Have you ever wanted to release a book, but been put off by all the work involved with writing it yourself?
Here’s a strategy you can use to get people to write books for you.
I think this works really well for Kindle books, but you can also use this for printed books, or even for website books.
Basically, you come up with a theme and get other people to send in the content for it.
The market leaders for doing this are probably those behind the Chicken Soup For The Soul series. They get people to send in their motivational stories, select and theme them and publish what they’ve done.
This works well as people enjoy sharing the things they’ve accomplished.
In fact, I’ve seen a variant on this work quite often for Kindle books, and that’s to ask people to fill in a short survey.
Often, this uses a service like Amazon Mechanical Turk, where you can pay people 20c each to get them to complete a few questions (provided as a Google Doc or similar).
You may want to pay more than that to get better answers, but that’s just an idea.
For instance, if you want to write a book for the “Stop Smoking” niche, you could ask them if they had ever smoked, why they chose to stop, what the biggest challenge was, what tips they want to pass on etc.
Then, just compile all these together and you have a book filled with people’s real experiences.
One hint – you can easily outsource compiling this into a book format too.
The Contest Approach
You can also make this into a contest if you really want your list to queue up and get people involved.
I know of a variant of this strategy which used to get people I knew involved.
They would be contacted to enter a poetry competition, with the prize of being included in a poetry anthology.
Nearly everyone who entered would be told that they had won, which would mean that multiple volumes of poetry would be produced if necessary.
The book would be sold at an inflated price, and chances are the “winners” would choose to buy at least one copy for themselves – and often more copies to share with friends and family.
Now, I have ethical concerns with the way that these contests were presented and the finished books marketed, but there are certainly ways to present anthologies which get you lots of content here.
You could, for instance, present this as just identifying the top three contributions (each of which gets a small additional prize) and then include all the other contributions as Runners Up.
There are lots of ways to get book content produced for you if you just think about the challenge slightly differently to how other people address it.