The Most Effective Marketing Piece a Consultant Can Have
What's the most effective piece of collateral you can have as a consultant? A book. Being the man or woman who wrote the book on XYZ is a powerful calling card. It is one that immediately impresses yet stays around and is passed around long after you have left the meeting. As a consultant, authoring a book is now well within your reach. Consultants, by definition, have ideas, practices, methodologies, experience, skills, knowledge, expertise, and more that lend themselves to books. Yet, getting a book written and produced has always proven to be a hurdle. It takes time, effort, and clout-you need to know someone in the publishing business, an agent or publisher. If you work at a firm with a large PR department, it might be able to grease the process a bit, but that's not a sure thing. So, where does that leave the individual consultant? Fortunately, advances in printing technology and the Internet have converged to make book publishing accessible to any consultant with a good idea for a book. Print-on-demand (POD) publishing is accessible while producing high quality hardcover and soft cover books. POD publishers automatically place their titles on Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, and the other major online booksellers. They also get their titles in the catalogs of the major book distributors who supply bookstores so their books can be ordered through any bookstore. Google Book Search also takes POD books. And best of all, POD publishers can produce a book fast, allowing you to capitalize on fast moving opportunities. Just think what you can do once you have that book in your hands and on Amazon.com. It is a vehicle to attract speaking opportunities at conferences and media/press attention. It gives you great credibility when pursuing major accounts and boosts your professional career, your practice, and your firm. On top of that there is simply the personal satisfaction from seeing your thoughts in a book, one that will be around for a long time. Of course, there is much more to publishing a book than can be addressed the few paragraphs above. I will take up those issues in subsequent pieces along with whatever questions you might have. Next we'll look at the different types of publishers out there. Bio: Alan Radding is a fulltime freelance writer, ghostwriter, and author of The White Paper White Paper and the popular Ultimate Guides, which are available on his website, http://www.technologywriter.com His writing appears regularly in leading business and technology publications including Consulting Magazine, Computerworld, CIO, CFO, and more. Contact him at alan@radding.net Content for this article provided by Big4.com. |
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