Plays Well With Others to Become an Instant Author

What would you and your colleagues think of jointly creating a tips booklet? Each of you contributes several tips, has someone else oversee all of the production, and gives you ideas for marketing it. Each colleague shares in the costs, making the entire thing not only palatable price-wise but an exciting prospect and even fun to do instead of some kind of drudgery. It's very possible this is a solution that just had not yet come to mind. I can almost see you sitting there saying “yes, that's perfect.”

Collaboration is far from being a new thing. Book anthologies are done all the time. Cookbooks have been created just this way for years and years, with each person in a particular group contributing their favorite recipe. The hugely successful "Chicken Soup" series is probably one of the best known anthologies of recent times. It's just taken awhile to realize that the same thing can be done with tips booklets, and done within any self-contained, self- formed group rather than only a publisher of an anthology gathering unrelated people together to create the book.

Look around you. You probably have colleagues, a circle of professional friends, people you utilize as a sounding board, as a mastermind, as a respite from your daily process. And you each like doing the work you've prepared yourself to do, whether it's being a business coach, a hypnotist, a retailer, an artist, a realtor, or endless other possibilities. Yet you also love the idea of being a published author, seeing your name in print, someday, when you get around to it, when the stars and planets are aligned just perfectly. Or the idea of expanding an existing product line appeals to you, and a booklet seems to be the ideal answer for that.

Several years ago, a group of veteran professional organizers wanted to create a revenue stream for themselves so they did not have to tap the general budget of the umbrella association to which they belonged. About 100 organizers (104, to be exact) each contributed several tips. We then selected one tip from each person and created a booklet for the group. To date, the booklet has brought in over twenty-five thousand dollars ($25,000!) of direct revenue for that group of veteran organizers, without really marketing it. The great thing about that booklet is that it serves as both a revenue stream for the group plus it markets the business of each contributor in the booklet as well as the entire industry of professional organizing. You'll find the individual person’s name, business name, and city of each contributor right under their tip. Every organizer whose tip is in that booklet instantly became a published author.

But wait, there's more. Each and every booklet that a co-author distributes markets every other co-author in the booklet. Plus (and this is just so terrific) the booklet is of great interest to reporters and journalists in the media who love to interview more than one person for any article they write. It's a ready-made mechanism for getting lots and lots of publicity.

I recently started a conversation with a representative from a group of about 15 health care professionals in related areas of expertise, exploring the idea of the group jointly co-authoring a booklet. Each person in the group contributes a handful of tips, shares in the production costs (bringing that way down), and becomes a published author. This takes much less time, m0ney, and brain damage than if any one of these people wrote a complete booklet themselves. That's not to say they won't ever do one on their own. It just means they will get one done probably sooner through the collaboration of this tips booklet anthology, and they will expand their reach every time any other co-author distributes this booklet.

Has your mind started racing about who to approach to do a booklet with you? You don't have to be best pals with a colleague or love everyone in your mastermind group or agree with every pearl that comes out of every coach in your Special Interest Group, or think that each person at the recent chamber of commerce meeting was the most brilliant person you ever met. You don't even need to live anywhere near each other in order to put together a collaborative booklet. All you need is to find a group of people interested in contributing some tips in a somewhat related field. Depending on the size of the group, it may be one or two tips each, or 10-12 tips. In either case, it's a minor amount of time, effort, and m0ney to instantly become a published author.

© 2005, Paulette Ensign