Why Publish

I recently developed a poster for Beaver's Pond Press to describe reasons to publish. Beaver's Pond exists to help authors produce their books and market them--but like any good publisher Beaver's Pond warns writers that making money isn't realistic as a sole or even primary reason to write and publish.

Why Publish?

Not for money alone.

Publish to share knowledge
Publish to entertain
Publish to inspire
Publish because you have to
Publish to learn
Publish to teach
Publish to honor others
Publish to change lives
Publish to challenge yourself
Publish to grow


Publish for these reasons,
and you will profit from publishing.

© 2008 Beaver’s Pond Press

To share knowledge
A bit of a no-brainer. You can't share ideas without taking them public.

To entertain
Many writers disregard this. A publisher will consider any book's entertainment value: its ability to hold the reader's attention. A book doesn't have to be funny to do that.

To inspire
A good book breathes new life into ideas, events, experience, knowledge. Being able to do that is rewarding.

Because you have to
Many writers are compelled to tell stories, to mentor others, to persuade others, to lead, to write. They take pleasure in it. They enjoy responses they receive to their ideas.

To learn
You will learn by writing and by testing your ideas against reader's responses.

To teach
Another basic. To publish is to inform, and when a reader learns something new, you've become a teacher.

To honor others
Consider what you gain when you tell someone's story. You gain rare insight into that person. You create and extension of that person. It's a big responsibility.

To change lives
It's not automatic, but when it happens, your life changes, too. You won't always change lives; you won't always know when you have changed lives. But if you want to change lives, publishing a book is a good way to do it.

Challenge yourself
Writing is hard work. Writing well is harder. Publishing requires skills of many professionals. They will challenge you, too.

Grow
If you want to grow intellectually, subject your ideas to public scrutiny. Some people will be brutal; others will be thoughtful. Grow a thick skin. Listen to the criticism. The rewards are immeasurable.

About Audiences

Dan Hill, author of Emotionomics, appeared locally last week to give a fascinating presentation on the role of emotion in buyers' decisions. His point is that buying decisions are based on emotion more than they are based on rational thinking and if you, the seller, want to appeal to buyers, it behooves you to understand what kinds of emotion your products and messages about your products trigger in buyers.

These sponsored events are helpful to authors and they can be invaluable for the audiences they attract. Sponsors have the resources to advertise events and even to subsidize the cost of authors' books, making ideas and books become available to broader audiences. Sponsors go to the trouble because they are able to attract sizable audiences of prospective customers for their own services. But what sponsors do with their captive audiences matters.

Let's start with the redundant phrase "captive audience." All audiences are captive. All audiences agree to give up the freedom to engage in normal conversational give and take in return for a promise of something interesting and valuable. We sit still in front of a stand up comic in return for a promise of laughter. We listen to speeches without the expectation of giving our own two cents in return for new, relevant information. We turn the pages of a book and stay with it as long as it delivers on the promise to solve a problem, be entertaining, or provide information we don't already have. The sponsor delivered on that promise by giving us access to Hill's presentation.

Smart sponsors understand the rules of the game and ride the coattails of the excellent speakers they sponsor. They become associated with the same qualities as their speakers. In this case, the sponsor had a shot at demonstrating to 300 business owners that, like Dan Hill, it was an innovator in market research.

But then the sponsor spoke. Big mistake. After Hill's engaging presentation the sponsor trotted out one of its own happy customers who, while reading from slides, bored us to death with the details of a case study in which the sponsor, surprise, delivered more than it promised. Dan had just demonstrated that marketing success is based on getting people to feel, so the sponsor wades through a half-hour of tedious detail--in the voice of one of its customers--with information designed to get us all to think. The session mercifully ended and many wiped the sleep from their eyes even as they stumbled for the exits. I personally was filled with confidence that we were in the presence of a company whose arrogance knows no multinational boundaries.

Authors, don't bore your audiences with irrelevant detail and self-serving third-person testimony. Give them information from reliable, sincere, authentic sources, and then stop. Readers will love you for it. And they'll buy your books.