The written word is a part of every day life. At its most basic, writing is a way of communicating. This is the one inalienable characteristic of writing itself, whether you’re communicating with a colleague or friend or you’re actually communicating with yourself – though a shopping list, for instance.
Writing a book has been huge for me. Here are 12 reasons you—regardless of what you do–should write a book, but especially if you are an entrepreneur, consultant, or other type of influencer.
1. Education. When you write, you learn. But that’s only the beginning. I interviewed 30 chief marketing officers for my book. Do you think I learned a thing or two about that role? About marketing? You betcha. I’ve also learned how to conduct important interviews long distance, how to market a book, how to work with editors and publishers, how the book writing and publishing process goes, and on and on.
2. Connections. In conducting 30 interviews with top marketers I not only connected with them, but with their assistants, PR reps, and all the other CMOs I wasn’t able to interview but still connected with. I would estimate I added more than 500 new connections on LinkedIn as a direct result of writing my book. That doesn’t include all the connections I’ll make afterthe book is published.
3. Content marketing. In Content Inc. by Joe Pulizzi he tells everyone to write a book. It’s great content marketing. Writing a book brings attention back to you, your business, or might help you launch a new business.
4. Credibility. It’s a lot of work to write a book. I can’t believe how much work it has taken to write my book, and I didn’t even write it! I just interviewed people and am publishing those interviews, but oh, the work that went into getting those interviews, scheduling them successfully (in one case I rescheduled with the interviewee 10 times and it still never worked out), getting the interviews transcribed (that’s where my advance went), then edited (more expense), editing myself, getting release forms, then endorsements, etc. Once you write a book you gain credibility simply because not that many people do it. It sets you apart from the vast majority who haven’t.
5. Confidence. Completing a book is a big ego booster, even if nobody reads it. Just the fact you took on such a large project and finished it is something you can always look back on with satisfaction. You’ll know that writing a book is hard, but you can do hard things. If people like your book so much the better.
6. Material. Writing a book means you have lots of material to use in ebooks, blog posts, articles, podcasts, video, infographics, etc. Going back to content marketing, you can use parts of your book in a hundred ways to produce content that will generate leads for your business and sell more books.
7. Therapy. Don’t get me wrong–writing a book is stressful. But so is running a marathon, and there’s something similar about the two exercises. They’re both hard, but once you’re done, you feel good. That is, you feel good a few days after you finish.
8. Service. You have knowledge and experience that can help others. You have a moral obligation to share it. Writing a book is a great way to get it out there and reach people.
9. Recruiting. All things being equal, would you like to work for the guy who has written a book on what his business does, or the guy who hasn’t written a book? As I near publishing my book I’m surprised how excited my team members are at MWI. It’s great to see them getting behind it and eager to read it and share it.
10. Pay. It’s the last reason on my list, because a lot of authors never get paid directly for the books they write–which is the case for me. I’ve already spent much more writing the book than what I got paid as an advance, and I’ll be lucky to recoup the remainder on commissions. But you could get lucky and have a runaway best seller that actually pays some bills.
11.Remove stress from mind, place on paper. Writing can be therapeutic. It can be a way to vent all the pent-up frustrations burdening your mind into a far less volatile form, paper (or screen). You can address your anger, fear, worry and stress without bludgeoning the person who embodies those emotions for you with a paperweight.
Writing can serve as a form of cathartic stress relief where you finally get to say what you can’t say out loud, in real life. Just don’t let your vented feelings get into the wrong hands, or you may end up paying some pretty hefty blackmail cash.
12. Sweep Your Mind. A daily writing habit gives you regular time to sweep your mind for forgotten tasks and ideas that have been fermenting in the back of your head without your knowledge. It allows you to take the unordered thoughts floating around your head like lost puppies in zero gravity, and turn them into ordered plans and actions.
This is the fundamental principle that the mindsweep and weekly review are based on: getting everything you can think of out of your head, and into a written format. This simple process can save your life when things are getting overwhelming and complicated.
So what’s keeping you from writing a book? Let’s talk about it in the comments below.
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