On February 28, 2007, I have been asked to speak on the seven secrets of publishing your own book.  I’m not sure there are any secrets when publishing a book, but the seven “topics” I’ve chosen to talk about are topics that would-be self-publishers I speak with every day find useful.  I hope you will find these topics useful as well.  Here’s the first topic - A book is not just a book.

Secret Number One - A Book is not Just a Book

We traditionally think of books as 9 inch by 6 inch pages of words printed on 60# Offset paper - something a little nicer than the paper that comes out of your office printer - and then softback bound with a flashy color cover.  Of course, these books might be hardback bound, but the principle is the same.  We think of books as something we hold in our hands and read in airplanes or in bed or while lying on white plastic chairs on white sandy beaches.

But today, a book can be an ebook we download directly from an author’s website, or it might be an audio book we listen to on our iPods while running around the park or it might be a seminar we attend.  That’s right, a book might be a seminar.

ZDocs prints books for Will Marre.  You may not know Will, but Mr. Marre co-founded the Covey institute.  Most of you probably know Steven Covey, the author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.”   What you might not know is that Steven Covey struggled to write his “Book.”  Every time he sat down at a word processor to get his thoughts on paper, he lost his voice.  (I’m basing this story on a Podcast I downloaded from Will Marre.)

One day, according to Will, Will and Steven realized that the best way to write the book was to record Steven’s seminars.  So yes, a book can be a seminar. 

A book is nothing more than the organized thoughts of an author.  A book is not the jumbled words an author might write on napkins and scratch paper and then copied and bound together, but rather a book is the thoughtful organization of those thoughts.  For me, the main purpose of a book is to help the author communicate his or her ideas to an audience.  To effectively communicate, the author needs to formulate his or her ideas into words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters. 

Each year, over 2.5 million authors seek to publish their books with mainstream publishers.  These books are memoirs, business books, political books, novels, cookbooks, fitness books you name it.  The human race wants to share ideas and since the time of Guttenberg (you know, that guy who created the printing press), the most common way for us to communicate complex ideas is by printing our words on paper and binding them together.

But the world is changing.  We must embrace all forms of communication including books, CDs, ebooks, audio books, and so forth.  An author has spent hundreds of hours organizing his or her thoughts in order to communicate a complex idea to an audience and authors today need to be ready to share their “books” with their readers (listeners, viewers, etc.) in many different ways.

Original post by Phil Davis, ZDocs