Peter Winick argues that authors should stop creating new material constantly and instead repurpose existing work into multiple formats. A popular book chapter can become an assessment tool, video series, or questionnaire without the creator needing to master each format themselves.
Peter Winick here with Thought Leadership Leverage, and today we're talking about repurposing your content with purpose. So what does that mean? What that means is that people that create content— authors, thought leaders, etc.— tend to do it in one format and one medium, usually the written word, although not exclusively. The written word might be books, It might be articles. Depends on how you've traditionally gotten that content out there. What you need to do is think about what else you can do with that existing content. So by default, most creatives, most thought leaders, given a block of free time, gravitate towards creating something new or doing some new research or creating a new model or something different with it. And that's fine and that's great, but understand the drivers and the reasons that you're doing that. You're probably doing that to solve a creative need As opposed to leveraging a business opportunity. From a business perspective, I'm a big fan of repurposing. So if there's a chapter in your book that you know is just a really great chapter, it's the one that people always ask you about when you meet them for the first time, you can take that and you might be able to turn it into an assessment tool. You may be able to turn that into a series of 3-minute videos. You may even be able to turn that into a tool for a manager to use to ask questions of his employees. There are a lot of things that you can do. You don't have to be the expert in doing all of these things. Consider it like translation. When your book is published in Finland, it does not mean you need to go out and learn Finnish. You find someone that knows the language. Converting to different mediums works much the same way. You just need to find some folks to help you. And I think it's important to make sure that you are constantly thinking about your content as an asset and you're constantly thinking about how to leverage those assets. Thank you, and I appreciate your time. Thank you.
