Book Marketing Bestsellers: Promoting and selling your books to a worldwide audience. The Book Promotion Blog!
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Fred Gleeck Speaks: Your Book Is Only the Beginning |
My friend Fred Gleeck wrote a great article in the most recent issue of his Fred Gleeck Insights ezine. I think you should read it. He's got some great things to say that I've also been saying. Every once in awhile, it's good to hear it from someone else. Here's Fred:
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For the last almost 10 years I've been trying to tell authors that the money is NOT in the book. It's in EVERYTHING that comes AFTER the book. Most traditional authors (and aspiring authors) don't seem to understand this model.
That better change if authors want to make writing their full time occupation. If not, they're going to want to find a bartending job. If you know an author or someone who is thinking of writing a book, PLEASE send them a copy of this email.
I believe even more strongly than before that you can only make serious money as an author if you structure your business in a way that your book becomes the beginning and not the end of the process.
I've referred to my own books as negative cost lead generators. By this I mean that when I sell a book I make a few bucks but my REAL goal is to capture the email address of the person who buys it.
Take a sale I make on Amazon for one of my many books. Let's say the book sells for $14.95. After Amazon takes its cut I make around $6.50 per book. Since I get them printed for $3.50 a piece, I end up making $3 a book.
In the books I've got an offer on every page, trying to get people to give me their name and email address in exchange for an appropriate digital bribe.
Every author has got to understand that the sale of a book or two or two thousand does not make a BUSINESS. Smart authors build their business by building and cultivating their LIST. Your business becomes LIST BUILDING. A list that is created from making attractive offers to readers of the book between the pages of the book itself. The list that you create of people who have an interest in your topic area becomes a gold mine that you can continuously tap if you cultivate them correctly.
I was prompted to write about this topic (again) after reading Chris Anderson's most recent article in Wired magazine. Chris, if you don't know him is the author of the prescient Long Tail. In that book he explains why ITunes works. He explains that because the cost of distributing music has fallen to virtually ZERO, even the most obscure singer/songwriter can sell a download or two every month or so and have it work financially for both parties.
Similar things are happening in the book publishing business. Traditional books are now being transformed into e-books and the new e-book readers are getting better and better.
A recent book by Jeff Gomez (Print is Dead) talks about the imminent demise of physical books. It's mandatory reading if you are an author and suggested reading for EVERY info marketer. His premise is that that eventually people will become accustomed to getting their information directly from the computer and the need for a physical book will no longer be necessary.
I'm not sure I buy his premise completely, but he makes a very solid argument. In another 50 years it is entirely possible (for me) to envision a world where (new) physical books no longer exist. If we even partially buy into the argument, it becomes imperative for authors to look for other revenue sources than books themselves. Why? Because the effective COST of a book will be ZERO!
That's WHY I'm an information marketer. That's WHY every speaker, author and consultant should be building a list and creating ancillary products and services in their topic areas to sell to that list.
I spend an inordinate amount of my time reading and thinking. I consider this time well spent. I mainly think about how I can generate more revenue for myself and my clients through novel and creative ways.
Going back to Chris Anderson's article in Wired, he talks about a very interesting concept. He references a venture capitalist named Josh Kopelman. He talks about what he calls the penny gap. He postulates that FREE is one market and ANY other price is an entirely different market.
As an information marketer I'm constantly thinking about what price point a product should be released at. According to Kopelman's argument the question is really binary: FREE OR NOT?
I would suggest that you need to ask this question of yourself all the time when you produce any kind of intellectual property. It's really the FIRST question you should ask before you even produce a product. IF you decide you'll be giving it away, THEN all of your marketing efforts will be completely different.
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In Fred's ezine, he attached an article he had previously written about the seven deadly sins authors make. I'll post that article as well tomorrow.
  
Fred offers five free books to anyone who wants them. Check them out at http://www.fredgleeck.com/ebooks.Labels: building a list, Chris Anderson, Fred Gleeck, free books, Josh Kopelman, lead generators, Wired |
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Paulo Coelho: 100 million sales and growing! |
I am sharing this story from David Kirkpatrick's Fast Forward blog at Fortune.com because I do not know how to link to it, and it is too important to ignore. I wish Fortune made it easy to link to their articles.
