Writing Books and Speaking
Thursday, May 8th, 2008If you are a non-fiction book writer, you by definition must also learn to be a public speaker. The marketing combination of the two is incredibly powerful. If you are more of a speaker, a book gives you credibility, gives the impression that you are an expert (the more niche your book, the more of an expert you are likely to be), and gives you something else to sell besides your speaking services.
If you are more of an author, speaking will help you sell books. Then you can get into other info products such as audio recordings, DVD, workbooks, etc. The list goes on and on. There is a ton of info out there on this so I am not going to repeat it here, A friend of mine, Stephanie Chandler, has a book called “From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur” which talks a lot about creating information products. Good book, easy to read and a great place to start.
As a made up word, I dont have any trouble with ‘infopreneur’. I think that Robert Allen came up with it in the latter part of the 1990s as the info revolution was gaining steam through the emergence of the Internet. Some people take that (some noun)-preneur thing a little too far. Sam Horn who has an awesome book called Pop! which is about creating memorable branding for your business or books or whatever. She has been credited with creating the word ‘authorpreneur’.
I know I dont want to be called an authorpreneur. Entrepreneurs who write books and do others things to leverage their original content (i.e., speaking, creating audios, etc.) dont need their own word: they are called entrepreneurs.
EVERYONE should be more entrepreneurial in the future anyway. No one else is going to look out for you.
Later…