The Entrepreneurial Author: Writing Books That Sell Your Services| Profitable Books Entrepreneur

Welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me, your host, Jim James. Now, if you have thought about writing a book and you've got over the anxiety of what you'd write, but then you're thinking, what's the ROI? What's the return on investment of spending all those hours and often writing down things that you charge clients for, right? So you're giving your value away. Well, we all know that having a book positions you as an authority, but How do you make it profitable? My guest today is Chris Bonetti. He's based in Perth and he has a company called Smart Author and he helps business owners to write books and to make it a very profitable enterprise. Chris Bonetti, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Jim. It's a pleasure.

Well, it's a pleasure to have you because it is a fundamental problem. We're all told that we should have a book and as you know, I have The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, you know, onto volume 3. But it's a lot of work and frankly, we don't make that much money per book sale. So how do you help entrepreneurs and business owners generate a revenue from being a published author?

Well, in my opinion, the secret is actually not within the book itself. It's within the whole offer ecosystem. The authors that I work with are primarily entrepreneur authors, and that just means that they primarily have a business and their book is an asset to help them create awareness or get noticed on the front end for new people entering their world. And it's an asset for someone to get a lot of value from them, but then also figure out how they can work with the author further. So whether they're consultants, whether they're coaches or they run masterminds or they have software, whatever the offer is that the book leads to, I really help to market the front-end asset, which is the book, to create the back-end clients, which is the consulting gigs or the mastermind members and so on.

Chris, so you see the book as being, if you like, part of the funnel for that business owner, and they've maybe enshrined some of their thinking, their methodology, or their frameworks into that book. Many, many people have put a book out there, put it on Amazon, for example, and then there's nothing. How do you help people to go from having that book on Amazon that does offer a lot of value to being, as you say, a backend sort of a backend system and a backend asset. How do you take the client of Smart Author through that process and what sort of results are you getting?

Yeah, sure. So, you know, from my perspective, there has to be 2 things. It has to be leveraged and scalable. You know, someone can get a book and they can go and do all the manual efforts required to market said book. They can go and do podcast tours, book signings, they can go and speak on stage and tell people about their book. They can go on their social media and post about it and so on, or they can let the marketplaces like Amazon or the bookstores or so on be their traffic source. But it is a very hope and pray strategy, in my opinion, to do so. From my perspective, the only true way to have leverage and scale is leverage means something that I can set up today and it continues to work with me, work for me without much effort required on my behalf. And so leverage and scale to me is advertising essentially. So it is less about the time investment that we do because all of those other things are time investments and they might not cost much money for you to actually do those activities. But you're certainly going to spend your time to do them. With advertising, you are trading your time and you're spending money instead. And that is a much more beneficial scenario in my perspective because it not only allows us to turn up the dial and turn down the dial when we want to increase the amount of results that we're getting or decrease the amount of results we're getting based on what we're spending, but it also means that we can ultimately always have a source of people coming to check out our book, whether it's buying the book or getting the book for free.

So you've talked about buying the book and getting the book for free. On your website at smartauthormedia.com, you've got some case studies and some results. So Chris, you know, why don't you take us through one or two examples that you've got so that we can really understand There's a bit of an upfront investment, as you say, in advertising, but we've spent a lot of time and the opportunity cost of writing that book and publishing that book in the first place. Can you take us through some case studies to help us to understand how that works out in real terms?

Yeah, absolutely. So my favorite 2 case studies, we have Nigel Moore who has Package Price Profit. We've been working together for 2 years now at this point. And so in 2 years, we're actually giving his book away in exchange for a name and an email. That's it. The cool thing with Nigel is his backend offer and a part of his book funnel is his membership. That's the next thing after his book. So someone gets Package Price Profit. That is essentially a short 100-page book that is a roadmap to someone being able to package their prices better, package their services better, price their services better, and ultimately make more profit by doing so. But that's only one small part of his niche's pain problem that they experience. And his membership essentially goes into much more detail around all the other things that this niche experiences as managed service providers. So for Nigel, 18 months, we have close to 5,000 books given away. So that's 5,000 leads for his business. And on the next step, after someone downloads his book, we do what's called a one-time offer. And for the one-time offer, we actually offer a trial to his membership where he gives everything else away. And the trial is for $7 for 14 days, and then it's a $47 recurring subscription after that. Now, Nigel is incredible because he has so much value and goes so deep. He's very product focused, so he goes into as much detail and always adds to his membership. His community always provides amazing support and so on. So he's actually lucky enough to have retention numbers in the high 90s. So when someone gets a trial, 95+% of people continue on to the membership, and then 95+% of people stay on as subscribers month after month for him. And so after spending $77,000 in ad spend in 18 months, we have actually generated about double the revenue back. So nearly $140,000 in revenue. Now, because it is a recurring offer, we have built up over $16,000 in monthly recurring revenue. So every single month, Nigel pays me for my service and then we pay for ad spend, which is about $6,000 at the moment. So $6,000 plus, let's just say, uh, $3,000, um, is $9,000 a month. And he's making $20 grand a month pretty much, um, after everything's said and done. And then we're adding new subscribers every single month as well. We're adding about 10 to 12 a week at the moment.

