By Neil Jensen

We've compiled four years of Tom's articles and blogs into a new book titled It's Not Rocket Science: Plain-English Advice for Managing Your Investments. The pieces are short narratives that reinforce some of the basic, yet most important, principles of investing. Below is a description of the process we went through in self-publishing.

One of the goals of Steadyhand is to change the investment landscape in Canada. To that end we intertwine our marketing and investor education objectives by providing educational content on our website, blogging frequently, and by Tom’s bi-weekly column in the Globe & Mail.

We’ve long toyed with the idea of publishing a book of Tom’s writing, and this summer spent some time investigating the process. We were initially dismayed as we were told that to go the traditional route of conceiving an idea for the book, writing it, and then working with a publisher would take us about a year and a half before the book was available to the public. While there is tremendous value in what a publisher brings to the table (editing, marketing, design, etc.), the process seemed onerous and we didn’t want to wait that long.

Being self-starters, we decided to self-publish, and treat it as a learning exercise (which is how we treat many of our marketing initiatives).

We shifted our focus to creating a book that was a compilation of Tom’s best writings over the past four years, including many of his Globe & Mail columns (which he owns the rights to). The columns have been edited by the G&M, so we decided to forgo hiring an external editor to work with us. We spent a lot of time selecting the best articles (we have over 600 blog postings) and grouping them together into chapters focused on specific investment themes. The result was 34 articles grouped into 8 sections, for approximately 140 pages.

After some research, we chose lulu.com to print and publish the books. Lulu is an open publishing platform that allows users to upload content and self-publish books in a variety of formats. While we could have used Microsoft Word to create the book contents for Lulu, we ended up using the LaTeX system for its superior typesetting. This involved downloading the blog articles from our website, converting them to LaTeX files and then generating a PDF of the book’s contents. While we were very happy with the results, LaTeX is not for the faint of heart and requires a high geek-quotient to master. We designed our own book front and back cover using Apple Pages.

We test-published a version of It’s Not Rocket Science and then took the plunge and ordered 1,000 soft cover books (for a cost of roughly $2 per book). We announced the book on our website in late November and provided PDF and ePub versions, and a follower of the company created a Kindle version for us as well.

We decided initially not to charge for the book – our goal was to spread the word about Steadyhand while educating investors, and we consider this a powerful form of marketing.

The results so far have exceeded our expectations. We’ve distributed over 600 books, and the electronic versions have been downloaded over 800 times. There have been a number of positive reviews on the web, and the feedback from readers has been extremely positive. On the marketing front, the book has been referenced in a number of venues in which we don’t normally appear, so we feel that we’re introducing Steadyhand to possible new clients. We’ll be monitoring the results of this closely over the coming months to determine how it helps build our business.