Your Competitive Advantage The Attraction Builder™ Website and Online Community provides the communication tools, know-how and resources to help anyone market or promote their business or career. The online store offers the do-it-yourself tools that make difficult tasks like writing and getting published a reality.    Why would writing give you a competitive advantage? Writing is not only valued by our culture as proof of intelligence, it can help you leapfrog your competition by reaching consumers and becoming known and familiar.

There Are No Wrong Choices, Only Unfamiliar Ones!

People base their decisions on what is familiar.  They find comfort in familiarity and discomfort in the unknown.  The more you see someone, the more you like them.  Becoming known is the goal of the attraction marketing program.  By addressing the familiarity factor ahead of time in bylined articles, booklets, and materials, your sales cycle can be shortened significantly. This creates increased productivity and a bigger future, thereby giving you a competitive advantage. 

Sure it's true that good writing takes years to develop, but it also takes years before you have something to write about.  Assuming you’ve been doing something with your life, it may be time to document how you “did what you did.”

Your opportunity to move ahead of the pack!
“As of 2009, an unpublished author is on a par with published author.”

How could that be?  Because virtually all how-to advice books published prior to October 2008 are out of date, obsolete, and worthless. But how could they all be worthless?

We all witnessed the subprime mortgage crisis and the largest economic collapse in our lifetimes.

Now think about all the books written offering get-rich-fast advice, profiling business-building strategies or investment tactics that were supposed to prevent loss.  But the facts are undisputable: Most investors lost 30% to 50% of their assets’ value overnight, and the government has had to bail out the largest financial institutions and companies in America. 

Here’s my six million dollar question to you: If the advice offered didn’t work then, why would the same advice work going forward?  The answer is: It won’t!

A New Playing Field
Everyone should have an equal chance to succeed, but that is not always the case in publishing; and, particularly in the business book genre where the field is often uneven and seldom level.  But, today, in terms of credibility, an unpublished author is on a par with the famous and well-known.  Famous and well-known authors may have sold more books than you, but if written prior to 2008, their advice cost their readers untold millions—and people don’t forget.  A 50% loss will take more than a 100% return just to get back to even, and if we stay in a low growth economy, that could take 20 years.  Ouch!

Of course, there are a few books whose author’s advice actually worked, such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan—The Impact of the Highly Improbable (which may become one of the most important books of the last 25 years), books by Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Covey, Daniel Pink, Frank Luntz, or Jim Lunney, author of Surviving the Storm, McGraw-Hill 2008, which I was lucky enough to help write.  (Jim used demographics and his 25 years of experience to predict what has happened almost with perfect clarity, but that is a story for another time.)  

The Downturn Has Shuffled the Deck
After the forces of the free markets make the necessary corrections—which includes a beneficial housecleaning of our economy—by sweeping out bad ideas; unproductive practices; wasteful strategies; and ineffective companies, organizations and people, what will emerge after several years will be a much more productive and, if we are to survive, more efficient economy, taking care of more people.  And you can be a part of the solution by writing a book that offers new and unique solutions, solves pressing concerns, strengthens a reader’s capabilities, or eliminates an everyday danger.

Best of Luck!

Larry Chambers