my first book income report and lessons learned
TRANSCRIPT
I wrote the Digital Marketing Handbook to help other
entrepreneurs learn a step by step process for how to attract clients using digital marketing. And while I know a lot about
digital marketing, at the beginning I knew very little
about creating and marketing a book.
Here's what I learned.
Why I wrote my book
How I wrote my book
How I promoted my book
Why I self published
How tiered pricing played a huge role
How much money has the book made for me so far?
Why I wrote my book
I learned from Nathan Barry that self-publishing a book, if donecorrectly, can actually be quite profitable
Launching a new product can be very rewarding, both in terms oflist building and cash flow
I wanted to see if I could create a high quality product that wouldactually help people to have more success with their onlinemarketing
Makes for a pretty nice business card for potential consulting clients
Accomplished something that I’d always talked about doing
How I wrote my book
Before I started to write, I did a brain dump and just listed out thebullet points of everything that I thought I needed to cover in thebook.
Once I had this list of raw ideas, I then went through them again andtried to organize them into chapters. Once that was done, it was timeto write.
I use a slick program called Dragon Naturally Speaking and ratherthan type out the entire book, I used Dragon to dictate a largeportion of it.
To manage all the text, I used an application called Scrivener
Once I had the first draft of the manuscript (about 50,000 words),the project was handed over to an editor that we hired. Her job wasto take my raw ideas and polish them into something that would beenjoyable to read. This cost us about $1,250.
How I promoted my book
Internal Promotion- blog posts and emails to our list
External Promotion- recruiting other people to help us spread the word about the
book
Why I self published
First:
-based upon Nathan’s success with self publishing, I was pretty surethat I could achieve a similar result and reap the financial rewardsfor doing so.
Second:
-I didn’t want to wait for a year for my book to be published, as isusually the case with the traditional publisher route.
Third:
-I wanted to be able to give away as many free copies as I wanted,whenever I wanted, as doing so was going to play a huge role in mypromotional strategy.
How tiered pricing played a huge role
Why does tiered pricing work so well?
While I’m no psychologist, my guess is that there are plenty ofpeople who, if given a premium offering, will choose that offering.
If you don’t use tiered pricing, these folks can’t choose the premiumoffering and you will end up leaving plenty of money on the table.
How much money has the book made me so far?
In first 10 days that the book was on sale, we generated $17,321 ingross revenue.
Included in this time frame was one additional webinar with an affiliate partner and that webinar contributed about $5,200 of the $17,321 so 50% of that (or, $2,600) was paid to him in commissions. We paid our designer $125 to create a book cover, and traded services with our website guru for the book sales page (which otherwise would have been $1000). Other than those costs and the $1,250 we spent on editing, it was all profit (so that’s $13,346 in profit).
Lessons learned…
Writing a book isn’t as hard as I thought – the key is to get started,develop a writing plan, and stick with it
Using Dragon’s Naturally Speaking software and Scrivener will saveyou a lot of time
If you want to publish a book in a short period of time and makegood money doing it, self publish and use tiered pricing
Editing the book will take longer than writing it
Be sure your promotional plan includes both internal and externalpromotion
External promotion accounted for 55% of our sales (this was asurprise)
Be sure that even if your book doesn’t sell a lot of copies, that youcan still realize a benefit from writing it
Creating products high quality products is key to increasing passiveincome
To check out a free chapter of my book, visit http://brightideas.co/book