Guest post by Chloë Thomas

Recently I published my fourth business book. It’s called Customer Manipulation: How to Influence your Customer to Buy More and Why an Ethical Approach Always Wins. I write books because they are a great way for me to market my other services and products.

Whilst writing this one I pondered why I chose to use books as my main profile raising activity, and I believe it’s because it’s a marketing method that really suits me and my introverted nature. (Although of course it’s not all gravy, I’m sending in this piece a week late because all the social media promotion of launch left me too worn out to think straight! So I spent the weekend in the cave – and now I’m back up and at it.)

The writing process
In order to write a book you need to have something to write about, and in order to write a good book you need to have a well thought through idea or model. Whether it is fiction or non-fiction the book has to have a clear ‘arc’. Coming up with one of these involves a lot of thinking, mulling, and rolling ideas over and over again around your head – extroverts really struggle with that!

Sitting down and writing is also a process that can only be achieved on your own. Even if that on your own requires you to be in a public place (I do some of my best writing on trains, in fact I’m writing this on the train from London to Birmingham).

The production process
To get a book into print (paperback, audiobook, and ebook formats) requires a number of skilled individuals.

The good news is that platforms like Upwork are full of very talented people with each of these skills. Using such tools means this part of the process can be managed with the minimum of people time – I haven’t spoken to any of my freelancers, and all have been great at clear written communication.

Your part of the production process (endless proofing and checking) is also very introvert friendly. You HAVE to block out half a day here and half a day there to sit down and go over the manuscript.

Once all the files are ready it’s easy to create accounts and upload each format into the relevant Amazon selling platform. There’s KDP for ebooks, ACX for audiobooks, and Createspace for print – that’s 3 more supplier relationships you don’t have to build or maintain.

The launch and promotion
Unfortunately this is where it becomes less introvert friendly.

As I write this it is week 5 of launch activity (the book published 10 days ago) and I’m on my journey home after 3 days promoting in London. I’ve chaired a conference, presented at a breakfast networking event, and run my own book launch party. Yesterday afternoon I holed up in my hotel room slept and watched TV in order to have enough energy for the evening’s party.

I’ve chosen to do several F2F (face-to-face) events to promote the book, you don’t have to. But the online activity is almost more tiring than the F2F stuff. For the last 3 weeks I’ve been encouraging my launch team (and anyone else I can think of) to help me promote the launch, that’s involved a LOT of individual emails, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and much more. It’s utterly exhausting, but great to consolidate so much connecting and promotion into one chunk.

It will be worth it
The book enables me to spend time with 1,000s of people around the globe. Explaining my ideas and convincing them that I have something important to say and help them with.

It also forces me, every time I launch a new one, to reconnect with all the people I’ve met over the years – bringing in new opportunities.

The book proves to event organisers that I’m worth paying attention to, that I am a great addition to their conference line up. It gets me more speaking gigs, at higher fees.

The book shows potential partners that I’d be a great person to write their white papers, or guest blogs.

All these things an extrovert can achieve through networking and lots of relationship building. I chose to do it in a way that suits me – by writing and launching my book.

About Chloë:
Chloë Thomas is an eCommerce expert focused on eCommerce strategy and marketing, author of 4 books, keynote speaker, and host of the eCommerce MasterPlan Podcast. eCommerce MasterPlan is the result of years of experience, and exists to help eCommerce people make better decisions as they build their path to success.