A lot can change in five years. In the May/June 2014 issue of Law Practice, I wrote a column titled “Is a Book the Ultimate Marketing Tool?” The column covered a classic marketing topic: the value of authoring a book in enhancing a lawyer’s reputation as a subject matter expert. I said in that column that writing a book had been the single most effective form of marketing I’ve done over the years, and that remains the case—actually more so since self-publishing came into the mix. (I’ve now published four book titles with traditional publishers and two by Alan House, the publishing arm I created for my law firm.) That column made a brief mention at the end about the emergence of new options for self-publishing. But little was said about the topic because, at that time, publishing with an established publishing house had a number of clear advantages, and the ability to successfully launch a self-published book was not something many lawyers had accomplished.
Today, many lawyers, including myself, have created their own publishing houses and successfully published books that they control entirely. In this column I revisit the topic of book publishing but focus this time on how lawyers and law firms can successfully self-publish.