If you haven't written your book yet, learn how to write a book in 30 days first. It's important to realise where the money comes from when it comes to books and publishing. It comes down to this: Usually you either get a publishing deal, then get an advance and royalties once you've sold a certain amount or you use the book for publicity and get paid for speaking engagements. I didn't do either. I have no publishing deal, never have and never will. I'm also shit scared of public speaking so haven't done that either. That leaves our third and final way of making money. Self-publish then sell the book for a profit. I didn't do that either. Actually, I've sold 3 copies on Amazon for a total profit (after their fee) of about £3.40.
Simple. You give the books away. Before we go any further, I'm not talking about e-books here. I'm talking about real, printed books that you hold in your hand, put into an envelope and post to someone.
Just before we get into the nuts and bolts of this, we need to assume you have a fairly high priced product or service with a sensible amount of profit in the deal. Don't try doing this on a shoestring budget. When we did this, we were selling custom software. Business Automation Systems which ranged from £8,000 to £20,000 with retainers upwards of £6,000 a year. We had some money to play with but we still needed customers. Here's the criteria I feel you'll need for this to work:
Your book should be written in a way that has people wanting to contact you. It shouldn't be a 120 page sales letter but there should be a clear next step for the reader if they're keen. The best way I can think of this is to write it as if it will have a £10,000 price tag. That's the level of value you're looking to pack into this baby. Keep it real and tell a story. Books full of blog posts are boring and don't get read. Trust me. The stage is set. You have your book worth £10,000. It's all written and ready to go. It convinces people to get in touch with you at the end of the book. Now you just need to get it in front of people.
The basic marketing plan is pretty simple. It's not revolutionary but if you do the basics right, it works beautifully.
You'll need to assess who your potential readers / customers are and what platforms they use. We tried Facebook Ads and to be honest found it to be completely crap. Great response but completely the wrong people. The targeting is far better on Facebook now so don't take my word for it. What we did find that worked well was LinkedIn Ads. It's expensive, which is partly why you need the decent profit margin but the quality of the traffic is way better. It's well worth giving it a spin. I would say, hang in there. It was 4 months before we saw any actual revenue from our efforts so it will take time. What I did when running ads was took the main 8 or 9 key themes and points from the book (clue: they're probably the bullet points on the back cover of your book) and created ads and landing pages around those themes. Example: I had a bunch of generic "step by step guide to automating your business" type ads, then a bunch of lifestyle ones like "How to ACTUALLY live the 4 hour work week" then we dug into the more specific things like "Here's what an automated sales process looks like". Don't overthink it. You only need to utilise the main themes of the book and create a corresponding landing page.
Whatever you do, make sure this is automatic. You need it going into a CRM or at the very least, into your email marketing software. Even with 3 book requests a week and a fairly busy client services business, I found it near impossible to keep track so we built something custom into our CRM which showed us what book requests had come in, which ones we'd sent out etc. I imagine you could use a free e-commerce plugin for Wordpress. That would do the trick. An experiment we ran was collecting additional data, like problems in their business, which areas they struggled with etc. I found that it had an ever-so-slightly lower conversion rate but the data was worth capturing only if you do something with it. In short, if you're going to ask deeper questions about each person who requests a book, or get them to complete a short survey, keep it multiple choice and make sure you a) ask good questions b) do something useful with the data.
This is the magic that makes the whole experience for your reader epic rather than average. First, let's talk about packaging. You'll probably get a book in the size called Royal. That's the most common size of a regular book. They fit perfectly into A5 envelopes that have the bubble wrap inside. You want to put the book, a 'thank you' card and a business card in the envelope. For a long time we just bought cheap 'Thank you' cards. In hindsight, while it wasn't as polished, I think it was more authentic. I would write something like this in the card:
"Thanks for requesting a copy of my book {first name}.
I really hope you enjoy it and get value from it. If you have any questions or want to share any ideas with me about it, my card is in here. Please don't hesitate. Enjoy. Adam"
This approach was different from what you'd expect and it worked really nicely. The next thing is to make sure you send it THE SAME DAY they request it. This is absolutely non-negotiable if you want the epic response. This probably sounds like a lot of hard work but this is how you nearly automate the entire thing, while still making it all look really manual. Basically, you're batching the entire process.
That's what I did, you might find other ways to make it simple but whatever you do, post it the same day with First Class stamps and make sure it's as easy as possible. If it's any effort, it'll be annoying and you won't do it.
There's so much that's been written about automated marketing campaigns, I'm not going to write too much but I'll make a few points:
I didn't actually do this to start with and it's depressing how much business I must have missed out on. Hit them up with a couple of personalised emails, but preferably phone calls. Keep them super chill and just build the relationship. The idea is to just find out from them what they were struggling with and offer help. Use Eben Pagan's old "moving the free line" trick. Give them 3 or 4 times as much value as you would normally. Help them discover the solution themselves through you. I liked to follow up with a personal email after 7 days just saying something like:
"Hi {firstname} Adam Hempenstall here, I hope you're enjoying Automate Your Business. Just thought I'd pop you a quick email and say hi. While I'm here, could I ask, what was it that attracted you initially to the book? Are there any problems that you're facing that you felt the book would help you with? My ears are open. Adam
This kind of approach is different to the normal state of affairs which is just booking in a "sales appointment". This is a far more fluid approach so it'll require you to use a CRM. After a while you'll find you'll do lots of mini-consultancies, then leave them a while, then maybe they will buy your solution 4 or 5 months later. I would also reach out to them at about the 3-month mark too. It doesn't matter what you say, just get a conversation going.
I feel I need to address the big claim in the title. It's actually way more than £300,000 but I can't truly say how much it is. Every deal we've won, the decision maker has read the book so it's difficult to know if we would have won the deal anyway. A quick note on conversion rates. We were always 50%+ on the landing page. At one point it was performing at nearly 80% which was insane. This is of nearly no relevance to you because you don't sell what we sold at the time but we were making roughly 1 sale every time we sent out 50 books. That worked really well for us. Book - £3.50 Stamps - £1.60 Envelope - 30p Thank you card - £1 Traffic to get book request - £8 Total - £14.40 Times that by the 50 books we needed to get a sale is £720. When your cost per acquiring an £8,000 - £20,000 customer is £720, that's pretty good going.
Please do this. Honestly, it's a crime not to. There's so much more I could share with you about it so if you are vaguely inspired by this post and this one on how to write a book in 30 days then please drop me an email and I'll offer more advice where needed. Thanks for reading and best of luck with it.
Теst the effectiveness of your proposals but it would take you years and hundreds of thousands of pounds in lost revenue to work out what worked and what didn't.
You don't enjoy the idea of selling, but love it when people decide to go ahead with you. If that's true for you then you're like 99% of the rest of us.