Build a Business Around Your Blogged Book

All my posts during April, National Book Blogging Month (NaBoBloMO), have helped you blog a book fast—in just 30 days. Blogging a short book fast provides you with something you may not have had before if you take the manuscript you created with your blog posts and actually get it edited and then publish it as a printed book, ebook or both—author status. Not only that, if you blogged a book on a topic related to your area of expertise, you have now catapulted yourself into the expert industry arena. This is the place where experts in their fields make a lot of money by having an online presence, speeches, consulting or coaching services, and information products. They build businesses around their ability to take their expertise and communicate about it from the podium, the page and beyond. To accomplish this, however, you need some business acumen.

I often write and speak about wearing more than just a writer’s hat; I say you need a businessperson’s hat as well. If you want to create a successful book—one that sells, you have to know something about promotion, sales and marketing. If you want to become an independent publisher and self-publish your book, you have to know how to run a publishing company. If you want to land a traditional publishing deal, you have to be the kind of businessperson in which a publishing company wants to invest their money. If you want to become a professional blogger, you need to know how to make money with and run a blogging business. If you want to develop a new entrepreneurial venture around your blog and your book, you must know what it means to be a successful entrepreneur, how to get that venture off the ground and possibly how to get yourself out of your current job and into your new business.

In other words, you need more than an idea for a book and the ability to get it written—or blogged—and published. You need to become an entrepreneur and a savvy business person. Next month, this blog will host five experts who can help you go from author to expert author, thus making it possibly for you to enter the expert industry, and who will give you some of the foundational information you need to succeed in this business. They will help you form a business around your blogged book.

After all, don’t you want your book to be successful? And don’t you want to make some money as an author? Of course, you do. So do I.

Most of us begin writing and blogging because we are passionate about our topics or we feel we have a purpose to fulfill—or both. And that can be enough to sustain us, but it’s even nicer if we can earn a living in the process and maybe even create a lifestyle around our business.

Hmmm. A business and a lifestyle built upon our passion and our purpose. Sounds pretty nice.

So, how do you get started? Here’s what you need to know (and what my expert guest bloggers will be telling you about over the next five weeks):

1. How to connect your personal values to essential business processes—vision, mission, strategy, marketing, and operations so you achieve entrepreneurial successful.

2. How to use your mindset and passion to build a business that fulfills your needs, desires and dreams as well as those of your clients and customers.

3. How to do quick assessments of your business goals and then determine how to take the appropriate course of action to get your business moving forward.

4. How to add “expert speaker” to your “expert author” status, thus accelerating your ability to bring in readers, customers, and clients.

5. How to raise your company’s brand awareness and name recognition online and off.

To get you started thinking in the direction of building a business around your book, I’m going to ask you to think about the following:

• If you were going to blog two or three more books, what would you write about? (Write a 50-word or less pitch for each of those books.)

Publishers like to invest in writers who are not just one-book authors. That’s why book proposals, the business plan used in the book publishing industry, includes a spin-off section. So, you want to consider what other books you can write to build your business.

Also, answer these questions:

• What do you feel you are an expert in (and this doesn’t necessarily have to be something you learned in school)?
• What are you most passionate about?
• What’s your mission or purpose in life?

The answers to these questions are definitely important as you begin to consider how to focus and direct your entrepreneurial venture, whatever that might look like or encompass. It begins with a blogged book, but it could take you almost anywhere.

If you are serious about building a business around your book, join me at Expert Platform Building 101 on May 19 in San Jose, CA. During this all-day intensive, you’ll learn the three “must haves” for your platform: competent speaking, a powerful published “calling card” and a robust online presence. That means a speech, a book and a blog. (I’ll be teaching the section on writing and publishing books.) But…but…there’s more. If you register, for Expert Platform Building 101, you get a second day free: Entrepreneurial Fundamentals 102.  During this all-day intensive, you’ll learn how to become your own CEO and successfully build your entrepreneurial venture. By attending both days, you’ll learn how to create a business as a recognized expert in your niche—a business around your blogged book. Click here, if you’d like to find out more and register.

Remember, if you blogged a short book fast this month of 7,500 words, send me the manuscript, the table of contents, a 50-word pitch, and an overview of the book (synopsis). It must arrive by 12 p.m. 4/30/12 Pacific Time.  Email it to me at nina (at) ninaamir (dot) com. One lucky person will win a signed copy of How to Blog a Book, the book.