‘T-Shirts and Suits’ – a Free E-book from David Parrish

I was delighted to receive an e-mail from David Parrish this week, telling me he’s releasing his book T-Shirts and Suits as a free e-book.

T-Shirts and Suits is a ‘guide to the business of creativity’ and does an excellent job of making business advice ‘user-friendly’ for creative entrepreneurs. For a start, the eye-catching design means it doesn’t look like a business book. Inside, David addresses the basic subjects at the core of any creative business – marketing, intellectual property, accounting, business feasibility, leadership and management – in a way that makes them accessible and relevant to people who are creatives by choice and business people by necessity. It’s also one of the very few books on creative business to use the word ‘coaching’ in a management context – for which it receives an honourable mention in my forthcoming research paper.

I asked David what had prompted him to write the book:

“I’ve been designing and delivering training workshops for creative entrepreneurs for some years now and the book grew out of my training material. T-Shirts and Suits is a condensation of what I’ve picked up from my own experience, great ideas from creative enterprises I have worked with, combined with some business techniques I learnt at business school and from other research. I want to share my experience and knowledge with creative people who want to learn more about business to make their creative enterprises even more successful. The book has proved to be a great way to do this.”

Having gone to all the trouble of writing the book and getting it published, I wondered why he was prepared to give it away for free?

“There has been an interesting debate in the publisher’s offices about releasing a free e-book version. Some people believe that giving away a free e-book could kill book sales, whereas others see the e-book as a way to actually increase sales of the paperback. My own view is that it will help sales, but even if it doesn’t, it’s not my main concern. The bottom line for me is to share what I’ve experienced and learnt with as many creative people as possible – and to continue to learn from successful creative enterprises and feed it back into the world-wide network through my website, training, consultancy, and further publishing projects.”

As Seth Godin puts it, “ideas that spread, win”. And Seth has done a pretty good job of spreading ideas and selling books by giving them away for free. I hope it works for David as his ideas are much-needed for anyone trying to run a business fuelled by creativity. So if that’s you, I would download the e-book for free before you get stuck into today’s spreadsheets.

More good news – David is also sharing his ideas on his excellent blog.