That's a wonderful, wonderful case study. And in terms of cash flow timing, Chris, I guess he has had to pay the ad budget in advance of getting the subscription revenue, just from a timing perspective.

Yeah. So it took us about 6 months before we started seeing profitability for Nigel. And that can be reduced based on what your backend offer is and whether or not you're charging for a book. So that leads us nicely to another case study, which if you scroll down a little bit, is George Markoski, Freedom Through Property. Up a little bit. So the second one underneath Nigel. So after 5 months working with George, we actually opted to sell the book, but we did what was called a free plus shipping offer. So this means we're sending someone a physical book in the mail and we're giving the book away for free, and then we're just charging shipping and handling costs. So typically that's like $9 or $10 to handle the fulfillment costs and the book is free. So Through that process, when we start charging for books, we can do other things within the sales funnel called one-time offers and order bumps. So when someone buys George's book or gets it for free plus shipping, we can actually go, hey, do you want the audiobook as well? And then that's a bump that we can do onto the order so we can get them to add a $27 increase to their purchase. And then on the next page in the funnel, we can actually say, Hey, we've actually run this challenge that goes in detail for the strategies outlined in the books, but you can actually get Q&A feedback, further support and so on. And it's $97. And so that actually we have about 10% of people take that offer as well. And then finally we lead people towards a strategy session to book in with someone on his sales team. To get a customized plan for what they can do to implement his property portfolio building strategies. And that essentially allows them to sell someone onto a mastermind or something like a coaching program on the back end of the book. And so for George, 5 months, we sold around 110 books per month, which isn't heaps, right? We spent about $16,000 in ad spend. And we generated almost $70,000 in revenue. And that was basically from the book buyers. We had about 1% of people who bought the book wanted to work with him in his coaching program on the backend. So it's really easy to make up those numbers from there and get a tremendous return on investment.

Yeah. Well, thank you for such detailed explanation as well of the customer journey and the offers that the authors have created. And presumably then, does this work for a particular kind of client for you at Smart Author Media then, Chris, or can it work for everybody?

Yeah, so primarily it is people who have a higher price, I would say. So people who have offers that are above $5,000 or more on the backend, or, you know, as a core business service, I should say. So if someone's a consultant and they charge $5,000 for a consulting package, maybe it's hours, it might be a retainer-based offer that works well. If someone has a coaching program that's a little bit higher priced on the backend, it's maybe a 3-month coaching program or a 12-month coaching program and they're charging 5 or 10 grand for that. That is a really epic fit and just people like that. So essentially anyone who has backend offers that are higher priced or high ticket offers, a book is a tremendous lead generation asset because of the level of consumption that someone's going to spend with you. So I truly believe that consumption and it's tied towards how much someone will pay you at the end of the day. So if someone's spending a lot of time reading your book, understanding your methodologies, your fundamentals, they're likely going to be more invested to working with you versus someone who they haven't read a book from. And so that tremendously not only increases your authority as an author, but it also increases the potential for someone to see you as a viable provider for a problem that they're having right now versus, you know, them watching a YouTube video on the same thing and then working with that person as an example.

Yeah, it's really, really interesting to see the role that the book can play and how you've parlayed that as both sales and the free plus shipping, which is That's a smart way of doing it. And you're, you're based in Perth. Does this translate globally then, Chris? I mean, are your author clients all based in Australia, or is it something that you can do, for example, with the shipping? Do you work, for example, on Amazon and you can offset the cost of the, of the shipping and so on? How does that work?

Yeah, so, uh, funnily enough, the 2 examples I gave were Australian clients, but primarily 90% of my clients are US-based. And so most of my marketing is done over in the States. And we do have the caveat for Scott Alford, which is another one down, The Nuclear Effect. We marketed Australia, New Zealand, Canada, UK, and in 30 days we sold nearly 700 books for him. So we do work internationally as a company and we can work in most, I would say the top 5 countries are my preferred, which is Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States, and UK. And from a shipping perspective, if my clients are in America, I do have providers who essentially will print stock of the book and they will essentially store it in their warehouse so you don't have to hold it yourself. And then when an order comes through, they will fulfill the order the same day. And so it's a very very efficient system where an order comes through, they get the order and they fulfill it right away. And the benefit of that as well is you can put in, you know, little slips or pamphlets or anything like that. You can write personalized notes that are like printed and put that in the book as well. And that can be a really fantastic way to continue the customer journey and to have someone check out something else that you're doing elsewhere, like a strategy session or something along those lines.

