Getting Your Book Printed
Since the start of this year, there have been quite a few posts in social media by people who have written and published their first book. Each time the person is excitedly showing off the boxes they received with the first print run of their books.
I can understand that excitement – holding your book in your hands makes Authorship real. You know you are not dreaming and from now on you will say with confidence: ‘I am a published Author’, or ‘I am the Author of…’
Here is what many people who have written a book and received their box(es) full of books do not know or maybe do not think about:
- How are you going to promote and sell your books?
- How much time will you spend on packaging and mailing your books when orders come in?
Let’s take a closer look at each of those two questions and answer them.
Firstly, most people who have written a book are told to either set up a separate website for their book and promote that site so people will come and buy their book. Or they are told to set up a separate page on their existing website to promote and sell their book from.
The reason for selling your book yourself from your own page would be to collect a database of buyers and then to stay in contact with them to ‘warm’ them up to eventually come and buy higher ticket offers from you. (not all people who have written a book and set up a separate page know why they were told to so and so they miss the opportunity to stay in contact with book buyers because they don’t know)
Next, it is usually a publisher who will suggest to the author to set up such a page to sell the book from and it is immediately clear to me, that the publisher is not a marketer and here is why:
In order to attract people to find your page and buy your book, you must put a range of steps in place for the page to be found and found by people who are actually interested in your book topic.
Many authors assume ‘anybody’ who is their client, will also buy their book.
Watch my short Video, top of the page, why this is not the case, here:
CLICK TO WATCH
(you will need 15min to watch it)
Next, when you have the printed copies of your book, you will need to spend time, effort and possibly money to promote the book page for people to find it and buy your book.
Is time spent promoting the page useful for you and will it give you an outcome, is a question for you to answer?
And lastly, at least for the purpose of this post, in answering the first question from above, (How are you going to promote and sell your books?) another question arises:
How useful are book sales going to be for you?
Is the book ‘marketing optimized’, meaning, how was the book written that will make it a ‘tool’ to bring prospects to you to become clients?
Or was your book set up so your authority and expertise jumps off the pages and makes it easy to get media appearances?
Or did you purposefully write the chapters in a way the book will open doors to new business opportunities, new industries or to get you specific industry contracts?
Read this post that explains what you want to work out BEFORE you start writing a book:
Simply making a book sale, possibly for $25 or $30 per book, will take 34 sales to make just $1,000.
Most coaches and consultants usually have a program or service where they get $1,000 for serving one client – and the time, effort and money spent on getting one client is less than the time, effort and money spent on first promoting the book sales page and then staying in contact with the buyer of the book to eventually convert them to a client!
Next question from above: how much time will you spend on packaging and mailing out your book orders?
Let’s look at this logically, if you are after making sales, or at least selling your book so people get to know about you and your expertise, then you want to make a lot of sales so a lot of people get to know about you.
How many books can you package and mail out each day and not take away time from your business, serving existing clients?
You also need to promote the sales page, remember, so make that part of your time consideration.
Next, what sort of packaging material will you need, is it going to be economical to stock up on that or get it in as you need to?
How much does the packaging material add to the overall price of you selling your book? Now you need to look at what the print version of your book, printed locally, will cost you, in the first place?
If you have not yet done these sums, I recommend doing them BEFORE the book goes to a local printer.
(obviously too late for all those people whos’ social media posts I saw over the past weeks who’ve already received their boxes of books!)
Some people might now argue, BUT you need books when you go out and speak at an event or network. Yes, that is a different opportunity to share your book and to ‘sell’ it and with that, your expertise.
Right now, though, not too many events are ‘in person’. And we don’t know when that will be in full swing again!
Here is a much better approach to getting your book into the hands of the people who are keen to read your book:
Use the Amazon print on demand system.
Order only as many copies for yourself as you need for any particular situation, like an event where there might be 30 people, order 50 books.
Let Amazon promote your book online to their millions of subscribers.
Use the Amazon link to buy your book on your website and also in social media posts, when you promote your book.
All of the above ways of ‘selling’ your book will bring you the opportunities for which you wrote your book in the first place provided you wrote the book ‘marketing optimized’.
However, if you did NOT marketing optimize your book in the writing process, you can still use ways to connect with buyers of your book, and there are more posts and videos this also in my FB Group!
The point of this post?
There is more to writing and publishing a book, even if people think the writing might be the ‘hardest’ part, or the ‘finding a publisher’ or ‘finding a printer’.
NO the ‘hardest’ part, or the part that needs to be most considered, is the marketing of the book and HOW to market the book, that is best planned BEFORE you write the book!
If you need help writing your book and have NOT YET started, DM me. I work with people in business in a 6-Week Program to clarify the outcome they wish to achieve with their book, and who they are writing it for.
I also teach every step of the way, from planning the book outcome, the chapters, the marketing, using my proven method (that can get you at least 1 actual client from your book out of every 5 books sold (or given away, whatever works for you)
I also show you how to publish your book on Amazon, so you have full control over your book, any changes you wish to make anytime, and so you can sell it globally without having to spend time packaging and posting it out to people!
Enrolment is quick and easy and in most cases we can book our first, one on one session right away.
Looking forward to messenger chatting with you!
