Storification - How can you use books as part of your PR plan? Author, contributor or subject?

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James and I'm your host, and I have been running my own PR firm since 1995. And I have also been running multiple businesses, including importing Morgan sports cars to China and playing the role of interim CEO for Lotus Cars in China. So I run this podcast because I'd like to share with other entrepreneurs things that I have learned and that I think I can share which would help company owners and people helping those owners to get their companies noticed without the kind of fees and trouble necessarily associated with outsourcing. I would like to share today about this idea around books. The reason I want to talk about books is because I'm personally working on mine. It's called Start With Who, and it is why all great campaigns in PR start with the person and how individual company owners can be the brand that builds the business. So I've been interested and actively taking a course in order to learn how to write a book, because in our Speak PR methodology, the first part is storify. So I talk about storification of our lives and our companies Because ultimately, stories are how we all can associate and absorb large amounts of information. Indeed, I was listening to a podcast this morning, uh, with an American, uh, chap called Park Howell, who runs a podcast entirely dedicated to storytelling for your brand. And in his podcast, he said that even the dollar bill is a story. That money itself is a concept that people buy into because the essential story is that there's a promise of payment when you hold this paper. That actually the paper itself, of course, has negligible value, but it's the story behind it—the currency, the gold, the companies, the transaction, the trust—all of these other aspects make the dollar bill or the pound note or the the euro or the RMB into a story. Now, in the, uh, USA in 2018, some 675 million books were sold, and the global ebook market is valued at about $12.5 billion. So this is obviously an important but very competitive market, and there are over 250,000 business books that are currently in print fighting for limited shelf space or space on the Kindle reader or in the Amazon shelves or the New York best-selling shelves. So books these days are becoming easier and easier to publish, and the rationale for publishing them has also changed slightly. Most books today are really selling in terms of the business category, are really selling to the authors and the publishers' communities. It's very hard for a book to become a global bestseller because of the competition, not only because of language but also the interest levels and the pace at which books are picked up and dropped. So the view is that there's no general audience for most non-fiction books. The Dan Browns of this world obviously global, translated into, into multiple languages and so on. But what a book can do for a company or a person is to really connect them with their own community. And this is the reason why I've been looking at writing my own Speak PR Start With Who book. Now, the desktop authoring technology— and there are a couple, one's called Scrivener, which which is a text and compilation writing platform that I've been looking at. There's another one called Ulysses. These are making it so much easier to write a book, to compile a book at home, and to then export it to an online publishing platform and to self-publish. So it's no longer necessary to have a publisher endorse provide an advance and manage the distribution of a book. Much like podcasting, much like video with YouTube, publishing has now become something that really is possible and accessible for, for absolutely anybody. Now, one of the aphorisms, or one of the things that people say about publishing, is that only 5% is writing the book, but 95% is publishing I heard this week that in podcasting, the view is that 20% is content creation and 80% is the marketing. Whether it's 80/20, 95/5, the moral of the story is that what you write or what you say is only a very small part of the overall journey of the success. But it's also possible if you're looking at public relations, which is what this podcast is about, that the book can be used to leverage your business, to build credibility with your clients and create some recognition. Now, this can be for the company itself, or it can be on the entrepreneur or the founder as well. If we remember, for example, how the Six Sigma which is all about how GE made quality a fundamental part of their success. GE were instrumental in publishing and promoting the Six Sigma because it became also a mantra for them and explained part of the ethos of their company in a way that was much better than just lots of long or short-form articles in the news. So having a book can position the person as an expert even when they don't have a PhD, for example, or a university affiliation. So what we're finding with many people is almost in spite of, or saying, you see, I can do this without credentials of tertiary education, I can publish my own book. Of course, there's something magical about saying that you're the author of a book. I I personally can't do that yet. I'm looking forward to doing that. My father's published a number of books, and it establishes a huge