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I'm your host Omar Zenholm where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday to help you start, grow and scale your business. We read every single review. Seriously. It's how we know what's helping and what to dive deeper in on. The next episode. So if you got 20 seconds, leave a quick review and tell me what you want more of. I'd love to hear from you. Here's a little secret. I want to write a book in the near future and I was curious about this world of publishing. What are my options? What's the best option for me? So I did a deep dive and did all the research for you. I actually did it for myself, but I thought, hey, why don't I share this with my audience, with everybody on the show so that you can benefit from all the research that I did already. So today I'm going to break down the three options that I believe are viable options for publishing a book. And I'm going to go through the pros and cons of each and which one I believe is the best option for most entrepreneurs, creators, and experts today. And yes, option number three is a game changer. So stick with me for that. The first thing I want to say is that writing a book and publishing a book are two different things. We need to establish the fact that writing a book is about writing something valuable, that's compelling, that's fun to read, that's a page turner, that's a thing, that's a skill, and that's something that you're going to need to work on. Today's episode is not about that. Today's episode is about publishing a book. And publishing a book is about getting that book into the hands of your readers, getting it out in the world, and making sure that it's available and seen. A lot of people spend a lot of time on the writing part and forget about the publishing part. They forget about actually making the effort of figuring out what's best for them. And what happens is that they spend so much time on creating this great book that no one actually learns about because they chose the wrong option for publishing. This is what I want you to avoid, and this is why I'm doing today's episode. This is what I want to avoid as I write my book. In my opinion, there are a few reasons why people fail at publishing a book. The first big reason is that they choose the wrong publishing model. There are three options, like I mentioned today, and each option has pros and cons, and each option kind of leans towards a certain outcome. You got to know why you're writing this book, and if the outcome of the model, of the publishing model doesn't match the outcome that you want, then you're choosing the wrong model. So this is why I'm doing this episode, is because I want to make sure that your goals and your ambitions for writing a book are met through your publishing model. The other thing that causes people to fail in this process is that they don't understand the trade offs. They don't understand that there are pluses and minuses to every single decision in life, including publishing a book. So you got to be okay with the drawbacks with your choice, and you got to really want the pros for you to be able to choose that choice in the first place. The last mistake people make when publishing is that they actually choose the wrong outcome. This is a little bit deeper. Meaning that some people, they're not really sure why they want to write a book. They like the idea of writing a book. They think the book will give them authority and make them feel special, make them feel like an expert, but it actually doesn't make them feel anything. When they actually write it and publish it, they realize that actually what I was chasing, that external validation, is not going to come by just putting a book out in the market. I actually have to get it in some other way. We'll talk about that in another episode. But that's something for you to think about. Having said all that, publishing a book can be incredibly powerful and can be incredibly impactful for you. It can build your brand, it can create authority, it can drive leads, it can generate revenue for your business, it can open doors you didn't even know existed, like speaking on stages, at events. So this is an exciting time. But it's really important that you choose the right publishing model so that you actually get what you want out of this big project that you're going to invest a lot of time and money and effort in. Many people spend a year, maybe even 18 months, maybe even two years in the process of creating, writing, publishing a book, marketing the book, getting it out in the world, making sure people know about it. That's a long cycle. So you want to make sure you choose the right path. And that's why I'm here for you today. Let's start with option number one, and that's self publishing. Self publishing wasn't a thing like 20 years ago. Okay, this is fairly new. But in the last 10 years, self publishing has really picked up steam and become really popular amongst a lot of entrepreneurs, business people, creators, because there are a lot of advanced. Now with self publishing, you do everything yourself. You hire the managers, you hire the people that you need to design the book cover, for example. And you use different resources and platforms like Amazon, KDP or IngramSpark. Or you can even sell your book directly from your site if you want to. Self publishing gives you a lot of flexibility. Here are some big advantages of self publishing, and this one is number one with a bullet. And it's profit margins. When you self publish, the vast majority of the revenue goes in your bank account. In many cases, 70% profit margins. That's pretty good because if you compare that to traditional publishing, where you might see 5 to 15% profit margins, the difference is pretty massive. I know a lot of established authors. There are friends of mine that have books that you see in bookstores, that you see in airports, and the book might sell for $25 and they get like a dollar or two. So it's not much. The second big advantage of self publishing is total control. You get to control everything because you are the boss. You get to control the title, the COVID the messaging, the pricing, the positioning. There's no committees, there's no compromises, there's no negotiation. You get to do whatever you want. Advantage number three, speed. Speed and timeline. I would say you can publish a book as fast as you can write it if you want to. You can do it in three months and six months, whenever you're ready. And there's no waiting two years for a release window. When you have traditional publishing, often they have to find a release window because this publishing house might be publishing many nonfiction books, for example, in business, and they don't want to release competitive products, competitive books in the same publishing window. So you got to keep that in mind as well. So in self publishing, you could just release it whenever you want. That leads me to the fourth big advantage of self publishing, which kind of encapsulates it all, and that's total autonomy. You own everything. You decide when to update the book, when to revise it. You can bundle it with other products and services that you have. You can use it as a lead magnet. This is why many entrepreneurs and creators love self publishing, because they have total autonomy. There are very limited trade offs, but there are trade offs. Let's talk about them. You are the publisher. That means you have to fund the editing, the design, the formatting, everything it takes to write and create a great book. You have to handle distribution, you have to handle marketing, making sure people know about this book. You carry all the risk. Now, if you're an entrepreneur, you're probably used to that already, so maybe this doesn't deter you too much. But it's good to know what you're going to be responsible for. If you don't already have an audience with your business or a marketing engine. Self publishing can be very lonely. It could be very overwhelming. It can also produce very underwhelming results. Because how are you going to sell your book if you don't have an audience to sell to? If you're serious about choosing this option, self publishing, I recommend a book called Published by Chandler Bolt. It's a good place to start and there's a lot of great information on how to self publish your book. Chandler also runs an academy called self publishing school if you want to go even deeper. Everyone's deploying AI agents now. But here's the thing. Sometimes they mess up. They delete the wrong files, make changes you didn't authorize, or just go off script, leaving you stuck trying to figure out what went wrong. Unless you're using Rubrik Agent Cloud, AI is here to stay. It's not going anywhere. But can you control the risk? Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that allows you to monitor, govern and rewind AI agent actions. One platform to help you unleash more agents faster without the risk. You need full visibility into your agent's actions, enforce policies, quantify risk, and undo destructive actions to data. Rubrik Agent Cloud gives you AI resilience and the rewind happens fast. We're talking minutes, not hours or days. Rubrik Agent Cloud gives you that safety net when you're experimenting with AI, so one mistake doesn't tank your whole operation. 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