Chapter Forty-One
The Marketing Power of a Book
By Ben Hart
One of the most powerful marketing tools is the book.
The foundation of my Information Marketing business are the books I write. Writing and publishing a book achieves many key marketing objectives, including:
Establishing you as a leading expert in your field.
Generating money by selling the book
Collecting leads by offering your book (or chapters from your book in the form of “white papers”) for free.
Creating spin-off products from the content of your book – including articles, courses, seminars, speeches.
Or you can do what I do – use a book for all four of these purposes – thereby multiplying the marketing and selling power of your book.
But let me elaborate on the #1 reason to write a book. It’s an instant credential.
And it’s just about the best credential you can ever get, showing the world that you really are an expert at what you do.
Only a small percentage of people out there have ever written a book. So your clients and prospects will be enormously impressed that you have written a book in your area of expertise. And you will have people lining up at your door to hire you.
When someone is looking for an expert, a specialist to solve their problem, they are going to take a very close look at the guy who has literally written the book on the subject.
Would you rather hire just any brain surgeon to operate on your brain? Or would your rather hire the brain surgeon that has written a textbook on brain surgery? Or even better, a book on how to do exactly the specific operation he is getting read to perform on you?
My guess is you want the brain surgeon who has written the book on brain surgery. This is the big reason writing a book is so powerful as a marketing tool – almost no matter what business you are in.
Authors are immediately categorized in people’s minds as leading experts on what they are writing about.
Heck, I only have an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth. But I get invited by leading business schools – including Harvard Business School -- to deliver lectures on direct marketing.
Why?
For one and only one reason – because of my books on marketing. A book is actually a better credential than a PhD.
It will take you four years or longer to get a PhD. Some work on their PhDs for decades. But I can write a good book in about four months.
I never went to business school. I never took a marketing class – mainly because almost everything the business schools teach on marketing is unadulterated B.S. But I routinely receive offers from leading ad agencies on Madison Avenue in New York to run their direct marketing divisions or their direct marketing creative departments.
I have no interest in working for a big ad agency or a big company ever again. I have no interest in doing anything other then what I am doing now – and that’s writing my own stuff, handling a few select clients who are super-easy to work with and who “get” my philosophy of marketing.
But let’s get back to why a book you have written is such a powerful marketing tool, no matter what business you are in.
For starters, there’s the economics of it. It costs about the same to print a four-color brochure as it does a 250 page book – at least in quantities of 1,000 copies or more.
If you print 1,000 four-color brochures – you will probably spend about $3.50 for each brochure, once you’re done paying for the set-up costs and color separations, not to mention the graphic artist.
And that’s about what it will cost you to print 1,000 copies of a 250-page books.
Now, what will impress you more?
If someone hands you their brochure and business card? Or if someone you’re considering hiring hands you a 250-page book they have just written that is exactly about the job you are thinking of hiring them for?
Hmmmm. Not much of a contest, is it?
The brochure will be pitched in the trash as soon as you leave the presence of whoever it is you are talking to. But no one throws a way a book.
That would be like book burning. That’s what the Nazis and the communists do. They burn and they ban books.
No. Your book will go on the book shelf. Your prospect or your client will most likely ask you to autograph the book you have given him – which will make your book an especially prized possession of your prospect or client. And you will become an instant mini-celebrity in the mind of your prospect.
In fact, people will even boast about hiring the author of a book to do a job for them.
“I’m not having just any plastic surgeon do my face-lift” she will say. “I’m having the author of this text book on plastic surgery to do my face-lift. Not taking any chances with my face,” she’ll say as she drops her surgeon’s text book on the kitchen table.
But here’s the big mistake aspiring authors or writers make.
They submit their manuscript to a commercial publisher – like Doubleday, or Harper-Collins or some big publisher like that. They then wait many months to hear back from the publisher.
Almost always the answer is “No, not interested.” Most publishers don’t even look at manuscripts that are not solicited, not commissioned in advance to be written.
But even if you are fortunate enough to have your manuscript accepted, expect to wait at least a year, but more likely two years for your book to appear. Expect then for it to be almost impossible to find your book in bookstores.
