If you research what the basic rules for writers are, you’ll read about proper punctuation, proper use of adverbs and adjectives, sentence and paragraph length, and so on. While these mechanical writing rules are all valid and must be observed, I’ve chosen to focus today on the behavioral rules of writing instead.

On the surface, the job of the writer is to create helpful content that readers will consume and enjoy. But the true job of a writer is much deeper than that. Stephen King put it very eloquently when he said: “The job of a writer is to transfer the ideas inside your head into the heads of your readers.”

Let’s explore this further. People like to compartmentalize things in order to make sense of the world, so we create labels – you’re a writer and I am a reader. As a writer you’ll decide what you’re going to write about, and as the reader I’ll decide what to read. But when you think about it, while labels may make for a nice intellectual construct, they’re not very useful for describing human connection. If anything, they’re more about separating than unifying.

At its core, writing fulfills the much deeper need to learn from each other, to enrich each other’s lives and to be of service to others.

This is what writing really is at its foundation: a vehicle to create a deep connection between human beings – one the writer, the other one the reader.

So, let’s now focus on the type of “human” rules that’ll help you create a nonfiction book for your business or career that strikes a deep bond with your readers.

Rule #1: Write Every Day

This is the cardinal rule of successful writers, whether they have 5 books to their name or 50.

Developing writing mastery is no different from developing mastery in a musical instrument. Very few professional musicians people born with a gift – the vast majority are people that worked really hard at it, practicing every single day.

You have to create a daily writing routine that’s independent from your work life and your family life. If you’re running your own business and want to write a book to establish yourself as an expert in your field, create a two-hour writing block 6 days a week where you’ll be able to write without interruption. Enlist the help of your family and/or staff to make this possible: no phone calls and no one walking in on you.

Rule #2: Write Honestly and Authentically

Now you’re ready to begin your journey. Here’s my advice: it’s critical that you learn to communicate in writing in the same way that you communicate directly with your clients. In all your interactions, you must have a foundation of honesty and authenticity; otherwise you wouldn’t be able to stay in business, right?

Let me re-frame it this way: writing your book is really an extension of your business. You’ll be communicating in a different medium and to a much larger audience, but your goal remains the same – you have to be transparent and you have to be yourself at all times.

Readers can sense dishonesty and a lack of authenticity from a mile away. It won’t take long for them to sense that something is “off” with the author.

On the other hand, when authors use their authentic voice and aren’t afraid to be themselves, warts and all, the reading experience becomes refreshing and the connection with the reader becomes much deeper.

You can’t really connect with someone who’s trying to be someone else.

Rule #3: Don’t Hold Anything Back

As an extension to Rule #2, once you’ve decided to write a book to support and grow your business or career, you have to go “all in.” Don’t try to protect your ideas from theft by just offering a teaser of your knowledge.

To write truly successful nonfiction, you have to be able to bare your soul on the page. Don’t hold back any information that could be of help to your readers.

The more you give they more you’ll get in return. Your book’s word of mouth marketing will be stronger, you’ll attract more readers, you’ll get better reviews, and in the end, more doors will open for you.

Authenticity in your writing is a great selling tool. But if you combine it with generosity and selflessness-you’ve now created a game changer.

Rule #4: Do Your Writing off The Grid

We’ve already established in Rule #1 that you’re not to be interrupted when you sit down to write. Now, those are external interruptions. Equally critical, however, are internal interruptions.

Having so much technology packed into your laptop or tablet, it’s tempting to regularly switch away from our writing app whenever we hear the ding of a notification – perhaps an email you’ve been waiting for, a new post that caught your eye, an incoming text, etc.

All of these distractions, even if you don’t act on them immediately, disrupt your creative flow – the direct link between your mind and your typing fingers. You need to learn to treasure this connection because it’s from this state of creative thinking that your best writing ideas will come.

My suggestion is to go “off the grid,” on your device, and what I mean by that depends on your writing tools. If you’re using a native app like Word, which doesn’t need to be connected to the Internet in order to operate, then turn Wi-Fi off for the entire duration of your two-hour writing block. This will stop all notifications from popping up.

If you’re using an online writing app like Google Docs, then mute the sound on your computer instead. In either case also set your smartphone to “do not disturb.” If there’s an emergency that requires your presence, just make sure people know where you are.

