Today I want to talk about publishing. While storytelling may not be your G-d given talent, it’s a skill like any other and can be improved upon. Everyone has a story to tell and I think everyone can write a book. It’s a lot like starting a workout regiment. If you have the discipline and dedicate time to daily manageable goals you will reach the finished product without feeling overwhelmed.
Once you get started on your writing journey, you will want to think about distribution. I have experience with a few options, but if you’re just starting out I recommend KDP, which is Kindle Direct Publishing. You can capture up to 70% of the royalties of each digital book copy sold and if you feel like most of your sales come from Amazon you can join the select program and be exclusive to amazon in exchange for the ability to share your work with Kindle Unlimited. Kindle Unlimited is great because it can help boost your book’s overall ranking and you get paid per page read by members (think of it like Netflix for books).
You can also create paperbacks on KDP, but if you’re interested in physical books there are other avenues with more options (like Ingram Spark) however I’m going to stick with KDP for the rest of this post. It’s effective, and simple. A great place for beginners looking to control their publishing fate.
So, why is writing a book important? It can help establish your brand; people still love to read books and what better way to capture your entire story than to write a book about it? It can be fiction (a parable or a fable), it can be nonfiction, it can be whatever you want–you could publish a cook book if that’s what you think fits your brand.
Books are timeless. Books go up on Amazon and you don’t have to think about them ever again. You could create some ads to draw traffic and reference them in your videos but they aren’t costing you any money by sitting there. You aren’t paying for warehouse space or anything.
At close to no cost (outside of time, professional editing, and cover art) you’ve opened yourself up to passive revenue streams that you don’t have to actively promote, that you don’t have to run the fulfillment services for, that you don’t have to handle shipping costs or anything. Your book is out there for the world to see and you can promote it however you want.
This isn’t a strategy that’s going to make you a millionaire, but it feels great to wake up in the morning and see 10 people were interested in your story and purchased a copy. This happened to me recently. I saw I had 40 bucks moved to my bank account from Amazon royalty services. I was stressed with exams, and feeling a little overwhelmed, and this put a smile on my face. It’s fun to be able to treat someone to dinner with royalties–it made me feel like a real writer. I think Stephen King once described talent as being able to pay the electric bill with something you wrote.
To conclude this post, writing a book is a great way to encapsulate your story, diversify your brand, and create passive revenue streams. It’s also a way to expand global reach, and grow your business affordably, by offering a new product with very low upfront costs AND offers you the ability to build an infrastructure around the culture you’re trying to implement into your business.
R.K. Gold 