Selling Books Isn’t About Selling Books
I was reading a few comments back before I decided to go on an internet detox. (Which is a great idea – you should all try it.)
One of those comments was something along the lines of, “Being a writer/selling books doesn’t pay well because books are cheap and your customers are one-time customers.”
That’s a fair assumption – but it’s wrong.
The argument above boils down to two major thinking flaws:
- Not understanding what you’re selling when you sell words.
- Not understanding the options available to you when you have that new knowledge.
Let’s start with the first one, although I’ve talked about it ad nauseam in the past.
You’re Licensing Those Words
When you’re a bookseller, you’re not a bookseller. You sell books, sure, but the thing that holds value is the intellectual property. If you’re writing fiction, then people are paying for the story. If you’re writing non-fiction, then people are paying for the useful information inwhatever format you give it to them.
The magic of this is that the value doesn’t decrease when you sell it. You have to pay for the packaging (i.e. the physical book) but you can sell the principle product (the intellectual property) a million times without it costing you anything.
Selling a story in a book is like if McDonalds could clone a burger and only pay for the packaging. Their profits would be immeasurable, and that’s essentially the hand a writer is dealt.
Assuming you hold the copyright to your words, you can chop, change and put those words in any number of different formats.
That’s the first major understanding. The second issue with this is that most authors aren’t business people, and so don’t see the range of opportunities available to them.
Bundles
This is easy, free and doesn’t take much effort outside of copying and pasting.
If you’re selling books then you should be selling bundles. If you have three books on the same subject selling for $10 each, then you should keep selling them. But you should also bundle them and have people spend $20-$25 on the three together.
The readers save money, you get more money and it’s all wonderful. It will literally take you an hour at most to compile this collection, and you can chop and change at will. There are millions of different combinations for bundling you can try.
Subscriptions
Next to no authors offer subscription models, and they probably all should.
If you’re creating material on a regular basis, you should consider starting a subscription model. Again, this is win-win for reader and publisher.
Say you write one book every quarter. (If you can’t do this, then get to that point.) Your books sell for $10 each.
Have a membership program/fan club/whatever (give it a catchy title) and charge $30. You’ll be giving away one book for every four, but what you’re getting in return is recurring revenue. Recurring revenue is basically magical.
Obviously run the numbers on this one and work out how you’re going to do it in a bit more detail, but the same principle applies to books as it does every other recurring revenue model: guaranteed income is good.
Affiliate Sales
Non-fiction authors will probably be with me on this. Some of the fiction authors probably won’t be. Who knows?
The fact is that if you’re selling books, you can also sell anything else. If you’re selling non-fiction, you can link straight to products from your ebooks and you can have an “Exclusive resources” page you can send readers to.
You’ll also have an email list, right?
And you’ll have links to your own books in the back of your books… those should be affiliate links so when people add a new hoover to their next book purchase, you get a commission.
Rights to Books and Other Stuff
Remember – you’re selling the right to consume your intellectual property.
You can also sell the rights to reproduce your intellectual property; movie rights, translation rights, video game rights.
Or you can do all of those things yourself. Sure, you’re not going to go from self-help writer to movie director, video game designer and Chinese translator yourself, but there’s no real reason you can’t hire someone to translate your work or – if you make a lot of money – produce other formats.
Upsells
An author can upsell just as well as any other businessperson can.
“You like my book, maybe you’d like my seminar!”
“You love this story… why not join the fan club?”
“If you liked this book, you’ll love this course”
“I’ve teamed up with this helpful company that just happens to help people like you, and they’ve given my readers a discount on X”
You can create upsells or be an affiliate for them.
Other Sells
If the above seems complicated, it doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to create a super-duper $1000 course for people who’ve bought your $5 book on the history of railways.
You can just sell other stuff.
You can write a series of books and link them together by calls-to-action.
Or you can simply write other books and do the same.
You can build a digital version of your book, a paperback, hardback and limited edition signed copy.
Again, all of these things involve very little extra work.
Merchandise
Don’t make this your main business model, but by all means look into merchandise.
A lot of authors give away bookmarks and stuff to their fans (and other poor people that happen to accident upon a book signing at the store.) You can easily take it to another level if you have a recognisable brand of books – fiction or non-fiction.
- T-shirt slogans are easy, tacky and they sell.
- You can sell posters of your cover if they’re good
- Relevant stuff for your niche; There are branded 50 Shades of Grey clothing lines, sex toys and all manner of other stuff
- Toys if you write for children
- Mugs, pillows and all those other cheap dropship type things
Your market will dictate these things and you won’t want to do them as a main business line or when you’re starting out, but it’s all money in the pot once you’re going. More streams of income are better for your business, brain and bragging rights.
Final Thoughts
This post could go on forever, and I’ve only just touched on some of the bigger, more obvious aspects of each of those things. Also, I’ve tried to keep it to things that don’t require too much effort (except the rights/formats one.) It’ll take you a few hours to bundle stuff up, add affiliate links or create merchandise logos and stuff. There’s no reason why you can’t do any of those things.
The wider point is that you’re only a starving writer if you choose to be. With a couple of books written, you have endless different streams of income and projects available to you.
In this day and age, most of the limitations of traditional publishing can be bypassed, and most of the benefits available to other business models can be had for publishing books as well.