Rule #5: Focus Just on the Text In Front of You

When you work on a project as complex and multi-faceted as writing a book, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. But when you’re sitting down to write, you need to put the blinders on and focus exclusively on only what you’re writing about at that moment.

You can’t be thinking about the other 200 pages you still need to write and you can’t be thinking about whether the chapter you wrote yesterday needs more work.

Now, this will take some discipline and you’ll have to go through a bit of a learning curve. But you can’t write well and have distracting thoughts at the same time. Worrying about a past or future event will take you out of a state of presence and your writing will suffer as a result. Why? Because creativity requires a state of presence in order to flow. And this flow of thoughts and ideas from your mind down to your fingertips gets blocked if you’re focusing on the past or the future.

Rule #6: Don’t Write to Exhaustion

Never exceed your two-hour writing limit. If you push yourself to write until you’re creatively spent, say for 3 or 4 hours straight, you’ll begin to resent the act of writing because you’ll be setting an impossible expectation for the future.

It’s much more effective to write for two hours and leave behind a ton of ideas to write about another time. Just capture these ideas on a notepad in bullet form and use them as a seed for inspiration the next day.

Also, you don’t need to worry about ever running out of ideas, because as a nonfiction author writing about your professional life experience, you’re not creating an entire new premise from scratch like a fiction author. You’re simply downloading information you’re already familiar with from your brain onto the written page.

Rule #7: Always Go With the Flow

Finally, your book needs to be written with a sense of “flow.” Everything you write must flow because readers don’t sense “writing” – they sense flow. Author Elmore Leonard once said: “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.”

If all readers “see” is just the writing, they won’t feel a connection with you. If you use words that aren’t essential to the text, words that don’t add anything to your message, then remove them.

How do you know if you’ve written a non-essential word? Here’s a simple test: if the passage retains its full meaning after removing that word, then it’s not needed.

Also, don’t be afraid to cut out writing that took a lot of effort to create but that doesn’t feel right. Usually things that are hard to write tend to go against the flow. On the other hand, things that are easy to write, where your fingers seem to be moving on their own, tend to flow.

From experience, I can tell you that trying to rewrite something that clearly doesn’t fit the narrative will hardly ever make it fit. If it’s proven hard to write, it’ll prove hard to rewrite – you can’t fit a square peg in a round hole.

Bonus Rule: Don’t worry about quality – at least at first

I’ll leave you with a bonus rule that works wonders, especially for first-time authors. Now, what I’m going to say next is definitely going to sound counter intuitive: to produce a quality book you can’t focus on quality while you’re writing it!

The reason is that when you sit down to write you’re working from a stream of consciousness. You may already know what you’re going to be writing about – today’s section will be about the X, Y and Z lessons you learned working with one of your clients – what you don’t know is what you’re going to actually write.

Your goal in this initial writing stage is to establish a direct and unfiltered connection between your brain and your fingertips so that you can capture this “torrent” of information on the printed page. You goal isn’t to give it shape yet.

So if you’re thinking, “I need to write something with quality,” then that’s a sure-fire way to turn off your creative tap. You’re now letting your critical thinking get in the way of your creativity and your writing will become stale.

Leave the quality control for the multiple rewrites you’ll be doing after you’re done with the initial creative phase. When you switch hats and become your own editor, your critical thinking will step in to give your creative writing the shape and the quality it needs to pass muster with your readers.

Practice these seven rules plus the bonus one every time you sit down to write your book and you’ll be pleasantly surprised with your end product!

All the best,

Ben

Leave me a comment below if you have any questions or a specific need that I can help you address – I operate an author services firm that specializes in helping entrepreneurs, professionals and business owners who want to publish books as a calling card for prospects, to establish their status as an expert or to generate additional leads for their businesses.

 

Here are some related posts I highly recommend:

The 10 Must-Have Writing Skills for Entrepreneurial Authors

How to Become a Great Book Writer in Business Nonfiction

How to Write an Epic Nonfiction Book in 12 Steps – A Must-Read Guide for Business Owners

How to Come Up With a Killer Title for Your Nonfiction Book

The Most Effective Writing Exercises for Busy Business People

 

Bennett R. Coles is the author of 6 books published through Harper Collins (NY) and Titan Publishing Group (UK). He is also the publisher at Promontory Press and the founder/CEO of Cascadia Author Services, a boutique full-service firm that specializes in premium author services specifically designed for busy professionals. Our end-to-end services include writer coaching, ghostwriting, editing, proofing, cover design, book layout, eBook production, printing, distribution and marketing.

