Beyond Book Sales: How Authors Make Real Money with Their Books

What if I told you your book could land you a $10,000 speaking gig? Or open the door to a major media feature and attract clients who say, I read your book. How can I hire you? It's not fantasy. That's what happens when you stop chasing book sales and start using your book like the fabulous business tool that it is. If you're wondering how to use your book to make more money, this video is for you. Hi, I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers and your host here at Book Launchers tv. Book Launchers is surrounded by renovation. Isn't it delightful? Book Launchers is your first choice for all things related to writing, publishing, and promoting nonfiction book, including our Author Launch Kit software, which is the ultimate tool to help you with your nonfiction book marketing. Now, now, don't get me wrong. Book sales are nice. It's a measurable metric. And I understand why many authors focus on book sales. But for me, selling a book and profiting $4 doesn't excite me as much as selling 100 books to a company bundled up as part of a workshop we're doing together. Or as much as even giving the book to someone who really needs it and will read it. And maybe even giving it to somebody that will decide my company is the perfect fit for them to work with. Now, maybe you only really care about book sales, and that's totally fine, but this video is not for you. But if you want to make money from your book, besides book sales, let's talk about what to do. Number one, speaking and workshops. Now, this is one item, but not just one way to do this. We've had clients sell books in exchange for virtual workshops. We've had clients use their book to get a speaking gig. I mean, if you've ever submitted to speak at an event, the form you fill out often says, what books have you written? It doesn't say, are you an author? Or tell me about yourself. It'll say, what books have you written? It assumes you have that expertise that you've put in a book. And I have used books to get paid for speaking. When an organization doesn't have a speaker budget, but they have a marketing budget, what does that mean? Well, let's say they have a budget to sell tickets. So the marketing budget, you could say that everybody who purchases a ticket by X day or the first 50 to purchase tickets get copies of your book or put them in the VIP bags and they'll buy those books from me. That way I might make $500 to speak when I was going to make nothing. Plus, I will almost always ask to either be able to promote my services somehow, whether at a booth, a sheet on the seats, or something else like that, to grow my email list and connect with that audience. Now, as you are marketing your book, you may find there's demand for more and more. And in that case, you will want to turn your book into something like a course. Self Publish and Succeed became Self Publish and Succeed Live, which is a course we've run many times and it was based completely off of the book and people asking for help that was from the book. How do you start? Well, start with building an author platform, building that email list, teaching some of the content that you have created on podcasts or in live streams and see what is resonating with people and, and then letting people know. I'll also look at different conferences where my audience is hanging out and I'll submit some speaking proposals and I'll even try to connect with the event organizers. Now, of course, all of that took me two minutes to say, but it takes months to do. But we work on this with authors in our author business accelerator. If you want some support, you can go ahead and join us@authorbusinessaccelerator.com now, after you've done this really important step, the next thing is to build out that client attraction funnel. So now you know what you're offering. Grow the top of the funnel. So you want to turn readers into leads. So put them in the top of the funnel by offering a next step in your book, like a quiz, a checklist, a video training. One book I recently read was Benjamin Hardy's Science of Scaling. At the end of every chapter, there was a call to action to take the Readiness to Scale quiz. Now, it wasn't really actually a quiz. It was a 12 minute video positioned as a masterclass that led to a form to fill out, that led to a call, but it still worked and now I'm on the email list. You can even use your book as the thing to draw them into your funnel. For example, when I am live and in person, I will often give a copy of my book in exchange for an email address. So if I'm at say, a National Speakers association event or a local chapter event or some other conference, I will have copies of my book on hand. And if you're interested, I will often offer you a book in exchange for your email. I'm not trying to sell somebody a book in these situations. If they're a person who can potentially book me to Speak, hire my company or otherwise just have some other collaboration or move me closer to my overall goal. Free high value book for you, email for me and we stay connected. And that's all part of putting someone in the top of your funnel. Now you can do this inside of your book. Inside of my book we test different offers. Lately we've been offering our audiobook version. So inside of Self Publish and Succeed and Self Promote and Succeed, you get an opportunity to download the audio version in the second edition which we're launching soon. For