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Interviewer: So, for someone looking to increase their visibility and their credibility of themselves and their business, how would a book help them do that?
Interviewee: Yeah, well another area of business that I think a lot of people if they’re experts and they’ve got expertise they should be doing is getting more speaking engagements and being on stage. It’s a very leveraged way of sharing your message and connecting with people that might be interested in your message. I know when we published our first book it really helped us to find new speaking engagements because we had an excuse, we could say right, we’re now the authors of XYZ book, I mean our book at the time was called “The Grillers of Barnado’s” and people instantly, you know people that book and find speakers are like, yeah there’s an instant credibility around that saying I’ve got a book so from that side actually getting in there is good but from the other side building new speaking experience, you’re going to have to do a lot of free gigs and a great way of making sure you get paid even if you’re not getting paid directly is to have some product to sell at the back of the room, so having books with you, you can work out how many books you’re likely to sell, take a little pile of books along, you know I may have made a couple of hundred quid but it was worth it cause I’m in front of the audience again it’s being paid to promote your business rather than paying or not being paid at all to promote business and the great thing is there is a set of celebrity factor signing a book I mean I was a nobody I had, this was a self-published book but people were oh can you sign my book and then other people see what’s this person that’s having his books signed and you get queues forming, it’s a really interesting effect and people want to talk to you afterwards there’s so much credibility so I would always say if you’re planning on adding speaking to part of your marketing mix if you’ve got a book first it makes the job a lot easier because you can get paid even if you’re not being paid directly and you’re more likely to be booked because you’ve got that authority factor from being an author.
Interviewer: And then of course you’ve got the lead through to the sale after that because you’ve got all those people that have bought the book, I’m one of those people that buys books when I hear people speak because if I like them I want to know more about them, it’s that foot that’s the lead in to be able to then take the next step and then use you for your services.
Interviewee: And if you’ve got somebody else handling the sales process the great thing is, I mean this is actually a trick if you are a speaker once you’re finished run back to your table and sit behind the books cause people always want to talk to the speaker.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Interviewee: If they see actually there is a queue forming and there’s a book on the table you can literally presuppose they’re going to buy the book and say “would you like this signed?” And so then people, you save your time then for people that were genuinely engaged in your message and are ready to make the move on that relationship a bit so that was a useful thing I found but you’ve got to run back if you’re taking your own orders being there ready to sign and getting them on the table. If somebody else is taking your orders, this goes back to your point, you should ask them if they want an invoice or actually insist because then you get their email address then you can follow up with them.
Interviewer: Of course.
Interviewee: And how nice would it be that the speaker that they’ve just seen so there’s my level of credibility who is also an author, then calls them personally to find out what they thought about what they said, it could be a very powerful way of growing business.