amount of credibility for him. Now, there are opportunities that people like Steve Judge, who we've mentioned, have got for speaking as a result of publishing his book. So books bring an authority for the individual or for the company that really can't be overlooked. Now, there's also something that I'm personally enjoying, and that is that by researching, writing a book, I'm personally getting better at what I do. I think, you know, I've run my own businesses for over 25 years, but the field of communication is constantly changing. There are new research papers being becoming available, and I've mentioned some of them on this podcast. There's the impact of new technologies on communication that are fundamentally shifting the domain of PR, especially as I mentioned since the middle of, uh, the last decade, that the impact of social media, for example. So my mission with East West PR and with the Speak PR program and this podcast is to help people running their own companies to communicate better so that you or they can be better understood and that what you're building, the people that you'd like to engage, will be more closely aligned with your vision. And in the process, they'll solve and you'll solve more problems. More value will be created and more jobs will be created and greater security will be created, which reduces stress and conflict in the world. So why, why would I not want to write about that? Now, obviously, the challenge with a book is that it is on average, or a book is on average, 60,000 to 100,000 words, you know, 180 to 250 pages, which creates, you know, obviously just an authoring challenge. Now, the beauty, of course, is that with technology we no longer need to have quite the same level of self-discipline or skills. One of the reasons I started this podcast is that each day, 6 days a week, I'm able to take an aspect of the Storify personalization, engage, amplify, and know methodology, this SPEAK PR, and explore one of those aspects. Research it and to share on the podcast what I've learned. Some of the learnings I already knew, some are new, some are people I'm reaching out to— professors, academics— as I've done across Scandinavia, America, all over the world now. So by doing the podcast and publishing and producing this, I'm able to both learn myself but also start to create content for the book. What I've discovered is that there is a platform— well, there are a number, but one called Otter.ai. And with Otter.ai, I can upload this podcast and get a transcript back within 2 to 5 minutes of an AI-rendered transcript for the podcast. I then put that out on Upwork, and for just $5 per script of about 2,500 words I found several people around the world, one in the Philippines, one in Canada, and one in continental Europe, who are able to then take the transcript and to polish that and make that into an article that I could put into my LinkedIn, onto my blog, onto my Facebook group, onto my Twitter. So I'm creating this great content, at least I hope it's great for you as well, about my thoughts around PR. Now, if you're running any kind of a business you'll have an authority because it's what you're doing. It's what you're being paid for. Whether you're successful, not successful, in between, going up and down like most of us, there's a story there that somebody else would like to hear that could touch and reach and support somebody else that's on that common journey. So writing a story, writing a book, a narrative about what you've learned is a great way of both articulating what you've learned but also continuing to, to learn more and to share that with other people who are also going through the journey of learning. So it seems to me that there are several different types of books. There are the biographies like the Richard Branson Like a Virgin, for example. There are lots of these books, the Steve Jobs biographies, how he got to that place. And those are all very valuable and worthwhile. The only issue is, well, we learn about them, but that's kind of their personal journey. Then there are the sort of how-to and life stories, the books like the Kawasaki Rich Dad Poor Dad that's made a huge impression on a great number of people, including me, taking sort of an observation about society and how we live our lives And we have people like Malcolm Gladwell writing books like Outlier in that area as well. And then we've got the how-to books, which are perhaps, you know, the core element of the business category and probably more in tune with what I'm doing with Speak PR, which are really how to learn what other companies have done and some processes. So if we look at, for example, the best Benjamin Graham book called The Intelligent Investor, which is ranked as one of the best all-time books, published in 1949. Warren Buffett still credits that as being the, the best book that he's ever read on investing. There was Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, which is the book really talking about whether we should stay in the industry and the trend that we're currently in, or whether we should break free and create something new. And Steve Jobs apparently used this as an explanation for why Apple needed to change and to embrace cloud computing. And Jeff Bezos apparently has also used this book as well. So these books that are about strategy, and there's a great futurist