People who play competitive sports recreationally, like ice hockey, soccer or basketball rarely (ever?) hire coaches to help them. Yet every single professional athlete who participates in the same sports does – without exception. Why is that?

Because no matter how good an athlete may be in their mastery of the sport, their complete immersion in playing the game prevents them from taking the necessary distance from the field to assess how they’re playing. It can be hard for them to see where they’re getting stuck, what could be improved, how to play faster, with more accuracy, with better angles of attack, etc.

The same applies to nonfiction writers – especially those who are writing a book to improve their career or business profile, to reach out to more clients or to be recognized as experts in their field. If you’re such a writer, your book will become an extension of your professional life, a calling card that’ll communicate your skills, your experience and your subject knowledge to the world – and above all, your personal reputation.

For this reason, it’s imperative that your book be the best possible quality you can produce, in the same way the professional athlete is expected to always be on the top of their game.

This is where the writing coach comes in: to help establish a routine that is conducive to producing good results with consistency, to help shorten the learning curve in order to perfect new skills faster, to offer new perspectives and to help develop the focus and discipline that is necessary to succeed.

What Is a Writing Coach?

A writing coach, not unlike a sports coach, is there to help you develop a writing routine that works for you based on your personality and your style. Their goal is to help you reach a stage where you can consistently write from a place of joy without experiencing drudgery.

A writing coach will offer you ideas and tools so that you can create a personal structure that allows you to stay focused as you access the creative side of your brain. They’ll also help you develop techniques to speed up your writing while at the same time enhancing the quality of your output. In short, they’ll help you get better at your game.

A Writing Coach Is Not The Same as an Editor

What a writing coach is not there to do is to edit your manuscript. What they do instead is help you gain clarity on what you’re trying to achieve with your book, fine-tune the message for your target audience, find the right tone and style to communicate and organize your book project.

An editor, on the other hand, will focus strictly on your manuscript. In addition to taking care of the basic tasks of checking for your grammar and spelling, they’ll also make recommendations about your book structure from top to bottom, will take care of the overall flow, developmental issues, word choice and sentence construction.

The editor focuses on the product. The coach focuses on the process and the person.

Fiction Vs. Nonfiction Writing Coaches

Now, if you’re writing nonfiction, it’s really important that you work with a nonfiction writing coach. Although a coach that specializes in fiction writing will have certain elements in common with a nonfiction coach, what they won’t have is a deep understanding of the psychology of nonfiction audiences.

The audience for your book will be motivated by the need to solve a problem or challenge that they have, which your book will address with your unique solution. They’ll have certain pain-points that they’re seeking to eliminate and are actively looking for relief.

In order to work in this field, the writing coach needs to have not only a deep understanding of the market forces in the genre, but also compassion and empathy for an audience that is seeking to move away from that pain.

A writing coach that specializes in fiction may lack these skills, because their focus is on creating a product meant to entertain and to help readers experience a break from reality by becoming immersed in the lives of the book’s characters. This is clearly not in your best interest as a nonfiction writer.

How Do You Find a Good Nonfiction Writing Coach?

Writing coaches work in an industry that isn’t regulated and you need to be very alert when you research candidates. To make sure you find legitimate writing coaches that fit your requirements, you need to look not just for nonfiction experience but also for a long resume.

In the world of sports, coaches are always older than the athletes because it takes a long time to develop strong coaching skills. In fact, it’s quite common for coaches to have been athletes in their youth.

It’s no different in the world of writing. You’ll find that many of the best coaches are authors themselves who have spent years guiding and mentoring younger authors (not necessarily in age but in experience) to become better writers.

Check the coaches’ websites and read all the testimonials. A good writing coach will list 10 or more testimonials. Learn about what those authors say about their coaching experience. Check what kind of books they’ve written to make sure that they’re in the nonfiction genre (in most cases the titles will be listed along with their full names in the testimonials), and finally visit the authors’ websites and get in touch with them to find out more about how the coach works.

Writing Coach Rates

Rates for writing coaches vary quite a bit, based on demand, experience and genre. Most coaches will charge you an hourly rate, but many offer multi-hour packages at a discount, provided you pay in advance.

