Authors spend 50-60% of their time on books but earn only 5-10% of income from them. Instead of chasing book sales, treat your material as a content business: repurpose speeches, writing, and ideas into speaking gigs, courses, consulting, and workshops to multiply what you earn from the same work.
Monetizing your business content. How many of you in here have written a book? Okay, cool. Almost everyone but me. That's like 90%. I read books though. Given that you've written a book, how many of you describe yourselves when you're introduced or talking to friends or business associates as an author? Great. Now what I want you to do is think about the period of time from when you wrote your last book or any of your books. How many of you have written more than one? Masochists are in the room. Great. We have multiple offenders in the room. So think about either the last book or the big book that you did. Think about about 9 months before you launched the book and 3 months after. 12-month time period, right? And think about what percentage of your time you spent on the book, not just writing, but marketing, thinking, the COVID all these other things. 20% of your time? 30? 35? 40? 50? Okay, we can be honest. 60? Okay, so like 50 to 60%. Now we're going to ask you this different question. What percent of your income came directly from the book? Book sales, not all the other stuff during that period of time. 60? That's right. 50%. Here we're going to go south now. 40%. Yeah, we'll speed this up. 5%? Yeah. So why would anyone do this? Like, I don't understand. If I said to you, for 5% of your time, I can get— 5% of your money, I can get 90% or 60% of your time, most of you wouldn't do it. Yet we do. Well, the reason that we do it is the book is one place that your content lives. And we tend to obsess over it because it's physical. And it's tangible and it's filled with deadlines and stress-inducing factors. And we all know the hidden secret. You walk into a cocktail party the day after you've published your first book and everyone thinks you're 30 IQ points smarter than you are. And that kind of feels good. But strictly from a business perspective, there's no logical reason to do this. I'm here to show you that what you've done in the book you can do multiple other things with. So it wasn't just a waste of time. How many of you speak? There we go. How many of you like to speak? There you go. How many of you get paid to speak? There you go. Now how many of you is speaking like 40% or more of your income? Okay, about half. Okay, great. Where's the rest of it coming from? So if we're not making money from books, we're making some of it from speaking, there's got to be another place. So this is where I am here to sort of convince you to stop telling yourself you're a speaker because it makes you behave in a certain way. I don't know, I might not be invited back to the NSA, National Speakers Association, next year. Don't think of yourself as an author. I'm already off the author circuit. Think of yourself as being in the content business. Does that make sense to anybody? Yes. OK. And here's the cool thing. We live in a time today where there are more opportunities to do stuff with your content than ever before.
