Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been talking on the blog about the different ways to get published: approaching a publisher, attracting a publisher to approach you, and self-publishing. One thing that I hope has become more clear to you is that publishers are really in the game to make money for their own business by selling copies of your book. This week, I’d like to talk about how savvy authors actually make money writing, potentially really good money.
How do people make money writing books?
Essentially, there are only two ways to make money writing books:
Option one: Sell a lot of books. This generally involves writing a lot of books so that your loyal fans can become repeat customers.
Option two: Sell something that is on the same topic as your book but allows the reader to go deeper with you.
The second option is nearly limitless. You can write one, two, or three great books, set them up to do the heavy lifting in your marketing platform, and then make hundreds of thousands, millions, heck, hundreds of millions on the back-end business model. That’s pretty darn exciting to me, so let’s talk about how you can make money writing and take your reader deeper with you.
What are some ways a reader can go deeper with you?
Just to give you a bird’s eye view of all the possibilities, a reader can go deeper with you:
- At a live event. You might give a workshop, retreat, presentation, a keynote presentation, or you might organize an entire conference. Each of these would offer the possibility of the reader investing money with you for deeper, live training/coaching/healing/learning.
- In one-on-one coaching. Coaching can happen on a couch in a therapist’s office, at a hotel meeting room in the client’s city, or via Skype. Most people who want to get results will happily pay someone else to help then get those results faster and more efficiently than on their own.
- Through group classes. These classes can be through CDs, DVDs, online videos, FB live videos, webinars, group meeting interfaces, or in a real, live classroom. For any topic that you’d write a book about, you could almost certainly create an entire course to walk the person through, step-by-step, and why not do this as a group class experience?
- Through memberships. If the type of training/coaching/healing/learning that you offer is an ongoing process, you could have people sign up for a membership arrangement with you, so that you offer live events, one-on-one coaching, or group classes on a regular basis. Recurring revenue, now that’s a good thing.
Okay, yes, all of these sound awesome. But how does a book make it possible? Let’s go through a hypothetical example that I think’ll help.
How to turn your reader into a client or customer.
A sales funnel is how you bring someone who has never heard of your business or platform into your world, give that person a chance to get to know you, and then provide an opportunity to go deeper with you by investing in your product or service.
How do you guide someone on this sales funnel journey with a book?
1. Publish a book that has the keywords in the subtitle, that your ideal customer, client, or supporter would type into Amazon.
For instance, if you are writing a book for people who teaching meditation to parents of young kids, you’ll want to include words like “meditation” and “busy,” so that your ideal people are more likely to find your book when they’re searching Amazon.
2. Put an opt-in or freebie at the beginning of the book and the end of the book.
People who are just browsing through the Amazon bookstore will click on your book title, look in the beginning of the book and be interested in both the book and the freebie. They might even click and get your free offer before the buy the book. Or, if they read your book and love your message, they’d get the freebie then. Either way, they join your email list.
3. Offer an entry-level product or service.
Now that you have their email address, you can send them a series of emails to deliver the freebie, to tell them more about you, and to sell them an entry-level offer. Your entry-level offer could be a free call with you or a $97 product, it doesn’t really matter.
Even if they don’t buy from you right away (or if you’re in the non-profit space, if they don’t financially support you right away), they’ve given you their email address.
4. Continue to send them valuable content through a free newsletter, maybe once a week or once a month.
And every few months, when you have something for sale, you can send them another email, and then they might become a buyer or supporter.
This is how you use a book to make money writing. And this is only one of the ways!
If you want to know more about how to write and self-publish a book that will strategically level-up your business and platform, you’re going to want in on the Free Book-Writing Crash Course that’s starting on November 22nd.
The free crash course will walk you through:
1. Three things you need to know about publishing and why now is the perfect time for your book.
2. The quick-start method that will get you clear on your topic & motivated to write today.
3. How you can write a high-quality, publishable book that you are proud to sell in 90 days.
Want in?
The free crash course is only available for a few days,
so sign up to get in:
http://startwritingyourbooktoday.com/crashcourse