You’re a businessperson. You may not think of yourself as a writer, but you know that writing well can boost your results and your career. Naturally, you want to do better. Every week I point you to one or two pieces that I think will teach you something or spark an idea or two. This week I’m pointing you to pieces on writing marketing stories and writing a profit-building book.
From Patricia Sellers: How great marketers tell stories
“According to legend, the iconic Louisville Slugger bat was born in 1884, when a 17-year-old baseball fan invited a major league player to his father’s woodworking shop. The star of the Louisville Eclipse was mired in a hitting slump and had broken his bat. The teen handcrafted a new bat to the player’s specifications. The next day the Louisville star got three hits. The Brand Ideal, or Purpose, of Louisville Slugger is ‘to make players great.’ That statement could sound like puffery, except that the stories surrounding the brand make it plain and true. This is the case for most Ideal-driven businesses. Stories make the Ideal wheel spin.”
Wally’s Comment: Learn about two kinds of stories you can use for marketing or to enrich your book.
From Gordon Burgett: Writers: ideas for creating top-selling nonfiction books
“I think of top-selling two ways. The most obvious is to sell more copies of your book than any other book like it in the market. If you sell 10,000 copies of the book, you outsold a person who sold 5,000. Duh. The less obvious way is to measure the effectiveness of your book’s sale. If the purpose of your book is to create a core for an empire, starting with the book and spreading into other information dissemination means, a book that sells 150 copies but generates 50 $1,500 speeches, spinoff books, keynotes, and lots of crelated consulting, and so on, is a huge deal too.”
Wally’s Comment: When most people had never heard of an information empire, Gordon Burgett had created one and was showing others, including me, how to do it too. In this post he talks about testing titles for niche books.
Sources I Check Regularly
I find the posts and articles that I share with you on The Writer’s Edge in many places. But there are a few that provide insightful pieces again and again. Here they are.