A good nonfiction coach will charge anywhere between $100-$125 per hour and a highly sought-after one will charge between $200-$300 per hour. A typical engagement can range anywhere from a single one-hour session to five or more sessions, depending of the writer’s needs.

What Questions Should You Ask Before Hiring a Writing Coach?

Most writing coaches will agree to meet you for a free initial consultation, usually lasting fifteen minutes. This can be conducted over the phone or via teleconferencing. Use this time to assess rapport and to ask questions.

To make your job easier, here are some handy questions that you may want to consider asking during your interview:

• What is your past training as a coach?
• Do you have experience with nonfiction books written by professionals, consultants or entrepreneurs?
• What is your coaching style? How do you work with writers?
• How do you communicate with writers? Phone only, video call, both?
• Based on my goals, how many coaching sessions do you recommend?
• Do you provide a contract outlining your services, fees and terms?
• Could you provide me with two references I can talk to?

Next Steps

The best time to hire a writing coach is at the beginning of your book project. This will allow you to develop a game plan for the entire project, discuss the project details before you put pen to paper and create a writing routine that works best for you.

If you’re at the beginning of your book project, I have a companion post entitled: The 10 Must-Have Writing Skills for Entrepreneurial Authors that might be of help. In it, I’ve compiled a list of skills from successful nonfiction writers that you can borrow from to craft a great nonfiction book.

Best of luck in your search!

Ben

Leave me a comment below if you have any questions or a specific need that I can help you address – I operate an author services firm that specializes in helping entrepreneurs, professionals and business owners who want to publish books as a calling card for prospects, to establish their status as an expert or to generate additional leads for their businesses.

 

Here are some related posts I highly recommend:

How to Write an Epic Nonfiction Book in 12 Steps – A Must-Read Guide for Business Owners

The 7 Key Rules for Outstanding Business Writing

 

Bennett R. Coles is the author of 6 books published through Harper Collins (NY) and Titan Publishing Group (UK). He is also the publisher at Promontory Press and the founder/CEO of Cascadia Author Services, a boutique full-service firm that specializes in premium author services specifically designed for busy professionals. Our end-to-end services include writer coaching, ghostwriting, editing, proofing, cover design, book layout, eBook production, printing, distribution and marketing.

You’ve decided to write a book to support your business, but even though you’ve done plenty of writing in your career, you’ve never written a book before.

So you do an online search to learn what the best practices are for effective nonfiction writing, because you don’t want to spend a lot of time with countless rewrites until you’re happy with the end result.

But there’s a problem. Nearly all the search results that come back show writing exercises for fiction writers or for creative nonfiction. There’s next to nothing for entrepreneurial authors like you who want to write a practical nonfiction book with strategies to help your readers solve a problem.

Most writing exercises out there will teach you how to use creative prompts or how writing about an experience from your youth will help you develop your writing muscle. However, little of that will be of much help to you.

What you need are clear strategies and the right guidance to help you develop the writing chops necessary to create practical, compelling nonfiction for your target audience.

This is the reason why I felt the need to create a post specifically for entrepreneurial authors like you, so you can calibrate your existing and diverse writing experience towards the task of writing your nonfiction book effectively.

Instead of spending time doing exercises that have little relevance to the content of your book, I felt it would be much more effective to break down the key teachings of most writing exercises into practical strategies that you can use right away.

How Do I Write Effectively?

The main goal of entrepreneurial nonfiction books is two-fold:

1. To identify a core problem with your target audience
2. To provide clear, actionable strategies to solve that problem

In order to do this effectively, your writing must be able to:

• Communicate
• Persuade
• Train
• Compel readers to take action

Also, you want to achieve all of the above by using a personable, engaging and clean writing style, while staying away from impersonal, academic and complex language (the later can work very well for textbooks and professional journals, but it ‘s detrimental for practical nonfiction books).

The good news is, if you’re an entrepreneur, small business owner, professional, practitioner or coach, you’re already naturally conditioned to communicate, persuade, train and compel people to take action, except that you’ll typically do that through direct contact with your clients.

So, all you have to learn how to do now is to transfer these abilities into your writing.

How Can I Improve My Writing Style?

As mentioned above, the best style for the type of nonfiction book you’re writing is conversational.

