Do You Need To Write A Book?

There are many articles online that either advise you to write or don’t write books. There are even entire books devoted to the question of why you should write a book. However, even the articles which tell you not to write a book eventually tell you that writing a book could be beneficial for you.

So to directly answer the question: “Is writing a book beneficial to you?”, I would say: “Yes, it is beneficial to you.” Why? It’s because you are creating an ideal product you can sell as well as a 24/7 marketing tool for you.

An Ideal Product You Can Sell

Why do I say that books are an ideal product? Because you do not need any raw materials to create your product except paper and ink. Unlike other physical products that need other hard to get physical products as well as machines to create them, the raw material is only the thoughts and stories in your mind.

During the olden days, people wrote on animal skin, plant leaves and other materials that can record ink. But today, one only needs to produce their book in ebook or audiobook format and then it is already available for other people to read.

This is probably why there are so many books being written. The cheap or almost free cost of producing one and the relative ease it can be produced makes it an ideal product for any businessperson.

What is the ideal product anyway? An ideal product is something that can be created cheaply but can be sold at a high markup. It is also very easy to produce or gather. As we can see, books especially in the form of ebooks fit the bill on an ideal product.

A 24/7 Marketing Tool For You In Fiction

The words in your book are a physical manifestation of your thoughts. When someone reads your book, they get to know your thoughts even without getting to speak to you. Imagine if you have written a fictional fantasy book.

You have just created a fictional story, characters and world based from your thoughts of which you are the expert in it. You could market your fictional stories, characters and world and make an entirely new product line of which you are the expert.

For example, we have Walt Disney. He created stories and characters that became so famous that his company is now the biggest entertainment company in the world. Whenever for example we see Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and the others, we immediately think of Walt Disney and his company.

How did Walt Disney do it? By creating cartoon movies and by producing books so his thoughts can be present in every household even to those without television sets or who cannot go to the movies back then. This worked back then. It is still working now.

Even comics companies and similar companies are writing books. In the case of comics companies, their characters became famous because of the visual appeal and action stories of their characters.

However, they realize that there are people who want a deeper understanding of the characters and the stories which the comics or movie media can’t provide. Only books, which has the capability to fully capture human thoughts would fit the bill. That is why many people collect books.

A 24/7 Marketing Tool For You In Non-Fiction

If writing fiction lets you create fictional worlds in which you become the expert, then writing non-fiction books makes you an academic expert. Perhaps this is best explained by examples like that of self-help book writing.

There are now many books on the topic of self-help or self-improvement. Are there university and college courses on self-help or self-improvement? Yes, there are. It’s funny when you think about it. It’s funny because you wouldn’t think that such a simple idea of improving yourself could be marketed to a full blown course.

You might not be able to open up a university or college, but you could write a book and make it available online for anyone to read. Once people become aware of your knowledge through your book, you can then offer these same people your other products.

These other products could be in the form of online courses or physical seminars but it is up to you. You could even sell physical merchandise. The important part is that you are able to get customers who are serious enough in knowing your knowledge because they actually spent money buying your book.

Why Don’t I Just Write Blogs, Articles, Audiobooks And/Or Video?

Blogs And Articles

For one thing blogs and articles are way, way much shorter than a book. As far as I know, the shortest a book can be is about 10,000 words. Personally, I write blogs/articles in the 2,000 to 3,000 range. So four of my blogs could be considered a short book already.

I’m not joking. It’s true. There are books completely made up of compiled blogs and articles. This is not an underhanded or lazy attempt by an author to make a book. Since many blogs for example talk about a specific subject such as writing, they make a good candidate to be made into a book.

If you are already a blogger or an article writer, it is a good idea to further market your blogs and articles by compiling them into a book after revising them to make them even better in book form. This not only helps you as the author but your readers as well.

Another thing to consider is when you ever decide to make your blogs and articles available in printed paper format. Have you ever seen single page paper articles being sold in the street? The answer is no. Even newspapers are sold with several pages in them.

Have you ever seen a 100 page physical book? Chances are, you would not take it seriously because it is very thin. Like it or not, people are very visual. Many people prefer quantity over quality. This is also the same with written products.

In fact, many people do not read entire blogs, articles, books and so on in their entirety. They scan for the information or words that they want to read. If your blog, article, book is so short, then the reader might think that it is inadequate and is of no use to them.

Audiobooks and Videos

How about if I just want my book to be heard or watched instead? The first and foremost reason why there are hardly any book made into videos is because of cost. It is very expensive to make a book into a movie or even television series for example.