Forget Radiohead. Brazilian author Paulo Coelho has been an apostle of free Internet distribution for years. He figures they sell more books this way.
In 1999, best-selling author Paulo Coelho, who wrote The Alchemist, was failing in Russia. That year he sold only about 1,000 books, and his Russian publisher dropped him. But after he found another, Coelho took a radical step. On his own Web site, launched in 1996, he posted a digital Russian copy of The Alchemist.
With no additional promotion, print sales picked up immediately. Within a year he sold 10,000 copies; the next year around 100,000. By 2002 he was selling a total of a million copies of multiple titles. Today, Coelho's sales in Russian are over 10 million and growing. "I'm convinced it was putting it up for free on the Internet that made the difference," he said in an interview at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos.
Coelho, whose fiction explores universal themes of spiritual aspiration and brotherhood in unpretentious language, has been a star of the Forum for 11 years. (For an account of Davos 2008 see this column.) Before this year's Davos, both Coelho and I attended a wonderful conference in Munich called Digital, Life, Design. Onstage there he told the surprising story of his embrace of free Internet distribution. In Davos I sat down with him to learn more.
Coelho explained why he thinks giving books away online leads to selling more copies in print: "It's very difficult to read a book on your computer. People start printing out their own copies. But if they like the book, after reading 30-40 pages they just go out and buy it."
Intrigued by his growing sales in Russia, Coelho used the Bittorrent site - a favorite for illicit distribution of media - to seek out and download online translations of his books as well as audio versions. By 2006 he was hosting an entire sub-site he called The Pirate Coelho, with links to books in many languages. While he did not play up his own role, he did quietly include a link on his official site.
"So you gather together all the stolen digital versions?" I asked him.
"You say steal?" he replied. "No. I think it's a way of sharing."
His agent, Monica Antunes, who joined in the interview, chimed in unashamedly, "We don't own the translation rights to all those editions."
By last year Coelho's total print sales worldwide surpassed 100 million books. "Once we did the Pirate Coelho there was a significant boost," he says.
For all this, he kept quiet with his many publishers in countries around the world. "Sharing" is typically not the word they use to describe such activities. Coelho says the publishers have periodically taken action to remove books from the Pirate Coelho. "They think it is against me. They don't know it is in my favor. They will know it after your article," he says.
"Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age," Coelho continues. "Publishers see free downloads as threatening the sales of the book. But this should make them rethink their entire business model."
Now Coelho is a convert to the Internet way of doing things. His online e-mail newsletter, published since 2000, has 200,000 subscribers. In 2006 he started blogging. Last year he joined MySpace and Facebook to interact more actively with readers. "MySpace is an addiction," he says ruefully. He also makes available an extensive archive of rights-free photos on the Flickr photo-sharing site.
None of Coelho's books has ever been made into a movie. But now he is using the Internet to let his readers make one for him, based on his latest book, The "Witch of Portobello." It tells the story of its protagonist from the point of view of multiple people who knew her at various times in her peripatetic life. Now Coelho and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500) have created a competition, inviting anyone worldwide to submit a segment as they envision it. Coelho plans to knit together 15 winners and release the film.
He spends about three hours online every day, interacting with readers who send him over 1,000 e-mails and messages daily. A fulltime staff of six helps manage his manifold Net activities, and the entire operation costs him $15,000 each month, which he pays out of his own pocket.
"I don't understand why publishers don't understand that this new medium is not killing books," Coelho says. "I'm doing it mostly because the joy of a writer is to be read. But at the end of the day, you will sell more books."
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I've been recommending that authors give away their books online now for several years. Indeed, that's why I started up the following to websites:
All Books Free: http://www.allbooksfree.com (for novels, short stories, poems, and children's books)
Free Books for All: http://www.freebooksforall.com (for nonfiction books)
In a comment below, Paulo provide a link to his blog. Here is the live link so you can go there right away: http://www.paulocoelhoblog.com.Labels: bestsellers, bestselling book, Fast Forward, Fortune magazine, free books, free ebooks, Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist |
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