How effective are e-books as personal branding tools?
Stated another way, If you write an e-book, will your personal brand gain the same respect and visibility that you’d receive from a printed version of your book?
This is a particularly timely question since e-books and e-book readers are more and more in the news. For example, last month, Amazon.com announced that sales of titles for its Kindle e-book reader eclipsed sales of printed titles and Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-book reader in an out-of-stock until February.
What are the implications of the growing popularity of e-books? Does this mean you no longer need a printed book to build your personal brand? Put another way…
Is an e-book, by itself, enough to brand you as a subject area expert, opening the doors to new opportunities and driving new clients and pre-sold prospects to your business?
Pros & cons of e-books
The advantages of e-books includes:
- Freedom from up-front printing, inventory, and distribution costs. E-books are distributed through the Internet as downloadable files. Anyone with rudimentary word processing skills and a copy of Adobe Acrobat can create an attractively-formatted PDF version of their book within hours of completing the last chapter of their manuscript.
- Lower costs can mean wider distribution. Because of the reduced initial costs and per-copy costs, e-books can be priced substantially less than printed books. Since there are more people willing to spend $14.95 than there are willing to spend $44.95, e-books can a larger market.
- E-books can do more. Compared to printed books, e-books are easier to search and they can contain links to websites as well as audio, video, and presentation files. E-books can also be easily updated, so they always contain the latest information. E-books are available for reading within moments of ordering them. In addition, the new generation of e-book readers are more environmentally friendly than printed books, they’re a far better choice for traveling, and they take up a fraction of the shelf space required for even a small library.
From a personal brand building perspective, however, e-books have some potential limitations. These include:
- Lack of tangibility. Printed books are often referred to as “brochures” and “business cards.” As Bob Bly, author of over 40 books, including The Copywriter’s Bible, told me in a telephone call over 20 years ago, “When I visit a client and they ask me to describe my qualifications, I hand them a copy of my book…and they’re immediately convinced.” Giving a client a PDF file, however, lacks the drama of a physical product that speaks for itself.
- Limitations of on-screen reading. E-books are primarily intended for reading on the screen of a computer monitor or using one of the pioneering e-book readers. Most find that on-screen reading is more difficult than reading from a printed page. More important, although PDF files can be printed, what do you do with the print-outs? In many cases, e-books are printed on 3-hole punched paper, and inserted into a 3-ring binder, but this involves a lot of hassle and additional costs for paper, ink, binders. Plus, binders are bulky and hard to hold when reading.
- Evaporating savings. A final note of concern relates to the pricing of e-books distributed through the major online online retailers. The possibility of wider universe of buyers created by lower costs may not work out in practice. For example, as I write this, the printed (i.e., paper) version of Garr Reynold’s new best-selling Presentation Zen Design, (list price, $34.99), is $23.09, but the Kindle version is $20.43! This is just one example, but it does suggest the possibility that the potential savings of electronic publishing and distribution may not always be passed along to readers and authors.
Why does a printed copy of a book cost less than $3 more than an e-book?
Potential e-book personal branding strategies
The following are some of the ways you might approach creating an e-book strategy for building your personal brand as an expert in your field. Here are some ways you can begin to build your personal brand with a self-published PDF e-book promoted and distributed through your own website:
- List-building. View a personally-published e-book not as a source of revenue, but purely as a permission-based marketing incentive. Your goal in publishing your PDF e-book is not to make money from sales, but to master the power of Internet marketing and to build a responsive e-mail list of prospects interested in solving problems you already know how to solve.
- Write the “minimum e-book” necessary to get published. Rather than writing the definitive volume on a topic, write the minimum book that will establish your writing credentials, perhaps a 45 to 80 page e-book, rather than a one-hundred to two-hundred page book. This provides a learning experience and opportunity to gain valuable e-commerce skills while helping you develop your writing skills.
- Create an e-book to create prospects for other products and services. Don’t create your e-book, but as a key components in other products, such as audios, videos, DVD’s, e-courses, workbooks, and training materials.
- Use an e-book to perfect the craft of writing. Writing, as most writers will tell you, is a craft, not a talent. The more you write, the better you’ll write–and the faster you’ll write. So, view an e-book as a work-in-progress, a “first outing,” rather than an “ultimate expression” of your knowledge.
- Use e-books to test new ideas. Uncertain whether your idea will fly? Instead of hitching your dreams to an idea that your market may not be as enthusiastic about as you are, write a 20-30 page e-book on the topic, and do what you can to engage with your readers and find out what they think about your initial attempt.
- Use an e-book as an incentive to create a better blogging strategy. Aimless blogging, i.e., blogging about whatever crosses your mind when you decide it’s time to add another post, is harder than purposeful blogging. If you start your e-book by creating a table of contents, and write your posts as chapter elements, your blog will be more interesting and your e-book will practically write itself.
What’s fascinating about the above 6 points is that they apply to all types of publishing–self-publishing and trade-publishing–as well as e-books! In every case, the sale of a book is the beginning of a relationship, or the cultivation of a skill, rather than an end in itself.
The above list, of course, is by no means comprehensive, and I encourage you to share your thoughts as comments, below. All of us are in this together; everyone can bring new insights and perspectives to the dialog. No one has a monopoly on the best e-book practices for successfully creating a personal brand, especially with all the changes currently taking place.
