This morning marks the official release of my first book - The BuyerSphere Project. You can find links to a digital preview, the full digital copy and the order page on Amazon.com at
http://www.enquiro.com/thebuyersphere/
The book is the result of a fairly extensive research project we did at Enquiro this year, looking at B2B buying behaviors from inside hundreds of organizations. I'll be doing a number of posts giving you some sneak peeks inside the book over the coming weeks, but today, I wanted to give you a little of the background that lead up to it.
I've been threatening for sometime to write a book, but let me tell you, this was never the book I intended to write. I've actually been struck in talking to other authors about just how many "unintentional" books actually get written. This is one of them. It just "sort of happened" this year and I thought it might provide a great chance to test the waters of authorship and self publishing, allowing me to get my feet wet before I actually write the book (which has since become books..plural) that I first set out to write. As I said, the book evolved from research we conducted at Enquiro and white papers I wrote to promote the research. After I wrote the first paper, one of our sponsors said, "This reads more like a book than a white paper." Which, of course, was the point where my best laid intentions went off the rail. The next thing I knew, I was writing a book.
As an evolutionary off-shoot, The BuyerSphere Project differs from my mythical "intended" book in several ways -
- It's written for a very specific audience - I know this is not a book for the masses
- It's research heavy, so it's not for readers who blanch at the site of charts and graphs
- I made the decision that with the number of graphics in it required by the research, it had to be printed in full color, making it quite expensive to print (hence the relatively hefty $39 price tag)
- It's a bit of a strange hybrid between a research analyst's presentation, a business marketing how to book and a psychological/neurological who-dun-it, resulting in a certain narrative unevenness. It is what it is.
- It does not take the leisurely road in exploring concepts. It packs a lot of information into a relatively small number of pages. It's euphemistically been described as "an epiphany smorgasbord", slightly less diplomatically as "intellectually dense" and finally as a "fire hose". Again, it is what it is.
I admit, I'm going into this as naive as can be. This is all totally new territory for me. I had talked to a number of successful authors hoping that they would all offer some consensus on the right path to take, and my hopes were dashed pretty much from the first conversation. It seemed that every piece of advice conflicted with every other piece of advice.
Publishing is a scary thing for an author. It's taking your reputation - your very thoughts - and putting a price tag on it. The one thing I heard over and over is this piece of advice: "Don't expect to sell many books. That's not why you write a book. You write them because you have to." Okay..as ambiguous as that advice is, I think I get it. I have tried to keep from developing any expectations at all for this book. I'm looking at it as a fortuitous opportunity that I had to take advantage of - a learning experience.
No matter what happens, I've already been rewarded. It's been fun so far!