How Ebooks Can Kindle Clients’ Interest In Your Law Practice

Over four years ago – lightyears in Internet time – I blogged over at Nolo’s Legal Marketing Blawg about using ebooks to market a law practice. As a marketing tool, ebooks work for many reasons: foremost, they provide value by educating prospective clients and offer lawyers an opportunity to convey their expertise.

Yet despite the benefits of ebooks, during my speaking engagements over the years, I’ve found that only a handful of lawyers actually include them as part of their marketing portfolios.  For some, the thought of writing an entire book is intimidating while others didn’t quite understand the concept of an electronic publication or were deterred by the anticipated cost of designing and producing a book.

Now, four years later, most lawyers understand the ebook concept – and Amazon has made self-publishing easier than ever. While I’ve been sitting around toying with the idea of aggregating MyShingle content or other legal papers for a Kindle ebook, San Diego Car Accident and Injury Attorney Joseph Dang has gone ahead and done it.  Using materials that he’d already prepared for prospective car accident clients, Dang set aside a weekend to repurpose them as copy for an ebook, entitled The Dirty 8: The 8 Dirtiest Insurance Adjuster Tricks that Can Cost You Thousands. Dang sourced the formatting to a contractor he found on Fiverr (see my post here) and by the end of the weekend, had uploaded the book to Amazon for sale.  

I’ve read Dang’s book and it’s full of neat advice. The inside formatting looks good, though I’m not crazy about the cover; perhaps for future publications, Dang might consider more professional design.  But while clients may judge a book by its cover, I don’t – and I found the content informative, accurate and to the point. Dang makes the book available for sale on Amazon which presumably deters competitors and copycats – but I believe that it’s available free to in-state prospective clients.

Can an ebook kindle a client’s interest in your law practice? The only way to find out is to do what you’d do with any book: dive in and see what happens.  I certainly intend to.