In the kick-off meeting it is very useful for you to provide the Mighty Guides team with core background information about your company / brand and your goals for the book. If there are any products related to the topic of the book that you are planning to launch in tandem or if you’re expecting the book to raise the profile of these products, we would love to understand those in detail and to see examples of recent marketing campaigns or other useful collateral. You are welcome and encouraged to provide that information in advance, so we are as prepared as possible in the meeting.

We use this meeting to understand your ‘world view’ in regards to your industry / vertical, marketing and products. The better understanding we have of your view of the book topic, the audience you would like to reach, types of influencers you would like to include, and your overall goals for the book, the better we can deliver you a finished book that is exactly what you require. It is also helpful to discuss what your ideal answer to the question would be, and what answers you are not interested in. There are often so many directions people can go when discussing a topic, so we like to understand the direction you are looking for and what your parameters are. We usually agree on a final version of the question after the meeting, once everyone has had a chance to discuss.

For each eBook we help you to craft a single, interesting question designed to pique the imagination of your target audience, generate a valuable collection of articles and match the goals of your messaging strategy. Each question is unique, but we have found this format produces the best results:

What advice would you offer [target job title] who needs to [perform topic-related action / goal]?

Some examples:
What advice would you offer a newly promoted director of marketing who needs to transform an old school marketing team into a highly productive and value-producing team?

On which metrics do you advise senior marketers focus to most effectively measure the impact of marketing on business goals, and why are these metrics the most important?

What advice would you offer a fellow marketing executive to help ease the transition to Individualized Marketing?

What advice would you give someone in your industry to get business value from text analytics?

We highly recommend that you keep the main question focused on 1 topic. If you want to choose 1-2 follow-up questions for the interviewers to ask, which touch on a 2nd topic or theme, we can assist with that, but we find that keeping the question focused very specifically on the main topic produces the best essays.

Using a variety of tools, we create a target list of influencers and practitioners. To best understand the types of influencers to target, we ask you about your target customers, the influencers that you already have relationships with, the titles of executives and profile of companies and organizations that you’re trying to reach, and relevant keywords. Depending on the book, we can target particular verticals, professions and even geographic locations. We select people who both have something to say and who already reach your target audience through LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, blogging, participation on community sites, as trade show speakers and editors of newsletters.

Getting contributors to participate can be challenging because they’re often extremely busy, and their company may require approval before they participate. To make writing easier, we interview the contributors over the phone. We transcribe the interview, and based on the transcription, our professional writer will draft a spotlight article that you and the contributor can approve.

Contributors participate in the book to gain publicity, recognition and to create something valuable for their audiences. They aren’t paid. More than anything else, they contribute because of the other people who are contributing, and we promise that the book will be aggressively marketed, and made available at no charge after the sponsor enjoys their exclusive 12 week lead gen period. In short, contributors see this project as a worthwhile endeavor to support the industry that they care about. In order to get the kinds of people that we would like to participate, we don’t ask for exclusive rights to the content.

Absolutely. We encourage you to provide a list of customers and influencers that you would like to see included in the book. Here are samples of an internal email and an email that can be sent from your company to reach out to these contacts.

Sample text to explain the opportunity internally:
Hi ________,

{Company} is sponsoring an eBook, {Book title} that will be published by Mighty Guides. The book will feature 10 VPs, CISOs, CIOs and Directors, along with 10 influencers.

As the sponsor, {Company} has the opportunity to suggest people for inclusion in the book, which is a major opportunity for us. We’d like you to suggest key customers in your region, people who you’d like to become customers, and even friendly regional influencers that you’d like to see in the book.

Ultimately, Mighty Guides (as the publisher) will decide who will be contacted and chosen for the eBook, but we can make the most of this opportunity by suggesting people who are important to {Company}.

For chosen participants, Mighty Guides will set up a 30 minute phone interview and will write a draft of the article for the contributor to review and approve. {Company} and Mighty Guides will both promote the book, as well as promote the contributors’ articles aggressively, so it’s a great opportunity for you to do something nice for your customers and help them establish themselves as industry experts/thought leaders.

Please feel free to reach out to as many executives/senior IT security leaders as you’d like, but also please note that the people featured in this book should be at the VP level and above.

After we have reviewed and vetted the suggested names, we’ll let you know who to contact, as well as provide a sample email you can use.

Sample text to reach out to executives:
Hi_________,

{Company} is sponsoring an upcoming eBook, {Book title} to be published by Mighty Guides.

