Peter Winick runs a podcast and a firm that helps authors and thought leaders amplify their work. He works with the creators and the people who support them: publicists, ghostwriters, speechwriters. Books don't make money directly, he says, but they should be part of a bigger content strategy.
You're probably thinking, or not, we're not ASUs, the F word, but who is this guy and why should you listen to anything I have to say other than you're sort of trapped in a room? So let me just tell you a little bit about me, it's one of my favorite topics. So I know a couple of smart people, so I've been doing this a long time, you can see me probably 20, 30 pounds ago and without a beard, so I've gotten fat and gray, I think that's a selling point. I talk with a lot of interesting people. So I have a podcast that I started about 18 months ago, and on that podcast, and we talked about podcasting earlier, I get to talk to really amazing and fascinating people. And I do that in a very tight way. So all we do at my firm is work with authors, thought leaders, and speakers that have content that they want to get out into the world in a bigger way. So that's all that, you know, so 80% of the people I talk to look like that, and the other 20% are of service to them. So these are people, maybe publicists, maybe ghostwriters, maybe speechwriters, people that develop cool content. So I'm sort of like all content all the time. My brain is like the CNN of like a nerdgram or something. And it gives us an interesting vantage point to see what people are doing globally, what people are doing to deal with the millennial problem and the microlearning, what people are doing that's cutting edge, what people are doing that isn't working. So that, I've also been involved with lots of books. So people have heard of books, they used to be pretty popular. They're still fairly popular. We look at books, we're not book publicists, but most of our clients have written a book or are in the process of writing a book. And to us, again, if you're in the content business, a book is just one place that your content is represented. It is the worst place for it to be monetized because there are very, very, very few people that can actually do the math on the book. However, whether they got a big fat advance, which doesn't really exist anymore, or they self-publish, but number of units sold times profit per book, horrible business. Integrating it in, in a systematic way as part of your content and thought leadership, great business.