Even if you are one of the lucky ones to have the bookstores decide to carry your book, expect the book to be off the shelves within six weeks. And then expect to receive almost no money in royalties.
So, basically three or four years of your life will be down the drain if you work through a commercial publisher.
Here’s what happened with my first book – Poisoned Ivy.
I wrote the book while I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth. The book was on the “political correctness” problem on America’s campuses.
I spent two years peddling the manuscript. It was finally accepted in 1984 by Stein an Day – which was a mid-sized New York publisher at the time.
I think Stein and Day was bought by a bigger publisher, so you no longer see Stein and Day books in the stores anymore.
So the book was accepted. A year-and-half later it appeared. The book was featured on the front page of The Washington Post “Style” section and on the front page of the New York Times book section. It was an instant nationwide bestseller.
I was on all the TV morning show programs. I was on all the political talk shows.
But the publisher did not print enough copies -- just15,000 copies for the first run. The books were sold out within a day or two of release.
They went back up on press with about 30,000 copies. But it took six weeks for the book to get in stores, long after all the media hype was over. So I ended up not making much money. I think my royalty was 12%.
And the publisher deducts all kinds of expenses from the royalty check. So basically, the author ends up with nothing – unless he’s Stephen King or Tom Clancy or someone like that.
If you are an author working through a conventional commercial publisher, expect to get no payments beyond the advance you negotiate.
An advance is the money a publisher pays you in advance to write the book. Expect to receive no money from royalties after that – unless you want to hire a lawyer to take the publisher to court and open up their records, which will cost a fortune.
Plus, a commercial publisher does almost no promoting for your book. The way publishing works is publishers print up a lot of books, and throw them out there and see which ones make money.
The publishing industry is entirely supported with sales from about 5% of the books published. In other words, they are supported by Stephen King, Tom Clancy and a few of the big authors.
The publisher cares less than nothing about the little author who is publishing her first book. The attitude of the commercial publisher toward the first-time, unknown author is beneath contempt.
Your book might be just about the most important thing in life to you. But your book is less important than confetti to the big commercial book publisher – which is banking on just 5% of the books they publish to make any money.
If you are unlucky enough to have a commercial publisher accept your book for publication, what will happen is a few thousand copies will be printed, and then it’s off to the remainder bin. And that will be the end of your years of hard work.
You won’t even to able to print your book yourself because you will have signed the rights away to your publisher.
Oh . . . and you’ll have to buy copies of your own book for at least as much as the bookstores pay for them. So if your book is selling in the stores to $30, you’ll need to pay $15 for each copy of your own book you buy.
There’s a much, much better way.
And that’s to publish your own book – and to take care of all the production, distribution, PR and marketing yourself. And to collect all the money yourself.
But here’s a key point.
Your profit is not really in the book anyway. There’s not a whole lot of money in selling books – some, but not a lot.
The big money for you is in the industry you build for yourself around your book. Your book is really more of a loss-leader for everything else you are doing.
More on that in a minute.
My business model is very similar to the Grateful Dead’s business model. Whether you are a fan of the Grateful Dead like I am does not matter.
They had a great business model. The Grateful Dead might be the most profitable rock band in history even though only two of their songs made it onto the top 40 pop chart.
More than a decade after the death of Jerry Garcia, the band still brings in more than $60 MILLION in sales – not bad for a band that went out of existence in the mid 1990s.
Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead were among the greatest niche marketers in history.
They never pursued the top spot on the pop charts -- or any ranking on the pop charts.
Instead, they dedicated themselves to pursuing a distinct style of music and cultivating a face-to-face relationship with their fans, building a loyal, even fanatical community of hundreds of thousands of Dead Heads by feeding this community exactly what it wanted, never deviating from its brand, for more than 35 years.
The Grateful Dead built its following by playing an average of more than 80 concerts a year for nearly four decades. As the years and decades rolled on, the Grateful Dead’s following never waned, but actually strengthened.
