immensely (or a lot of friends)!

Summary

Through writing books, I’ve learned the value of being an author—both for me personally and for my businesses. My personal goal was primarily to cultivate new business prospects and for that reason alone books have been extremely beneficial.  Like I said in my previous blog, Part 1, book-writing is the ultimate in content marketing, and it can really establish your credibility as an expert in your field, while also leading to surprising new opportunities that can expand your business in new and exciting directions. If you’re considering writing a book, I encourage you to do your research, look carefully at all of the options, and choose the path that’s right for you. Good luck!

FREE BONUS!

To get more great marketing information, please visit my website at rickcesari.com and download, for free, my e-book on the three most effective types of online video content. I go into great depth explaining this information, how to create it, and how it can be used to benefit you or your business.

Have a question? The answer is only an email away.

About Rick

Entrepreneur, author, keynote speaker and D2C marketing strategist, Rick enjoys working with and learning from other entrepreneurs and small business owners. He is the recognized leader in utilizing all forms of video as a powerful, effective differentiator for consumer brands. Rick continues to be on the cutting edge of new direct branding advertising campaigns, creating and implementing innovative cross-platform strategies that utilize the basic tenets of direct marketing and its accountable ROI approach to selling. Case studies from some of his most successful brand-building campaigns are outlined in his book Building Billion Dollar Brands and his latest book, Video Persuasion, both available on Amazon.