The chicken and the egg...
If you have no speaking career at this stage, maybe a great book will catapult your speaking career forward? Or maybe you need to develop your speaking career further first and then do a book. If you have already started to invest in getting yourself geared up to become a pro-speaker, then a really good book will certainly help you in this area. If you have some great concepts, passion for your beliefs, and a history of success behind you, then you need to get yourself out there already presenting your ideas and knowledge, writing articles, and establishing a presence for your brand in the market place. You don't have to wait for a book to be able to do that.
You'll need to decide if you want to invest in literature as a tool for promoting your speaking career. The Return on Investment in a book is not measurable... Simply because you have not yet committed to doing anything with it, and because the payoff most likely won't be in sales of the book itself, but more from other things, such as speaker fees increasing, more exposure by media as an expert in your field, or increased enquiry for your consulting services.
The best case scenario is this: You make your book happen (write, edit, produce it etc), put some serious effort into promoting it and you get a lot of people talking about it. The Public Relations required to launch it well could mean an additional investment of anything from $200 - $20,000 - depending on so many variables.
Once your book is on the market and you have some build-up of publicity around it, then your speaker services become more in demand, and your fees can increase accordingly. Authors definitely can command a higher fee than a speaker or consultant who is unpublished.
You could use one book successfully to launch yourself onto the world market if you (as a speaker) and it (the book) are good enough and determined enough to make that happen. You can also drive bargains with corporate business sponsors to get their endorsements and sponsorship funding to help really offset the costs and spin it into a major deal worth thousands... ie, Employment and Manufacturers Associations, Chambers of Commerce, business development agencies, private companies from within your industry - if they love it, this could easily happen.
Note - This is NOT an overnight success thing - in fact most overnight success stories are at least 1000 nights in the making.
Worst case scenario is this: You make the book happen, spend $20,000 on getting it to market etc, and you sell 530 copies*, give several hundred away, get a handful of low-medium paid speaking engagements out of it, and then decide to move on and write or speak about something completely different. For your investment, you end up with some reasonable interest in your ideas, and it ultimately leads to a fantastic job offer by someone who notices how amazing you are at what ever you do. In 5 years time, you still have a few boxes of books sitting on your garage floor, but have enjoyed some really interesting experiences during your career as an author.
*500 copies sold would give you roughly half of your investment back... not great ROI, but like I said, you have to decide what your expectations are of this book.
Don't go into this assuming you will make lots of money... most likely you wont. Or if you do, it could take 2 - 3 years to cover your costs.
On the up side, a great example of the success of one of our authors is how he managed to tap into the financial market players, got an agreement by one very large company to take 5000 copies on release, with their name and endorsement note in the book, which more than covered the cost of the entire exercise. In the process, this early success catapulted him to the attention of other companies and media who all started to sit up and pay attention BIG TIME. John has done some heavy pushing of his book at the market he's targeting... he's aiming to sell 10,000 in it's first year, and I'm quite expecting that he will do it too.
Getting a second opinion If you have a book already written, but are unsure of whether or not it really will set the world on fire - put it in front of a few people... you can easily do that. You can also spend some time in the bookstores locally and see what else is out there that comes close to your book content and concept. You really do need to do this. However you also need to decide what's in your heart, where this is likely to take you and how much are you prepared to work at making it brilliant.
Maria Carlton is an award winning business operator, brand communications expert for SMEs and international bestselling author and speaker. Her books and seminars make people think, take action and move forward easily. Maria is also founder and CEO of Maruki Books - specialising in assisting professional experts to create and market non-fiction books.
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