In the early 1990s, until Garcia’s death in 1995, the Grateful Dead were probably the only band that could sell out major professional football stadiums on consecutive nights with no mass-market advertising.
Except for the fact that I am a follower of the Dead, I might never have known when the Grateful Dead was coming to Washington, D.C. because they did no mass-market advertising.
But every summer when the Dead came into town, the 70,000 seats at RFK stadium would be sold out for both nights instantly, as soon as the tickets went on sale.
Unlike other rock bands, the Dead would allow the Dead Heads to record their concerts and even sell the bootleg copies.
In fact, a special area was set up at every concert specifically for the bootleggers, complete with sound equipment, so the recordings would be of decent quality.
Why would the band allow this?
They allowed it because a bootleg copy of a concert was free advertising for the band.
The Dead believed there were no better marketers of the band than their fans. So why not let them record the concerts and distribute the tapes even if the band did not receive one cent from the sale of the tapes and CDs?
The Dead also made a decision to own every aspect of its band and music so it would have complete control over the production and marketing of its products. The band did not want its product corrupted by traditional promoters and the big name recording labels.
It put a ceiling on ticket prices, cracked down on scalpers, and did not mind at all if its hippie Dead Head fans made a few bucks by making their own Grateful Dead tie-dye shirts and products, even though not licensed by the band.
It did not matter to the band that it made nothing on the “counterfeit” Grateful Dead T-shirts.
The band just figured it was more free advertising.
Most importantly, the Dead made a decision to focus on its live concerts instead of recording records—because they were committed to spending face time with their fans.
The Grateful Dead delivered more free concerts than any major rock band in history.
In so doing, they created a devoted community of hundreds of thousands of Dead Heads who followed them from concert to concert.
The Grateful Dead succeeded by owning and controlling every aspect of the production of their records and concerts – pocketing every penny of profit along the way – and understanding their market and what their fans wanted.
They would never allow the big record companies to take them over and corrupt their brand – like a big publisher will do with your book if you are unlucky enough to have your book accepted by a big publisher.
It’s much better to own and control every aspect of your books yourself (unless you are Stephen King or a big author like that). Then your message will always be your own.
You can stay true to yourself, your brand and your fans.
“But Ben, what about distribution? How will I get my book in stores? How will I get my book picked up by Amazon and Barnes and Noble?” you might ask.
Not at all a problem, if that’s what you want to do. All the book stores buy from the few same wholesalers – Ingram’s or Baker & Taylor.
So just get your book in those two places, and you have instant distribution to all the stores if you can build up a prairie fire of demand for your book – which you can do with a good public relations campaign and a good Internet marketing campaign.
And just about every book in existence is for sale on Amazon’s and Barnes & Noble’s website. So if people want your book, they will have no trouble finding it.
The key is the marketing campaign – getting people to want it. The big old-fashioned commercial publishers are dinosaurs.
You have no need for them anymore, because distribution is no longer an issue, if you build up demand for your book. Most people now just buy their books online anyway.
And since you now control and own 100% of the money that comes in from your book, you can now afford to do your own marketing.
You’re not stuck with just 12% royalty from the publisher. You’re now getting 100%, minus the cost of printing. And you’ll do a much better job of marketing your book than any publisher will.
Why? Because you care about your book. You want people to read your book.
But I’m not going to spend much time here on conventional commercial book distribution through the normal channels – getting your book into Amazon’s system and so on . . . because that’s not where the money is for you.
Getting your book carried by the bookstores is really just for your own ego gratification. It will not make you money – at least not real money. In fact, getting your book into Amazon’s system and the bookstores will actually lose you money.
Why?
Because books are considered commodities. A trade paperback is expected to cost about $15. A hardcover book is expected to cost about $30 – depending on thickness, how elaborate it is.
But as a business, you don’t want to be commoditized. You want to be selling a one-of-a-kind service. You want to be the only source of valuable information that you are offering. You really don’t want your book out there like confetti.
You don’t want to sell your trade secrets that you have learned over a lifetime to someone for $15. Why do that?
This is another reason why you want complete control over the production and distribution of your information product.