Yeah, and that's good that you are helping people with fulfillment because otherwise you end up with a stack of books and the ROI again goes down, especially if you've got hundreds as you're getting for your clients. You're also an entrepreneur, and as you know, on this show I love to find out not just what you do but also how you do it. Smart Author Media— do you want to just tell us how you've managed to get noticed as a book, you know, as really a book marketing specialist? Although you're in Perth, which I believe is the world's most remote city, isn't it, in fact, technically? And but you're getting clients from around the world. How are you doing that, Chris?

Well, yes, it's probably one of the most remote for sure. It's especially forgotten in Australia, I would say. So I won't lie, I did have a bit of an advantage and I certainly played into my strengths where I could when I first launched. Launched this agency primarily. Before launching Smart Author Media, I was a funnel development and conversion rate optimization provider. So we would build sales funnels and essentially optimize those sales funnels for maximum conversions, maximum sales, maximum leads, and so on. So I did have a bit of an audience built up already, but whenever you start a new venture in a new niche with new offers and things like that, very hard to break the ice and get noticed. And so my primary strategies were from the perspective of how do I collaborate with as many other service providers in the same niche as me, which was authors to begin with, and how do I help them understand what I do and try to create win-win relationships. And from my perspective, and I'm sure you've seen this too, Jim, the most effective way to collaborate and be able to have face time with anyone in the world, you know, that you can is through a podcast. And I'm sure you are 100% a true believer of that.

Yeah, it's an insane— it's an insanely powerful medium, actually, podcasting. Without necessarily being the host, but being a guest as well, right? It's a really, really powerful way to get conversations started.

Yep. So I actually went from the host perspective and I'm like, cool, how can I have people who are amazing authors, bestselling authors, providers? So, you know, people who are publishers, ghostwriters, other book marketers and so on. How can I get those people on my show? To not only talk about different strategies and tactics around selling books, marketing books, writing books and so on, but then also allow for some time to talk a bit of shop. How can I talk about what I'm doing? How can I talk about what they're doing and see if there's any opportunity for alignment? And even before I started the agency, I did some market research and I knew already that there was no one really doing what I'm doing in Smart Author Media and there still isn't. And so I knew that there was a gap and I confirmed that by talking to about a dozen different publishers and having them on the show as well and essentially creating referral partnerships with each and every one of those saying, cool, hey, if you have someone who needs book marketing after they've been published with you, after you've done a bestseller campaign, hey, I'm here and I'm here to provide. And most people who work with you, we've already identified, are the same target market that I would benefit from working with. And so just hit me up, you know, and that worked tremendously well for me. Within the space of 6 months or less, I was the guy that everyone would tag on Facebook when someone said, hey, I've just published a book, who can help me market it?

Okay, that's very smart. So finding out who could be partners and getting in conversation with them on the podcast. Out of interest, what was the topic of the podcast, if you like? What was the positioning of the podcast? Because if you're interviewing people in the same, if you like, same space, how did you define the podcast? Because that sometimes is a challenge for people.

It's certainly hard, but I kind of kept it generic with a purpose. So my podcast is called Smart Author. As well. And essentially it was just Smart Author, and it started with, I want to share the best strategies that others are using, bestseller authors and author providers are using to market and sell books. So that was like the initial direction, and then it kind of went a bit more broad and I started interviewing other bestselling authors and just other providers who didn't necessarily talk about the marketing aspects of books, but more so about the processes like the writing of the books, the publishing of the books, the campaigns around the books, and so on. And so it still stayed within the realm of authorship, generally speaking.

Yeah, that's really, really a smart strategy, Chris, that you've got there. And so Is there something that you've done, um, that hasn't quite worked out that you, you know, you've built Smart Author from Perth, you've got clients from around the world, and I love how transparent you are on your website about the ROI. That's also incredible to get your clients to agree to publish that as well, by the way. Um, is there something that hasn't gone quite as according to plan, Chris?

I think every agency owner will experience this at one point, but certainly for me it was expectation setting. So, you know, there's some, there's some, some good results on that website and, you know, some of those clients, the numbers look great and they still had the wrong expectations with campaigns. So unfortunately, you know, the sales numbers, the return on ad spend numbers are all awesome, but still the client had ambiguous expectations around the campaigns and the level of problem that myself as an agency owner provider was going to solve for them. And so that actually ended in us having to short or cut short some of the relationships that I had with clients, which was unfortunate. So for me, as an example, you know, I would have a client come on and they're like, cool, we want to market our book. But then they didn't tell me that, hey, I want to make 100% of the money back on ad spend, plus I want to cover your retainer all on the front-end book funnel. And that, you know, not necessarily being disclosed or me being newer to the space and not understanding what was actually achievable because I was young and naive or whatever you want to call it. And so I wasn't able to set expectations properly. Today, my business and approach is much different. I will tell clients flat out that that's not what I do or can help with. And if they want to still work with me, that's cool. I can help them get a return on their investment on the back end of their book. But certainly on the front end is not something I promise and haven't done for quite some time. But without that expectation being set when the client signs up and then, you know, it just leads to a lot of challenges in the working relationship.