Whenever a reader picks up a nonfiction book written by a specialist who can help them solve a problem they have, they expect to develop a close relationship with the author. In fact, they subconsciously expect the book to be written exclusively for them.

If you, as the writer, use language that is addressed instead to a group of people (your target audience as a whole), then your book will lose its effectiveness.

Why do readers expect problem-solving books to be written just for them? Because most problems are personal by nature and as such they require a personal approach to solving them. Perhaps your target audience is ashamed of their problem, or feels self-conscious about it, perhaps they haven’t told anyone about it, or a myriad other reasons.

So, what you have to do, whenever you sit down to write, is to always think “one-to-one.” In other words, you need to frame your writing as if you were sitting down to work with a client without anyone else present in the room.

Now, how do you reconcile the fact that you’re actually alone when you write? You have to represent both your own voice as well as your client’s voice in your writing.

In essence, your own voice becomes the voice that communicates, persuades, trains and compels, and your client’s voice is symbolized by the use of statements of acknowledgment followed by rhetorical questions (e.g. you would first write: “Healthy fats eaten in moderation actually condition your body to burn fat at a much faster rate,” and posing as your client you would then write: “This is a radical idea, isn’t it?”).

Your ultimate goal is to develop a close one-to-one relationship with your audience to the point where each reader thinks that you’re just talking to them and no one else.

How Do I Improve Clarity In Writing?

Since the entire premise of your writing style is to have a personal conversation, you have to avoid obscuring this conversation with the use of writing crutches that muddy the waters.

For example, don’t over-explain things. Since writing is such a solitary endeavor, without having your subject in front of you giving you visual cues that they “got” what you just said, it’s common to make a point and then to keep remaking the same point again and again from different angles. When you’re alone with your thoughts, there’s no one there to stop you but yourself.

So, what’s the strategy to improve clarity when you write? By writing your sentences as they comes to you (even if you over-explain things) and then reading them back to yourself but switching hats as your client. It’ll become obvious pretty quickly if you’re overwriting.

Here’s another example. Sometimes writers confuse clarity with communicating like an instructor. The danger is that this style, though clear, can easily be perceived as condescending. This will break the one-to-one bond with your readers because no one likes to be talked down to, especially about their problems.

What’s the counter strategy? Seek to write with compassion – always put yourself in the shoes of your reader whenever you’re communicating your solution.

Final example. Some writers are so passionate about their solution that they unknowingly try to evangelize readers – don’t fall into this trap. In order to communicate effectively in written form, you always need to position yourself at the same level as your target audience.

If you position yourself high up on the expert’s podium, your audience will feel that you’re so much more evolved than they are that they’ll never be able to get there on their own and give up reading your book.

Remember, clarity has two sides. On one hand, you have to be clear when you convey your thoughts and ideas in writing. On the other, you have to meet your reader at the level where they are because clarity is also in the eyes of the beholder.

How Can I Write More Concisely?

A more technical extension of clarity is conciseness, or the ability to communicate clearly by using an economy of words. Sentences that are too wordy can become a big turn-off to readers.

Now, you do want to convey your thoughts in a personable, conversational way which sometimes requires the use of casual expressions, but you want to stay away from:

• Using “flowery” language (e.g. “There’s no doubt in my mind, or for that matter in the minds of most other people, that…” instead of “It’s obvious to most people that…”).
• Making excessive use of adjectives (e.g. “This approach is clearly and absolutely more advanced than…” instead of “This approach is clearly more advanced than…”).
• Unnecessarily embellishing sentences (e.g. “This is a mighty problem that is faced by the vast majority of people out there” instead of “This is a big problem that afflicts countless people”).
• Making unnecessary use of metaphors. If you can state matters clearly, you don’t need to use metaphors. Use them only if you have to mention a complex concept that is necessary for your thesis but which is unrelatable to the reader. You can then choose a metaphor that they can relate to.

How Do I Become More Eloquent?

To persuade your target audience to take action, you need to be eloquent in your message. Your book won’t be very effective if your calls to action aren’t compelling enough.

Here are some techniques you can use:

Paint a Clear Picture

Describe what your reader’s future will feel like when your solution is in place. Focus on their feelings and not just on the surface changes they’ll experience.