Not only do you want all the money – not just the 12% of the royalty. But you want to sell the key information you are providing for a lot.
What’s the value of the information in your book?
Well, it depends. Knowing the combination to a safe can be worth a lot.
So what do I do? How do I use my books?
I basically use my books as loss leaders – to sell a larger program. People don’t pay much for books because books are mass-produced. And they look mass-produced.
So I use my printed books mostly to generate my leads – leads that I then sell into a larger program. Back to the Grateful Dead business model again. Let’s take a page from them. They are maybe the most profitable rock band in history even though only two of their songs made it into the top 40 on the pop charts.
They did not play to the broad public or to the masses. They played to their fans and their fans only. So how did they get fans?
They did it by playing more free concerts than any band in rock history. They did it by allowing their fans to record their live concerts and sell the recordings. They did it by not worrying if the hippies outside the stadium were selling their own Grateful Dead tee-shirts and not giving the Dead any of the money.
To the Grateful Dead, all this amounted to free advertising for them.
If the Dead gave a free concert, they could be certain that a hundred thousand Deadheads and fans would show up and bring their friends. The more tie-die Grateful Dead tee-shirts out there, the more free advertising for them.
This was viral marketing, as it’s now called on the Internet.
Was this a conscious business and marketing plan by the Dead?
I have no idea.
I think Jerry Garcia was a very smart guy and probably and some idea about what he was doing here. He himself, alone, was making an estimated $40 MILLION a year during the hey-day of the band. Not bad for an over-weight bearded hippie.
So this is the approach I use with my printed books. They are the equivalent of all those free concerts the Grateful Dead put on for all those decades, and all the “bootleg” recordings of their concerts they allowed their fans to create.
The books are my advertisements. I figure if people like my books, they will become clients or customers for other things I am selling.
They will become Inner Circle members. Some will come to my physical seminars. Some will buy my courses that arrive in a box.
Some will become clients (though I’m not taking on any clients right now).
In other words, if they like books and if they like me, they will become fans and pay me a lot more down the road than the $15 or the $30 they would have paid for the book. By following essentially this strategy, the Grateful Dead accumulated an army of hundreds of thousands of fanatical followers
You were not even considered a “Dead Head” unless you went to at least 100 of their concerts. I went to about 20 of their concerts over the decades – so I guess I was just a fan, not a true-blue deadhead.
So the free book is my version of the free concert the Grateful Dead put on. They put on the free concerts, because they knew that if they could hook you on their distinct brand of music, they would have a lifetime fan. The free concert was the ad, the recruiting device.
The free books that I give away as a loss-leader is my ad, my recuiting device for the rest of what I am marketing. I know that I can sell a course for much more than I can sell a book. A client might pay me tens of thousands of dollars, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars over time. Why should I worry about getting the $15 or $30 for my book?
This would be tripping over the pennies to get to the big bucks. And, of course, a book does not cost me much to produce – about $3.50 a copy on average. The digital version costs me zero to produce.
Not only do I give away the digital ebook version of How To Write Blockbuster Sales Letters and Automatic Marketing FREE to those who fill out my sign-up forms on my landing pages, but I also I encourage people to send their entrepreneurial friends to the landing page to grab their own copy of this free 234-page book.
I’m able to capture thousands of new leads this way – new names of entrepreneurs who go on my free opt-in list of subscribers.
People constantly ask me, “Ben why do you do this? Why do you give away your book for free?”
And my answer is, I know the average value of a lead to me. I also know the average value of a first-time buyer. And I know the approximate average value of a die-hard fan.
The average value to me of a lead who has not yet bought anything from me is probably $40. In other words, I know that I will make at least $40 on average from those who sign up on my form to get the free book.
I will make zero from 90% of those who do ask for the free book. 90% will never buy anything from me. But 10% will buy. Some will buy once. Some will buy many times.
A few will become lifelong clients who will pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars. So finding a lead is worth at least $30 to me on average – probably a whole lot more.