called Daniel Burrus, and I read his books and his podcasts about what the hard trends and the soft trends are And it gave me, back 10 years ago when I first heard him speak in Singapore, an insight into this idea of always-on, a knowledge-driven, geography-independent enterprise powered really by the internet and growth of storage and a reduction of the cost of communication. Then there are books which one person suggests, uh, is one of the best, is called Business Adventures. By John Brooks, which was sent by Bill Gates to Warren Buffett apparently. And that's really an omnibus book which talks about all the different big disasters like the Ford Motor Company Edsel, which apparently cost them $350 million, the rise and fall of Xerox, for example. Now, in the same way that the Jim Collins, uh, Good to Great and then Built to Last books have created really paradigms for other entrepreneurs to work within. So we can all have different kinds of books that we like to read that give us inspiration and sometimes comfort. One of the books I personally like to read and am reading is The Confessions of a Pricing Man by Herman Simon. And this is a book all about the impact of pricing on all manner of aspects of life. And he talks about how they changed the pricing model for the German railways and increased take-up for season tickets and increased utilization on the trains purely through a different model of pricing. I like that book because I'm not a numbers person, I'm a marketing person, so I think brands and messaging And that book reminds me that it doesn't matter how good the product or bad the product is, there's a price element that, that triggers consumption by a person, a consumer, or a company. So I personally look for books that take me out of my own domain and take me into places that otherwise I wouldn't possibly know about. So I'm personally taking a course. There's a lady called Karen Williams here in the UK who is a book coach, calls herself the Book Lady, and she even writes books about writing books. So, uh, how cool is that? There's now an industry on helping people to write books. She has a very nice methodology using a platform called Carter, which is helping people like me that have got ideas but don't know how to structure them into a long-form document. And of course, this is why we have that authority when we write books is because it's showing that we have a continuity of thought that's greater than an 800-word article or a tweet. And when people are looking for authority, they're looking for someone who has a mastery of the subject matter, someone who can guide them through a bigger, a bigger phase of their growth or their company. Now, if you've got a mastery of any subject What could you possibly be sharing either with your own book or as a contributor? So it doesn't necessarily mean that we have to hunker down and write 60,000 words or speak 60,000 words. There are lots of people writing lots of books right now that need subject matter expertise. It's possible then to be a contributor or a partner. It's also possible to have someone to help ghostwrite your book, but your company and/or you will have some methodologies or some theories that make it unique. Are there ways that it could become part of a long-form paper which then becomes a book? Now, Warren Buffett apparently reads 500 pages a day, and he said knowledge works like compound interest. Bill Gates reads 50 books each year, which is amazing, and Zuckerberg apparently said that he was going to read a book every other week. I don't manage that kind of volume, I have to confess, but I do make an effort to listen to podcasts, which is why I'm doing this, because I think this is a great way of communicating. But in public relations, books play a key role for everybody and every company that would like to be seen as an authority, either writing their own book or participating in another book or being the subject of a book, inviting an author to come in and even write about your company and what you're doing, case studies, for example. What we hope to do then by writing a book is to get into the mainstream of consciousness by writing a book which is far greater than an article or an interview. But it's also part of a legacy. My father, Professor W.L.G. James, has written a number of books including Fiction and the Working Man, which was his Oxford thesis. His works are meticulously researched, and I've read them, and I have to say it's amazing the level of his intellect and the resource. And the— and it's the reason why after all of these years he's still sought after as a public speaker. The knowledge that we attain and how we put that down into the book could be great for public relations, but it also has to be a great investment of our time and the time of our readers. So if you're thinking about reading a book, I encourage you to do that. If you've got books you've read you'd like to share, please send me an email to jim@eastwestpr.com. I'd love to hear that. If you like this podcast, ask you to leave a rating and a review, and even leave any books that you'd like us to talk about in future issues. In the meantime, thank you for listening to Speak PR. This is an ongoing series of podcasts. We have more at eastwestpr.com. We also have the Speak PR program with all the documents and the videos available for download today.