I would like to submit your name as a potential candidate to be featured in the book. Ultimately, Mighty Guides, as an independent publisher, will choose who will be included, but I would like your permission to forward your information to the Mighty Guides team for consideration.

If selected, I hope you’ll agree to participate, because it’s a really valuable, vendor-neutral thought leadership piece that will be heavily promoted by both Mighty Guides and {Company}.

If selected, you will be asked for either an insightful quote or for 30-minutes of your time for an interview. If you are interviewed, Mighty Guides will write an article based on your interview (note that you don’t have to talk about vendors or specific solutions in your interview), and you will then have an opportunity to review and approve the final article. Also, regardless of whether you provide a quote or participate in an interview that leads to an article, you will be included in a list of impressive contributors and promoted as a thought leader.

I think you would be a great contributor to this thought leadership book. Please let me know if I have your permission to forward your information to the Mighty Guides team.

We grant non-exclusive, transferable, worldwide, fully paid up rights to use the content in any form of media. If you plan to use any of the content from the essays in a context other than the eBook (e.g. a quote in an ad), you need permission from the influencer and expert. However, if you want to use an article in its entirety as a guest blog post on your site, that’s fine.

We assemble the manuscript, write an Introduction to capture the main theme of the essays, edit the entire book, and send it to you for review. The purpose of the review isn’t to censor everything that’s said. It’s to try to identify essays that could be very problematic, so that we can discuss the best way to handle the situation. Our primary goal is to make you happy without alienating any of the contributors unnecessarily.

Unfortunately, no. Hopefully, if we have put together a good question, explained the issues and parameters to the writers, and selected the right influencers, then you should be happy with the articles. We can edit the pieces to pull out product names, but we can’t put words into the mouths of the contributors. You can opt to place certain essays in the back of the book or potentially pull the essay altogether if it’s a real problem.

We do it all – the production, editorial, design, layout and all the project management. Each eBook is assigned a project manager who will provide regular updates and guide you through the process. We also always appreciate your input and ideas to make the book better. We also have the flexibility to coordinate colors and design to match closely to your own branding guidelines.

• A high-res version of your logo
• Your brand guidelines
• A Foreword from a key executive, along with that executive’s headshot (the image file should be at least 50kb in size). The Foreword should be under 200 words.
• Up to four ads for the book along with any tracking URLs that you’d like us to link the ads to.
• Copy for the “About [Your Company]” sidebar that appears on the Foreword page. This is usually general info about the company, and should be under 100 words.
• Links to your company Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn or G+ profile pages, If you choose to provide. These will be listed on the Foreword page.
• Approval of the question, influencer list, the essays and their organization, approval of the design and layout.
• Your input on the book title, sub-title and the the type of imagery you prefer for the cover.

There is room for up to 4 full page ads in the book. They are 11″ X 8.5″, a standard landscape page. If you would like the ad(s) to link to a landing page, please provide the URL. Files can be PDF or JPG.

You can either provide us with pre-written essays (which we will do a light copyedit on to ensure they match the style of the rest of the manuscript) or we can interview your colleagues along with the other contributors, and create an essay for you and the contributor to review.

Book Production Timeline (Typically eight to twelve weeks depending on the market.)

As the sole sponsor, you have the exclusive right to publish the book on your site for as long as you’d like. Most sponsors choose to offer the book on their site, behind a landing page, to collect leads.

We will work with you to create a marketing and promotional plan around the book and any other collateral that we create (mini books, quote book).

We have several different eBook publishing options. Sometimes sponsors choose a series of books with 10 articles each, or books with half articles and half Influencer Quotes. Sometimes they choose a larger book with smaller collateral pieces created from it. This is an example of a marketing release plan for a package that includes a large main book (20-30 essays) plus a quote book and mini books:

Week 1 – Main eBook is published on your site. We send an email to all the contributors in the book with a link to your landing page to promote to their network, and a PDF for their own personal copy. We ask them not to distribute the PDF, this is just for their own use.

We also send an email campaign announcing the book launch to the people who we reached out to originally, but who did not end up contributing to the book. These people are well targeted, and although they did not participate, they will likely be interested in reading and promoting the book.