I am willing to spend up to $10 to find a lead. I would spend a lot more than $10 to find a lead if I had to. But so far I have not had to. I’m able to double my money every 75 days or so on my advertising by doing that. So that’s how I use my books – How To Write Blockbuster Sales Letters, Automatic Marketing and the other books I write. So the books serve a number of key purposes for me:
1) They help establish my reputation and credibility in my field.
2) They act as lead generation magnets
3) They help me build a following among those who read them, like them and get value from them.
But the books do not lead directly to substantial profit . . . because you cannot make much money simply by selling your book (unless you are Stephen King or Tom Clancy or someone like that). Your book paves the way for you to make big money.
A number of Inner Circle members have asked me about how to make money with the books or ebooks they have written.
I always tell them, you cannot build a business just by selling an book. You need a big follow-up act. You need other products or services to sell – preferably much higher-priced products.
People will pay big money take a course in their field. And people will pay big money to you to take your course if you have written a book, or more than one book, in that field.
People will pay more – 20 to 50 times more – for essentially the same material that you have in your book if it comes in a loose-leaf binder accompanied by a series of lectures on CDs or DVDs along with a study guide and a work book.
Why?
Because a course is inherently more serious than just a book that you grab off the bookshelf. A course has much great perceived and real value. A course is more comprehensive.
There’s much greater value in attending college than just reading the text books you’ll be reading in college. And its not only the college degree that makes college valuable.
The college degree is valuable because it signifies that you took the courses and did the work. That’s why a course is so much more valuable than a book.
My point is, you can’t really build a business on just a book. You need a follow-up act. You need to be selling something bigger than just the book – something that’s directly in line with the subject matter of the book. That bigger thing might be a course. It might be your consulting service.
It might be plastic surgery, or dental work or legal service. Whatever it is, it must be a bigger ticket item than just your book. The book is your advertisement. It’s your loss leader.
So how might this apply to you if you are, say, a car salesman?
Here’s how.
I have a good friend and Inner Circle member who is probably the best car salesman in Northern Virginia.
His name is Bill.
Bill followed my advice and wrote a book. The book is titled “Car Leasing versus Buying: The Case For and Against Both.”
Bill is not a writer and does not claim to be a writer. So he wrote down, the best he could, the case for and against leasing and the case for and against buying.
He then paid a writer to put the book in publishable form. I think he paid the writer $1,500 to do this.
The result was he had a 120-page book to give people. He then ran ads in the newspaper in the section where all the car dealers advertise. The ad simply said:
Wondering If You Should Lease or Buy Your Next Car?
Before you do either . . .
Pick-Up this FREE Consumer Protection Guide
“Car Leasing versus Buying:
The Case For and Against Both.”
Go To:
CaseForandAgainstLeasing.com
Or call to get your printed copy:
xyz phone number
The website landing page would require all basic contact information before the digital ebook was delivered. Once the form was completed, a page would come up with the access link to the ebook plus a message telling this person that they could come into the dealership to pick up a free printed copy.
The ad with this message featured a nice picture of the printed copy of the book that looked very impressive. The result was a flood of leads for Bill and a quick tripling of his sales.
Not only was Bill offering something of value free to collect his leads. He was positioning himself as an expert, not just a salesman. People trust experts much more than they trust salespeople.
A doctor is a salesperson, too. A doctor is in business to make a living. A doctor must do marketing to be successful. But we don’t think of our doctors as salesmen or business people. We think of doctors as specially trained experts who can fix our health problems. People trust their doctors.
So even if you are a car salesman, you can position yourself as a trusted expert. You do this in large part by becoming a publisher, an information marketer – a disseminator of unbiased information – such as that “Should You Lease or Buy a Car” book I mentioned a few minutes ago.
If you are in sales, you should be an expert at both what you are selling. And you should be an expert on the problem your prospects and customers are looking to solve.
You’re no a car salesman. You are a car expert, a car buying expert. You are not a lawn care guy. You are an expert in creating beautiful lawns. Offer your book on, or commission one to be written titled something like “The Beautiful Lawn Handbook” – something like that.
If you are a dry cleaner, you are not just a dry cleaner, you are an expert on “Keeping Clothes Looking Like New.”
