Mining your book for fun and profit

Few people, when deciding to work on a business book, recognize what they are really creating. A book is not just an idea made real and and powerful. It’s not just a way to spread influence and generate business. It’s a database that you can mine to power much of your work moving forward.

How to generate value by mining the database of content in your book

Stop thinking about your book as a pile of words. Instead, think about it as a collection of:

• Ideas. Your book has a main idea. And there are subsidiary ideas in many of the chapters.
• Frameworks. Books often include useful frameworks: the four elements of x, the 6-step process for y, and the like.
• Case studies. Many business books are filled with case studies. That means you have dozens of potential stories to tell.
• Graphics. Your book may include conceptual or data graphics.
• Statistics. If your book has a survey, you’ve likely got a bunch of data charts and other statistical results.
• Proof points. These include other people’s research, quotes, and facts that back up your main theses.

You’ve assembled these into a coherent narrative. But put that narrative aside for a moment. You can reassemble these ingredients into lots of other forms. These include:

• Speeches. You can customize a speech by assembling an idea, case study stories, and statistics that apply to any given audience.
• Videos. Record yourself talking about book concepts, illustrate with book graphics.
• Articles. You can contribute articles to newspapers (op-eds) and other outlets based on the ideas and examples in your book.
• Blog posts. Take any piece of your book and highlight it in its own blog post.
• Sharable graphics. You can build a sharable graphic from figures or quotes in the book and share it on Instagram or LinkedIn.

Mining the richness of your book

The best part about this strategy is that books are so deep that they can spin off dozens of unique pieces of content. Each one has its own message, supports your overall message as an author and thought leader, and helps expand your audience.

After Charlene Li and I wrote our book on social media, Groundswell, I gave 180 speeches about it to different audiences. Every one was different, but they all sprang from the same content and supported the same goal.

It got to the point where I could craft a speech in 20 minutes. For example, suppose I was speaking to a financial services company about high-net-worth individuals. I’d ask my data person, “Run people with assets over $250,000.” He knew that meant to generate some data charts from our survey data on social media use among that group of individuals. Then I’d go to the list of 70+ case studies in the book and pluck out the financial services examples. I’d plug the data charts my data person generated and my chosen examples into my standard speech framework and voilà: a unique and handcrafted speech customized to that audience.

When Ted Schadler and I published our book Empowered, I had a similar experience with promotional content. One of Forrester’s very talented public relations staffers would bring me opportunities to create contributed, bylined articles for various publications. He’d say, for example, “Can you get me a 1,000-word article for CustomerThink?” I would then rifle through the book, identify an idea that would resonate with that publication, and quickly write an article based on research and ideas we’d already assembled in the book. Writing an article like that would typically take me less than an hour, since most of the thinking was already done for the book. I eventually wrote 11 bylined articles to promote that book, and had to tell the staffer to stop, because I’d extracted just about every idea I could turn into an article already.

Authors creating a book realize they’re crafting a narrative for their audience. They may not realize until later what a resource they’ve created for themselves. Book promotion — and self-promotion — is easy when you’ve got a book full of great content to mine.