Dr. Nanette Miner has gone the traditional publishing and self-publishing routes, and after navigating both, she’s a strong advocate of self-publishing.
Nanette is the author of eight business books, including her most recent one, Future-Proofing Your Organization by Teaching Thinking Skills. Nanette also authored 101 Media & Marketing Tips For The Sole Proprietor, and there’s a fascinating story behind this book’s origins, which you can discover in this episode.
The ease of self-publishing in the digital age is the deciding factor for Nanette, founder of The Training Doctor; a consulting firm focused on organizational leadership.
Nanette began writing in the 90s, before the Internet existed, and when she self-published back then she even had to start her own publishing company to publish and distribute her books.
This extensive experience means Nanette has an impressive depth of knowledge about writing, publishing, and distribution.
Top Takeaway: Self-Publishing Is Easy In The Digital Age
She tells show host Josh Steimle: “Just being available on Amazon makes self-publishing the choice.
“If you use your keywords correctly, and people have a need for what you're writing on, then they just find you by default, which they would never do in a bookstore, they would never do by just getting on the internet and hoping that they found a book. When people have a need for a book they know to go to Amazon.”
Nanette’s primary concern about traditional publishers is the lack of marketing of books. “They don't really market your book for you and everything that any author has ever said is true: It’s that writing up the book is the easy part. It's the marketing that's the hard part.”
For Nanette the writing is the part that she loves, and the marketing not so much. “Once I understood how self-publishing worked, it was much easier to just replicate that process with different topics.”
She got around the marketing issue by writing on specific topics and working with either partners or professional associations to get a book out to an audience. And, of course, she has a significant following, which makes marketing a book easier.
More Control With Self-Publishing
Nanette also appreciates having more control over her work, including book titles, although sometimes this can occasionally provoke controversy.
The response to her most recent book, Future-Proofing Your Organization by Teaching Thinking Skills, was that people thought she was insulting them with the title.
Explains Nanette: “People were like ‘You're insulting us with this title, Increase Thinking Skills . . .you’re saying we can’t think’.
“And then I had a meeting with a mentor, and she said ‘But really, what you're saying is you want people to be better leaders. So why don't you change it to how to increase leadership skills’.”
Ultimately, Nanette left the subtitle but now just refers to the book as simply Future Proofing Your Organization, and she’s able to capture people’s attention this way.
However, she does feel strongly about improving thinking skills in the education system. “Truly, in my opinion, it comes down to fill-in-the-blank tests, because what we taught kids to do was look for only one right answer, because you can only choose from A, B, C, or D so that we can put it through a scan machine and give your test score and to determine if you're a smart or not.”
But, she says, that's not how the real world operates. There's multiple right answers, and you have to have the thinking ability to critically choose the best, and it may not be the best, but you at least put some thought into it. So that's the part (of the book) that actually grabs people because they realize ‘You're right’.”
This explains why Nanette is such a big fan of reading. She tells Josh: “If you are able to read in different interest areas, you become a more critical thinker, because you're like, “Oh, man, this economy thing is not matching up with this finance thing, which is not matching up with this historical thing . . . You start to see connections.
“So that's really what I'm trying to get people to realize. It's the education process that created this learner, this learning process. And we have to clip it in corporate America, or we're just going to have a bunch of people who don't have enough critical thinking skills to run business.”
Be Regimented
Nanette’s advice to entrepreneurs wanting to write a book is to: “Just do it. With Amazon the risk for you is so low, so just do it, get it out there as a credential, and and you can update it as you feel fit . . . it’s a blessing to have the technology to do that.”
She also recommends that writers be regimented about their writing. In her case, she made sure she wrote 1,000 words a day. “It doesn't matter if it's drivel, I just go back and edit it later. The important part is to get the thoughts.
Nanette narrates her books and articles, partly because she is more verbose when she’s talking than when I'm writing. So she tends to speak her articles or chapters first, and then, thanks to rev.com, she doesn’t even have to retype them.
Links
TheTrainingDoctor.com
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