How to digitally publish a book

Finding an offline publisher is damn difficult. Honestly, getting denied time over time again isn’t that bad, feedback improved and fueled my writing and made the book to what it is today. Yet, what is content if it doesn’t reach the audience? If the knowledge stays on my computer, nobody benefits. Hence, flipping the perspective and practicing what I preach, I decided to publish by myself, digitally, piece by piece.

With the ‘home’ of my book at my .com, I share the knowledge on Medium, LinkedIn and Twitter. With the sole objective of making the content world a little bit better and inspiring others to raise their own content bar. No financial objectives, except for me to claim my leadership in the content industry. The benefit for all is more qualitative and relevant content to fulfills our needs, and less crappy content that gets pushed in your and my timelines.

An extract of what you need to publish digitally.

What you need:

How to distribute what tag, to which audience, by what channel? The ‘tag’ is the ‘topic’, meaning the main subject of your content item. One content item can have several tags. With these tags, you give structure to what you want to tell. Not all tags are equally interesting for all audiences. And audiences have preferred channels they use to get their desired information.

My tags are in line with the main chapters of my book plus relevant keywords that are hot in the content industry and on Google. ‘Basics’ for the basics you need to know on content. ‘Structure’ to create an overview of your content story and to give structure to your organization and team. ‘Interviews’ is pretty self-explanatory. The same goes for ‘data’, ‘tools’ and ‘process’.

Notice that the tags are not set in stone. Along the way, I add tags when relevant to my audience. I try to limit the number of tags per content item to three, maximum five. Rule of thumb, the tag has to be logical from the audience’s perspective and it has to be a keyword they could use on Google.

The brand persona is the counterpart of the (buyer) persona. Humanize your brand to be recognizable and consistent in your communication. How do you look, visual identity. How do you speak, tone of voice and lexicon. How do you sound, sonic identity.

For my book, it is quite simple. As I am the author, the brand persona is me, myself and I. If you are a brand, you can develop the brand persona with your agency, or a bit more hands-on, by yourself. As it is no rocket science. Just imagine who you are as a brand, male/female, age, formal or very informal, etcetera. Tip: create an imagery Instagram or Facebook profile and fill in the details.

Digital publishing has, next to formatting, one big difference with the offline publishing. You need visuals. A lot more visuals. Every piece you publish needs its own visual. The content magic is in the combination between the image and your words.

Finding great visuals is one of the most difficult parts of writing. You want to stay away from the obvious usual suspect stock imagery. Your own supply is limited or, even worse, outdated. And create new bespoke visuals takes time and eat budget. How to get great visuals, by preference something original and for free?

Failing to plan, is planning to fail. Simple. To keep myself accountable, I created a planning in excel. When, what, where.

You can use fancy tools, in all honesty, if your organization isn’t that big, just start with an excel, learn and improve along the way. The only requirement is that you update this document continuously to keep track and to prepare timely.

Keep on learning and improving. Stay open for feedback. And hungry for more. A growth mindset is the most precious character trait you can learn.

You have to have some balls. It ain’t easy nor a walk in the park to publish a book digitally. Next to the time it takes, expect feedback, positive and negative. There are a lot of hmmm …. weird … people in the digital space. Some want to fiercely express their own opinion or do blatantly their sales pitch. Expect this, accept this, embrace it and move on.

Personally, I love this duality. On one side, the energy I get from sharing the knowledge, getting the feedback to improve together, and getting the praise and compliments. On the other side, the mirror of the society to broaden my horizon with different opinions and visions.

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