I’m going to explain all the ways you can monetize a book, but first, you need to understand how the “book as a marketing tool” works. It was a marketing tool intended to get attention for her from a very specific set of people, and it worked ( see her full story here). Her book tripled the inbound leads to her consulting business, and she was signed a multi-million dollar contract with one of the largest mall companies in America to create and implement their pop-up strategy.Īll because of her book. Which led to all the decision makers in retail–the exact people she wanted as clients–to come to her. She shared her knowledge and expertise, and because her book was the first one that deeply explored this topic, she became the recognized expert in this niche field. She did this by focusing her book on how the new techniques she pioneered in pop-up retail could help stagnating retail businesses. Instead, she focused on reaching the decision-makers in the retail space–the types of people who would hire her as a consultant. There just wasn’t a large audience for that topic. Obviously, not many people care about books on retail, and even fewer care about pop-up retail, so focusing on selling copies was a losing strategy from the start. Melissa is one of the world’s premier experts in a very niche space (pop-up retail). How? Because she wrote it to market her business, not to sell copies. You want to hear what’s even crazier? She did it selling LESS than 1000 copies. She estimates she’s made over a million dollars from the book. She did a book with us, and it’s called The Pop Up Paradigm. Great example: Our first client was a woman named Melissa Gonzalez. You can sell products, services, speaking, consulting, software–any number of things. This is how we advise our clients to look at books:Ī book is a multi-purpose marketing tool with unique and special abilities to create attention that you can turn into sales.įor entrepreneurs and professionals and other business people–people who own companies, are experts in their fields, and have some other activity they get paid for like speaking or consulting or coaching–the book itself creates attention, and that attention is the means to selling the other, larger opportunities that can be VERY profitable. Once you stop thinking about book sales, and start thinking about a book as a way to sell something else, everything changes. If your book is a marketing tool for something else, it’s easy to make money They don’t have anything else to sell but a copy of the book. They need to worry about selling copies of books because book sales are only way they can make money! There is only one group of people who must focus on how many copies they sell: Professional writers (like novelists, fiction writers, etc). People have a low limit on their perceived value for books. The greatest book ever written, if it costs more than that, won’t get bought. The highest you can charge is about $25, give or take. What’s even worse is that you can’t charge enough for books to generate good revenue from them. The list of books that have sold 10 million copies in history is so small there’s a Wikipedia page about them. The number of books that reached 1 million sold last year is even fewer, probably close to 10 (and almost all of those were novels).Īnd virtually no book does more than that. BookScan, the company that measures all book sales, says that only about 200 books per year sell 100,000 copies. Last year, there were about 300,000 new books published in America. It’s hard to sell book copiesĪ fact of life: it’s nearly impossible to sell a lot of copies of a book. If you want to make money from a book, don’t focus on selling copies, use your book as a marketing tool that gets you attention and sales for something else. In fact, focusing on book sales is usually the worst way to make money from a book. This is the right way: “How do I use my book as a tool to make money?”Īren’t those two things the same? Isn’t selling books the same as using a book to make money?Ībsolutely not. This is the wrong way: “How do I sell a lot of books?” It’s possible to make a lot of money from a book, but only if you approach it the right way.
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