Time, or the lack thereof, and e-books

I had fully intended to be a weekly blogger, but I can see that my fantasy will not come true. “Client work comes first” is a phrase used in our office, and this blog tends to come last after other nonclient work is done. My new goal is to be a monthly blogger. We’ll see how that goes.

Today I participated in a webinar by David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. He’s a dynamic speaker, and it was one of the most informative, entertaining sessions I’ve experienced in my quest to learn about social media and its applications to public relations and marketing.

Of great interest to me in my publishing role were his success stories regarding e-books. (I’m going from my hastily scribbled notes; any errors in fact are entirely mine.)

• Dr. Helaine Smith, a dentist, decided to abandon her Yellow Pages advertising completely and start a blog to promote her dental services. She then wrote an e-book titled “Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex” (yes, that’s the title) and put a Creative Commons license on it so others could distribute it for her without having to pay a fee. Promoting the e-book through her blog, and then allowing others to promote and distribute it in the blogosphere and beyond resulted in an increase in annual revenue from $150,000 to over a million dollars for her dental practice. The American Dental Association apparently was horrified, but who can argue with that kind of ROI?
• Jeff Ernst, vice president at Kadient, a company that “streamlines sales cycles,” experienced similar success for his company by publishing an e-book titled The New Rules of Sales Enablement. He also put a Creative Commons license on it and allowed interested parties to download the book entirely free from the company Web site—no registration required, no lead-baiting. The book has been quoted on Web sites, blogs, and in the mainstream media, enhancing Kadient’s brand image and increasing sales.

Scott was quick to point out, in both these cases, that the books were well designed, and the example pages he showed in his presentation looked very good. To me, that was a critical point of their success—no one wants to read a badly designed book, even if it’s free.