He’s got one of the most popular and interesting blogs on the internet – in fact, if you asked me to give an example of an effective blog in this still young technology, my list would include Seth’s blog.

In a recent posting titled “Do Business Books Work”, Seth posed a question that was no doubt intended to provide him with a measure of the market for business readers, a market he himself is heavily involved with.

In his post he argues that other professions voraciously read AND follow the written word to a much greater extent than business (and specifically sales and marketing) professionals.

Having self-published material into these markets, offered courses and seminars – here are my answers for Seth Godin’s questions:

1. Most business books are bad! It’s the 95-5% rule, mainly because of the poor state of our current publishing industry, far more bad books get written than good ones. By bad I mean simply wrong, ineffective, unproven or at the very least, useless information. Unfortunately, there are very few authors writing business books that have any considerable achievement – are they the ones you want to be learning from?

2. Business books have become marketing tools. Non-fiction books, especially of the “How To” variety in business, personal development, cookbooks, health and wellness have always been lead generators first. Seth Godin knows this better than anyone having mastered the art of publishing for branding and marketing purposes. So, there should be no surprise that sales and marketing folks end up spending far more on advanced training, seminars, workshops, courses, and the like – that’s exactly what most book authors want them to do…

These are the principles of information marketing just as we teach them at the Information Marketer’s Zone – you create content at various price ranges offering increased value at higher prices resulting in a “product funnel” as the main model behind your own information product marketing empire.

There really is no surprise here, the market is just following the book marketer’s lead.

Jeff