Teach by Telling Stories

Our brains are pre-wired to respond to storytelling – that’s why the most successful authors the world has ever seen are all fiction writers (the top three alone, William Shakespeare, Agatha Christie and Barbara Cartland, sold a combined 7 billion books!).

Since you’ve been helping clients for so long, you’re bound to have a lot of really good stories you can share with your readers. Just remember that unless you’re re-telling a story that’s in the public domain, or you have written permission from a client (rarely granted), make sure to fictionalize your client stories to disguise identities, places and events in order to protect their privacy.

What you want to do is to communicate the spirit of the story and its lessons for your reader – you’re not required to document the facts.

As an extension of the above, make sure that you choose stories that reflect the current state of mind of your readers (i.e. use client stories that will resonate with the way your readers feel right now).

Address Objections Effectively

Your readers do want to hear about your solution – otherwise they wouldn’t have picked up your book. But they’ll likely have lingering objections in their minds and will read your book through a filter of skepticism. This is because there’s a good chance that they’ve already tried something else in the past that failed to produce results.

To be persuasive, you’ll have to show them clearly why your solution is different from the others, and one of the best ways to do so is to address and refute the most common objections one by one.

How Do I Write With My Voice?

Since the most effective nonfiction books are written in a personable and conversational tone, you’ll need to master your ability to communicate with your own voice.

What you don’t want to do is to stand on the lectern and become an orator, a professor or a guru. These are all labels that will disguise your true voice, which is the voice your readers want to hear. Remember that all readers of nonfiction want to develop a one-to-one relationship with the author.

How do you write with your own voice? By being authentic and sincere in the way that you communicate through the printed page, which incidentally is no different than the way you already communicate with clients.

If you were unauthentic and insincere with them, you’d be struggling in your business because problem-solving relationships only work when they’re built on trust.

You’re not selling an entertainment product so people can live vicariously and forget their problems. You’re selling a solution that addresses people’s problems head on.

Your strategy is to always think deeply about your relationship with your clients as you write your thoughts down for your readers. Always write with empathy and your sincerity and authenticity will automatically come forward.

Writing Strategies

Now we’re going to get a bit more technical. Aside from writing using a personable and conversational style, while writing with clarity and using your own voice, you have to develop a good writing technique.

To be quite honest, this is something that can only come with practice and there are no shortcuts for spending “time at the wheel.” However, to help you along the way, here’s a short list of writing techniques you want to keep in mind:

• Avoid using phrases such as “literally, ” “I mean,” “You know,” “It’s like…” Let’s call them “lazy language.”
• Use contractions as much as you can, otherwise you’ll sound less conversational and more academic.
• Don’t make excessive use of exclamation marks to make a point or you’ll risk being perceived as too “pushy” or “salesy.”
• Minimize the use of expressions that can “clutter” your writing (e.g. “In actual fact…,” “First and foremost…,“ “Needless to say…”).
• Minimize the use of the passive voice (e.g. “It was decided by our team to…” instead of “Our team decided to…”).

What’s Next?

If you’re writing your first book, you may encounter some challenges as you embark on this uncharted journey. To help you navigate these waters problem-free, you’ll need a solid map that removes much of this uncertainly and safely guides you from beginning to end.

For this purpose, I’ve written a companion post entitled: Learn 10 Powerful Writing Habits to Fast-Track Your Nonfiction Book. In it you’ll find solid techniques that successful nonfiction writers use to create great products.

Last but not least, I wish you the best on your exciting journey!

Ben

Leave me a comment below if you have any questions or a specific need that I can help you address – I operate an author services firm that specializes in helping entrepreneurs, professionals and business owners who want to publish books as a calling card for prospects, to establish their status as an expert or to generate additional leads for their businesses.

 

Here are some related posts I highly recommend:

How Long Does it Take to Write a Book to Help Grow Your Business

How to Come Up With Killer Book Titles for Your Nonfiction Book

How to Write a Compelling Introduction that Will Move the Needle

 

Bennett R. Coles is the author of 6 books published through Harper Collins (NY) and Titan Publishing Group (UK). He is also the publisher at Promontory Press and the founder/CEO of Cascadia Author Services, a boutique full-service firm that specializes in premium author services specifically designed for busy professionals. Our end-to-end services include writer coaching, ghostwriting, editing, proofing, cover design, book layout, eBook production, printing, distribution and marketing.