A book like that would be a great item to offer to generate traffic for your dry cleaner for creating confidence in your customers that you are among the best at what you do.
Any dry cleaner who is able to write a book like that is clearly serious about his business.
If you are high-end restauranteur – a book of your recipes would be a great item to give to your customers, and would create customers for life. Don’t worry about giving away some of your trade secrets.
That’s what I do by giving away my books. I’m giving away a big chunk of my trade secrets. Your customers are not going to stop coming to your restaurant because they have a book of your recipes. They go to a restaurant to have a great dining experience.
But by getting this book, they will become loyal fans of your and your restaurant.
If you are a jeweler, offer a “Consumer Awareness Guide to Buying Jewelry.”
And test that offer against a book titled something like “How to Avoid Getting Scammed When Buying Jewelry.”
Any consumer buying jewelry will certainly be interested in reading a book like this. Do you see why just about everyone in business and everyone is sales needs to be an Information Marketer first, a sales person second?
Here’s another key fact to keep in mind.
Studies show that the sales person has zero role in about 75 percent of sales that are made. When someone comes into the car dealership, they already know what they are going to buy. The salesman is little more than an order taker.
People do their research first. They want to study unbiased information before they decide what to buy. They study consumer reports. They do their research to find out what models are best.
They know what they are going to buy and they know what they want before they even meet the salesman. This means that your job as a salesman is to be there at the right time to take the order. You do this by being an Information Marketer.
You do this with your book -- your book on your field of specialty; your book that shows you are not just a salesman, you are an expert, a specialist who takes his profession seriously – who is there to help, not just make a sale.
If you adopt this approach, you will be swamped with grateful customers who trust you.
But here’s another way to make money from your book.
When you are giving away your ebook as lead generation “bait,” you can have links throughout your book that allow you to earn affiliate commissions.
Just about every serious online business has an affiliate program you can enroll in. If your book mentions or recommends certain vendors you use, be sure you are enrolled in the affiliate programs of these companies so that you can receive a commission when someone clicks on a link in your ebook.
Since just about every business on the web has an affiliate program, there does not need to be a conflict of interest between your recommendation and you receiving a commission based on your recommendation. There’s no financial incentive not to recommend the truly best companies. So you can do this in good conscience. Don’t recommend just to get the commission. First decide what products, services and companies you strongly believe in, then sign up as an affiliate marketer.
So that’s yet another way to make money from your ebook.
Good Companies For Printing Your Book
Good companies for short run books (under 300 copies) are www.Lulu.com and www.OutskirtsPress.com. For good pricing and quality on longer runs try Signature Books in Maryland (this is the printer I use). I've found them a joy to work with. When they messed up the printing on one of my books (pages out of order), they reprinted it without kicking up any fuss. .
How to Get Your Book in Stores Nationwide,
and Carried by Amazon and Barnes & Noble
The two biggest wholesale book distributors are Baker and Taylor and Ingram Publisher Services.
They will carry just about any book if you present it to them. Once your book is carried there, Amazon and Barnes & Noble have it. It's then up to you to use the marketing know-how you are learning here to build a prairie fire of demand for your book. Distribution was once a problem for authors. Not any more.
Other second-tier book (but good) distributors include . . .
Associated Publishers Group, Atlas Books, Bella Distribution, Book Clearing House, Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Consortium Book Sales, Cardinal Publishers Group, C&B Books Distribution, Greenleaf Book Group, Independent Publishers Group, Midpoint Trade Books, National Book Network, Small Press Distribution.
Some of these distributors specialize in certain kinds of books. Click on the links above to check out their websites and see which distributors are right for your book.
To have your book distributed in stores and carried in libraries, you will need to get an ISBN number for each book you write. ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. You do that by going here: www.ISBN.org Your ISBN number appears as a barcode on the back on your book. You should also get a Library of Congress Number, also called a Cataloguing in Publication Number. This number along with a classification(s) description of the book appears on the copyright page. This further helps libraries and book dealers catalogue and categorize books. You can get this by going here: http://www.loc.gov/aba/