Week 2 –  Launch Mini Book 1 on Slideshare and promote

Week 3 –  Launch Mini Book 2 on Slideshare and promote

Week 4 –  Launch Mini Book 3 on Slideshare and promote

Week 5 –  Launch Mini Book 4 on Slideshare and promote

Week 6 – Launch Quote book on Slideshare and promote

Throughout each week we heavily promote each book on Twitter, LinkedIn, and our Mighty Guides Blog. We ask all contributors to include the link to the main landing page in all of their tweets, posts, or emails. We do what we can to facilitate the contributors own marketing efforts at this time. We Tweet and post updates on LinkedIn that they can easily retweet or share to their own network.

Once the three months are up, we launch the main eBook on Slideshare. We send out another email campaign to let contributors and targeted people know that the book is now live on Slideshare. You can still choose to leave the book up gated on your site at the same time, and the links from the mini books and quote book will still be active and collect leads. If your package is a series of smaller eBooks, the same approach is used – the books are gated for 3 months from release, and then afterwards they go up on Slideshare and you can choose to keep the books gated on your site or to release publicly.

We usually post it on our account, here: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidRogelberg

Below are links to examples of previous books’ landing pages. We strongly encourage that on the landing page, you list the names, companies, and job titles of all the contributors in the book, the book name and sub-title (as text, not just as an image) and a decent-sized thumbnail of the book. This all helps with SEO. We can offer further SEO guidance if you require.

In short, you should treat this eBook like any other important thought leadership piece that you’d use to generate leads and facilitate sales.

Depending on the size of the book you publish, we work to create a variety of derivative content pieces that we use to promote the eBook. Large books (25 contributors) receive more pieces whereas smaller books (10 contributors) may not have enough content to create all of the pieces listed below. Each campaign is different, and we work to create the derivative pieces that make the most sense for what you’re trying to accomplish and to help us achieve maximum exposure.

Guest Blog Posts

As we line up interviews and write our spotlight articles, you can post portions of the articles as guest blog posts on your site. You might consider adding a call to action that directs people to the main landing page for the book that encourages people to sign up to receive the main book when it releases.

Twitter Images

For each article, we create a graphic that you can include in your guest blog post page. The image will have a key quote, a summary, and the author’s bio information. We will tweet your guest blog post page and image to all of the contributors’ twitter accounts. The image will drive people back to your guest blog post.

Three to Five Mini Books (large books)

Mini books are created using three to five spotlight articles that have a common theme. A common theme can be a particular vertical that you’re trying to reach (eg. contributors from Financial Services) or a mini book can be created around a similar content theme (e.g. Getting Started with ________.) By carefully selecting and influencers ahead of time, we can build out these mini books to help you really increase the utility of your ebook campaign.

Mini Book Announcement Blog Posts

For each mini book, we’ll create a blog post that provides an overview of the mini book. In addition, we’ll alert the contributors so that they can link to your post.

Quote Book

The quote book contains twenty to twenty-five pages made up of the twitter images described above and is very similar in format to the main book. However, rather than including entire essays, we include one or two key quotes along with a summary from each essay along with the expert’s photo, bio, and links to their sites on one full page. The quote book is also set up so that a page will have two buttons that will provide an automatic way for readers to post just a quote, bio and photo (a single page in the book) to their twitter or LinkedIN accounts. The quote book will contain your ads, and you can add links to other resources on your site — including the landing page for the main book. This piece resides on your Slideshare account.

Main Book

The centerpiece of the campaign is a 60 to 80 page professionally produced piece. It will contain twenty-five spotlight essays that are 500 to 800 words written with the help of influencers and key practitioners in your industry. You will have the exclusive right to publish and gate this piece on your site for three months. Even if you choose to continue gating the book on your site beyond the three-month exclusive period, we ask that you also post it to your SlideShare account and make it available without registration.

To increase the value of the campaign, you can begin to use content as it is created on your blog as guest blog posts and twitter images. Once we have enough articles for mini books, we publish them along the way. In the end, we roll up all the articles into the main book and create the quote book to promote it. This gives you the opportunity to see a return on your investment from the very beginning of the campaign. Please keep in mind that every image, mini book, quote book and the main book will feature your logo as a sponsor and the books will contain your ads.

As the sponsor of the book, you have the exclusive right to publish the main book on your site for 12 weeks before it’s released on Slideshare. Even after the book is released on SlideShare, you are welcome to continue gating the main book on your site. You also have the option to make the book available in your own social media channels, and you can promote the book by email to your customer and prospective customer (opt-in) email lists. You can advertise the book on any site including LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. In short, you should treat this e-book like any other important thought leadership piece that you’d use to generate leads and facilitate sales.