Last Monday, in a post titled The Value of Custom Publishing: Part I, I wrote that one of the benefits to authoring a book is the exposure and credibility you receive from having your name appear on the book’s cover. While some authors write books for the gobs of money they hope to receive from some combination of an ‘advance’ and royalties, I chose to co-author mine because:

1. I wanted to share my knowledge with as many people as possible; and,
2. I wanted to gain ‘thought leader’ status on the topics I choose to write about (namely, product sourcing and drop shipping).

The day after I wrote that blog entry, Stacey Miller at the Book Promotion Blog had this to say:

Your book publicist will assume that you are promoting your book to disseminate your messages to as many people as possible…You have something to say, and your book is one outlet for saying it; the mass media provides additional venues for you to spread your messages. In addition, many authors believe their visibility in the media will lead to great opportunities such as … additional clients or customers, or enhanced credibility in the professional world. This is usually what happens.

It’s gratifying to read an industry veteran like Miller share those thoughts. I didn’t co-author my latest book, eBay Inventory The Smart Way: How to Find Great Sources and Manage Your Merchandise to Maximize Profits on the World’s #1 Auction Site because I have some grandiose notion that I’m going to get rich by selling hundreds of thousands of copies. I wrote that book because I feel as though I have some really profound things to say about product sourcing, and I’m the type of person who’s willing to share ideas by any means necessary, whether you want to hear them or not.

Speaking of the new book, its been out for a little less than a month now, and with a recent ACNielsen International Research study showing the #1 concern of eBay sellers is what to sell and how to find suppliers, I continue to have nothing but high hopes for the number of people the book can have an impact on. In fact, the number of eBay sellers keeps growing. ACNielsen also reports that 724,000 Americans credit eBay sales as their primary or secondary source of income, with another 1.5 million people reporting that they supplement their income by selling on eBay. Based on those figures alone, the number of eBay entrepreneurs in the U.S. has increased 68 percent since the last time a comparable study was conducted (in 2003). With numbers like those, maybe I could make gobs and gobs of money by writing books, but then again, where’s the fun in that? Sure, there’s a unique sense of satisfaction that comes from seeing your name on the cover of a book, but can anything aside from marriage and parenthood really beat being an entrepreneur? Not for me. It’s being an entrepreneur that I credit with allowing me to write books, not the other way around.

As you may have noticed, in addition to co-founding several companies, I’ve also been fortunate enough to have co-authored two really great books. My first, Drop Shipping For Dummies, was published by the Custom Publishing Division of John Wiley & Sons in early-2005; while my latest title, eBay Inventory The Smart Way (AMACOM Books), just came out a few weeks ago. One of the benefits to authoring, co-authoring, or contributing to a major book–or ‘custom publishing’ a book–is the exposure you get from having your name appear on the book’s cover. For an entrepreneur like myself, this means one thing and one thing only: credibility.

If there’s one thing all entrepreneurs need—aside from capital resources—it is credibility. When you walk into a meeting with potential investors, vendors, employees, or even reporters, and if they know ahead of time that you’ve authored a book—and not just any book, but a book directly related to your company’s primary reason for existing in the first place—chances are, you’ve already got their attention (and in a way, I might add, that an unpublished entrepreneur can not).

When Doba decided that it was time to educate the masses on drop shipping, we had a serious choice to make… spend thousands of hours and countless resources creating a book/manual of our own (or a similar amount of resources on an advertising marketing campaign aimed at a geographically diverse audience), or turn to a known entity like Wiley’s For Dummies brand for help. At the end of the day, we chose to enlist the support of Wiley’s Custom Publishing Division, which is different from the ‘Consumer’ For Dummies and ‘Technology’ For Dummies divisions. In no time at all, Wiley was able to work with my company on a customized version of the same For Dummies-branded books that you see everyday at bookstores all across the world. In a matter of months—buy choosing to pay 100 percent of the costs associated with our book ourselves—we were literally able to own Drop Shipping For Dummies.

From a practical standpoint, we couldn’t have made a better investment. Not only did we get to write the book’s content ourselves, but also we’re now able to leverage the For Dummies brand to our advantage. Think about that for a second: John Wiley & Sons–along with the brand’s previous owners, IDG Books and Hungry Minds–spent millions of dollars building the For Dummies brand, and with one phone call and some negotiating with a custom publishing rep, my company was able to attach itself to that same brand in a way that none of my competitors ever can. From the public’s point of view, the For Dummies brand–whether it appears on a customized book like ours or on one of the traditionally published For Dummies titles that appears in bookstores–means one thing: concepts & how-to simplified. What company wouldn’t want to attach itself to a leading brand like we did? Not many, I’m guessing.

So for all you entrepreneurs out there, especially those of you who are looking for credibility, consider Custom Publishing. In the weeks and months to come I’ll share more about my experience with authoring custom published books and working with the likes of the John Wiley & Sons of this world. It’s not a cheap or easy-way-out proposition (not by a long shot), but if you plan your work and work your plan, who knows, maybe you won’t be considered a dummy either!

Update: Based on one of the comments I received to this posting, I want to clarify one thing. ‘Custom’ Publishing is very different from the traditional publishing model. If you wanted to author a For Dummies book, and you wanted your book to be sold at bookstores nationwide, you’d need to go through the traditional channels. Meaning, you’d need to hire a literary agent, and your agent would pitch your idea to a For Dummies acquisitions editor. The acquisitions editor–in consultation with the acquisitions director and publisher and sales team–would evaluate your idea, and if they liked it enough, make you an offer–advance/royalties–to write the book. With Custom Publishing–at least at John Wiley & Sons–you bypass the ‘acquisitions’ process altogether, and what’s delivered to you at the end of the day is a customized–usually smaller both in trim size and page count–version of the traditionally published For Dummies book. The big differences of course being that you pay 100 percent of the cost of the Custom published product, and however many copies of the book are produced/ordered, you take possession of them yourself for distribution as you see fit. Customized For Dummies titles like ours never see their way into the bookstores. We’re using Drop Shipping For Dummies as a premium or as a value-added giveaway, if you will.