Yeah, it's really good that you pointed that out because we often don't think about the need to set client expectations. I used to have in my agency a client service Protocol where we would state our kind of our standards for how quickly we'd reply, how quickly they'd have to reply, what they would expect in terms of coverage, and so on. I was dealing with the media relations agency, and having that conversation at the beginning of the relationship really cleared out a lot of misunderstandings as well about how the agency and the client can work together. So that's really, really good. Thanks for raising that, Chris.

Absolutely.

Chris, you've got great results for your authors. What would be your number one tip from an entrepreneur's point of view on getting noticed? I mean, you've covered off about doing the podcast, which is great. Is there a number one tip that you'd give us?

Well, Jim, I'm all about simplicity. You know, I think it is all about finding what works for you and not necessarily listening to the Gary Vees or the Grant Cardones or the people that are just all in your face all the time. And certainly strategies that they promote and recommend can work for many people, but when they're overcomplicated and intense and it's very hard for one person who's new in the game to publish on several channels, I am all about finding one thing that works for you and doing that consistently. To get the results for yourself. For me personally, I am a Facebook user. I have a lot of engagement with my Facebook posts. I find that I can get—I've pretty much gotten most of my clients from Facebook and referrals, pretty much through Facebook. And so, just based on that, Facebook is where I go. Like sure, I could probably start creating creating a following on YouTube or LinkedIn or. Instagram and so on. But it is for the most part more of a distraction for where I'm at at the moment. And whether the investment of time and energy on those other platforms is going to pay off is again ambiguous. So I would rather just double down on what I know works for me at the moment and when I have more capacity available to then further explore other options.

Okay, that's wonderful, Chris. And is that a Facebook group or a Facebook page that you're generating the most leads from?

Uh, it's primarily my personal profile, to be honest.

Very, very interesting. Okay, wonderful. So if you want to find out— oh, Chris, I'm going to ask you how people can get hold of you, uh, in a moment, but you've got a bit of an offer for us as well. But before that, let's find out from you your favorite book that you'd recommend?

So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, man, I should probably write a book and market it so that I can get these clients on the back end. A good friend of mine, Mike Capuzzi, has a book called The 100 Page Book, and that's a fantastic way to write what he calls a SHOOK, which is a short, helpful book that is geared towards being a really useful asset to market on the front end of your business, then I highly recommend you check out that book. It is literally a 100-page book itself, and so it's a really actionable book for you to get a shortcut to writing your own book for your business.

Good. I've never heard that expression, a shook. That's one— that's fantastic. Thank you for that, Chris, introducing a whole new term. Wonderful, Chris. If people want to get hold of you, they can look for you on Facebook, I guess. Would you want to just share As well about the best places to contact you.

Yeah, so smartauthormedia.com/chat, or if you just go to the main website URL, there's a green button that says book a book marketing chat with me. And essentially that's a free 30-minute consulting session with me. I charge $2,000 an hour for consulting, so it's basically $1,000 an hour, you know, that you'll get for free. And if you've got a book and you're marketing it, we can review what you're doing, and I can give you some recommendations to do it better. Or if you don't have a book and you've done— sorry, if you do have a book and you haven't done any marketing, then we can put a plan in place for you to, you know, go out and do some actionable things. And if you want our help to implement any of that stuff, then we can discuss that on the call as well.

Chris, thank you so much. What an inspiration. I think you've really cleared up as well for me how a book can be part of a broader strategy. And also through your explanation with the case studies, How the numbers work, which really, really makes sense. You've really demonstrated with clarity how a bit of an investment up front can lead to recurring income based on a book. So thank you, Chris Bonetti, for joining me today.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Jim. It's been a pleasure.

It's been wonderful to go all the way to Perth to hear Chris Bonetti, who's got clients from around the world. So I encourage you to smartauthormedia.com if you'd like to find out more about him, and do take him up on his offer of a half an hour session because you're going to get so much, so much value. If you can just imagine, we've had 25 minutes with Chris talking back and forwards. Imagine 30 minutes of your own questions back and forwards with Chris Panetti. So you've been with me, Jim James, on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur podcast. As always, I hope you've found this valuable. If you have, please do leave a review and forward it to a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. We don't want anyone to go unnoticed. Until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.