Self Publish and Succeed, we invite you to our free community@booklaunchers.com renovate@booklaunchers.com school now of course, if you're building a funnel either with your book or in your book, you have to have something of value to offer them. And that could be the courses or workshops we were talking about. Could be a product that you're selling or a service or an app. By the way, if you're looking to create something really easy, check out Lovable AI. It helps you build an app that you can sell. It's so cool, simple to use and it has integrations with 11 labs, OpenAI and so much more. I'm not an affiliate, I just think it's really cool. But you could also build a membership site, something like our free community over@book launchers.com school like I just talked about or our paid author business accelerator. The school platform actually makes it really easy to build a community because that you can monetize. So even if you're new to community building and don't have any tech savvy at all, it's a great option for you. And they recently released an option where you can do this for $9 a month. I probably have a link for that, so I'll post it if I do in the description below. If not, just go to skool.com and you'll find out more details on it. Now another idea. So hopefully you like ideas. But another thing that we've done not just for us, but we have done it for us, is we take the book content and we build a clone that can coach people. We had a client with a sales book and we put his book into Delphi and we do have an affiliate link for that book. Launchers.com delphi I'll put it below, but we made it into a sales trainer so sales agents could be on the phone with someone and type in the objection that they've just faced and the bot will coach them live on the spot using the Materials from the book. In our case, we have Julie the Book Bot who is a highly trained book publishing and marketing guide. You can see her in action and start envisioning the options and ideas for you to to now monetize the content from your book. It doesn't take a lot of work to set this bot up. It takes a little bit of work to train it after. But you can go into Julie the Book Bot and ask it how to make money from my book beyond Book Sales. Okay, do these answers look familiar? We basically just talked about this, but I can take it even further and ask her how to get corporate partnerships because that's one of her suggestions and then get more ideas to develop it further. I can then craft my pitch and bring it back to her to evaluate. We've heard from so many people that she is the greatest thing and worth thousands of dollars, which is so cool to hear. We've put her inside of our Author Launch Kit and our Author Business Accelerator Group for added value and support for our authors. So what can you do with your own bot? Does this give you some ideas for products even if you don't have one already? Of course, services are a little more straightforward. Joel Benge, one of our fabulous clients and author of Nerds that Talk Good, has services like a pitch deck review, but also a product. These message deck cards are pretty darn cool. So when someone buys his book, they will learn more about him, his services and his products. All right, so that leads me to number three, which we just touched on above with Julie the Bookbot. But partnerships. Corporate partnerships can be incredibly lucrative because they often have bulk book sales involved. There's exposure and opportunities to upsell your expertise, get creative. But in some cases you might find them buying your book in bulk. One of our authors, Lorea Martinez, wrote her book Teaching with the Heart in Mind and she found school districts were bulk buying her book. So she started leaning into that and marketing direct to school districts. Dale Roberts wrote a series of books after publishing a few books on book publishing and he got sponsors for his books. Sponsors like Book Award Pro and they pay for a feature in the book and to be a sponsor of the content. So he made money before the book was even published and covered some of his cost of publication. Of course, when you have events, virtual or in person, having sponsors can be a great way to add revenue to an event. Some authors even had sponsors host their book events. There's also potentially licensing opportunities. If your book includes proprietary methods or frameworks, you can license that content to companies for internal training or development programs. This creates a passive income stream for you, especially if you're not the one delivering the content. Or as our client with that sales book did, he licensed his bot that he created from his book content to corporations that had used him in sales training, so their sales team had his bot whenever they needed him. Even if the partnership doesn't involve direct payment, the exposure can lead to future income and a bigger audience. The more you get creative with your book and use it as a tool to build income and impact, the more you'll probably find yourself enjoying the journey and getting results. Now, if you haven't already, I do hope you've commented below to say hello and let me know how you're monetizing your book and and when you do, you'll meet other fabulous folks like Kevin Hall, Heather O, Eric Reid, Bill Miller, and other YouTube besties. And of course, I hope you've subscribed to the channel so we can do this again next Tuesday or Friday when a new video comes out.