The same is true with audiobooks. It is also expensive to create audiobooks from books. It costs several thousands of dollars just to create an audiobook. The longer the book, the higher is the cost of creating an audiobook for it.

Perhaps the single most compelling reason why written books (physical and ebooks) are still the dominant form of written media is because they are the most accurate interpretation of an author’s thoughts.

The author writes the words of the book and the reader translates the words in their mind which best suits their imagination of the author’s words. This is in effect the most effective medium of human thought to human thought transmission.

This is the reason why despite the onslaught of electronic media for written words, physical books still dominate in sales. Readers can read in whatever manner they want. This is unlike ebooks, audiobooks or videos where the movement of the reader’s thought is dictated to be a mostly linear progression.

Physical books allow the reader to scan a books within minutes, to go back and forth between pages. To compare two pages almost instantaneously and so on. Physical books also look beautiful in a shelf.

But Can Anyone Write A Book?

As previously discussed in an example, there are university and college courses on self-help or self-improvement alone. Think about it. Do you know of any tip or advise in making yourself better? Of course you know of at least a few.

This just proves that almost anything can be marketed and sold. The good thing is that everyone has a degree of mastery in something or many things. I am just a normal person but based on what I have read, I could also write in such subjects as computers, computer programming, accounting and other things.

This does not mean that I am an intelligent person. It just means that I have accumulated enough information in these subjects that could fill or be made into a book. In fact, let us discuss another example. This time we discuss home maintenance books.

When it comes to home maintenance, I am pretty hands off. Our household uses a handyman we have known for years. Based on the maintenance work he has done in our house for years, he can fill an entire book about home maintenance.

Let me enumerate a few things I can think about in writing a home maintenance book. Let us say I am writing a book about roof maintenance. I could write about how nature affects your roof like rain and the wind. Then I talk about the different kinds of roofing available.

Then I talk about the tools needed to maintain a roof. As you can see, I could write a book about roof maintenance by just stringing along a few topics about it. If my book is short, then I could just talk about several magnificent roofs that were ever made. This alone could make for a very long book.

You Could Write A Successful Book Even Though You Are Still A Child

As previously discussed, anyone is a master of something or several things. Even children can arguably write as soon as they can read or write. This is the reason why there are children’s books.

There are authors who make books specifically for children and teenagers and even consult them. If authors consult children and teenagers, why don’t these kids write the books themselves?

Let’s take a look at simple elementary students and children. They are nearly bombarded with assignments and books to read. These assignments and books once done and read would most likely just be forgotten and only bits of them would remain in the child’s memory.

But what if these same assignments and books can be turned to books themselves. For example, math assignments could be turned into math reviewers and could be improved upon by the child’s comments.

The books that the child has read could be rewritten into a book based from the child’s interpretation. For example, if a child gets confused with a certain part of a story, they can consult their elders who might give a better answer which could be added in the child’s book.

I don’t think it is still necessary to explain how this same principle could be duplicated or improved once the child has grown into a teenager, high schooler, a college or university student and so on.

The same principles apply throughout a person’s life. As they grow and mature, they automatically gain knowledge and even expertise which is a good material for a book. If you can write a book even if you are still a child, why waste the opportunity?

Can A 12 Year Old Write A Novel?

Yes, there is in fact a famous author who wrote a bestselling book when he was still 12 years old. He is a proof that there are no age restrictions in writing a bestselling book. The author’s name is Gordon Korman.

He is a Canadian-American author who has written over 80 children’s and young adult fiction books. He has sold more than 28 million books in his four decade career. He is also in the New York Best Seller List.

According to his story, his English teacher asked him and other students to write a book report as an assignment. Not wanting to read a book, he wrote one himself and made a report on it. This became the manuscript for his first book whose title is “This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall” which is also his first book in his Macdonald Hall Series.

He submitted his book to the book publisher Scholastic Press which published his book. Before even graduating from highschool, he has already written and published five books.

I am sure if you searched enough online, you would found other authors who also started writing and publishing books even at an early age. So, don’t waste all of your youth in purely unproductive activities. Take some time also to do productive activities like writing a book.

Conclusion

It is always a good advise to write a book even though you might not become a bestselling author. You should write a book because it is an ideal product to sell and its is a 24/7 marketing tool.

If you have doubts as to whether you could write a book especially an exhaustive one, then have no fear. Everyone has gathered enough expertise on one or many subjects. You can even be an expert even as a child.

Even at an early age, you could probably already write a bestselling book which you could improve as you grow and mature. You just need to assess yourself and determine which subjects in life you are knowledgeable with.

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