Book | She Owns It

Don’t Keep Your Book to Yourself by @JaneTabachnick

April 5, 2017 by Jane Tabachnick 4 Comments

by Jane Tabachnick | Featured Contributor

You’ve written your book and you want to profit from it as much as possible. I get it. You worked hard and you deserve to profit, but don’t go after short term gain when you can hook bigger fish.

I speak to aspiring authors who are focused on the potential revenue from retail book sales. That’s not the best place to focus on your book’s return on investment.

The biggest value and profits that come from writing a book are from the doors that it opens. The opportunities, with their associated profits, trump the royalty you will make from retail book sales by 1000-fold. Let’s compare the two:

100 books sold at $6 profit each is $600. A paid speaking gig that you get because the conference producer read your book could pay $2500 -$10,000. You have to sell a lot of books to get the same ROI as the speaking gig.

Another mistake I see authors make is creating a book and selling it on their own website but not selling it on sites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Sure, you can charge $34 for your book on your website, which would seem overpriced next to similar books on Amazon that are typically priced between $14.95 and $19.95. So at $34, you are making more money per booksale. Wrong way to think. Remember, most authors only sell a few hundred copies of their book.

I would feel 100% confident to say that your website doesn’t get nearly the traffic that Amazon does as the largest seller of books in the world. Only listing your book on your own website means that your book sales will be limited to the people who already know about you. If your book is listed on an online bookstore, it can be discovered by a large, new audience of prospective clients.

Here are other results that authors have gotten from being listed in online bookstores:

Invited to contribute to an article in a major national publication – the author was found during a keyword search in the online bookstore
Invited to speak at a conference – the author was found because their book was suggested by the online store as “another book you may like”
Clients – they read a book and it resonated with them so they want to work with the author

Online bookstores offer additional features that help authors get visibility, which can lead to additional opportunities and profit, that you certainly won’t get if you keep your book to yourself. These include showing up in and boosting your search engine results, a separate author page where you can promote yourself and your work, as well as a get a high value link back to your website [more SEO value], and enhanced social proof and credibility in the form of book reviews.

Think of it this way, when you write your book, why not put yourself in the biggest advertising vehicle possible, which is also where your target audience goes to look for a book or a solution to a challenge they have- an online bookstore.

You can have your cake and eat it too. You can always post your book on Amazon at the price of similar business books [ $14.95- $19.95]. You can then sell an enhanced version on your own website for that premium price of $34. You get the best benefits of both listings, and the icing on the cake, you get to keep all the profits from the enhanced version!

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Jane Tabachnick is a digital marketing and publicity consultant, and book publisher. She works with savvy entrepreneurs and enlightened professionals to help them tell their story, become published authors, and create greater visibility, buzz and profits.

Jane is eternally inquisitive and working on perfecting her gluten free baking. She has been named one of the top 100 people online by Fast Company. As an ambivert who has often been featured or quoted in the media, she sill prefers to help her clients get visibility.

Jane is the creator of a program on Sustainable Design Entrepreneurship at NYC’s Fashion Institute where she is also an adjunct professor. Her next book, Irresistible Influence will be published in Spring 2017.

Connect with Jane: Facebook | Twitter | Linkedin

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Jane Tabachnick

How To Use Your Book As A Lead Generation Tool by @JaneTabachnick

February 21, 2017 by Jane Tabachnick Leave a Comment

by Jane Tabachnick | Featured Contributor

Have you written a book, or perhaps you are thinking of writing a book?

You may have heard it said, a book is the new business card, but you wonder how will it help get you business? I wrote about this in an earlier post – 4 Ways Writing A Book Can Help Grow Your Business

When writing a book, you have the opportunity to turn it into the maximum lead generation tool, by building elements right into your book itself. Here are 4 ways to make your book a super lead magnet.

4 Ways to Turn Your Book into a Lead Generation Tool

When readers connect with you and your message, they will naturally want to continue to engage with you outside of your book. Highly motivated readers will go online to seek you out and start to follow you online. They may even inquire about working with you, and some will hire you.

Why leave it to chance, when you can encourage readers to engage and go deeper with you. Here are some of the ways you can incorporate calls to action within your book, that will help generate leads for your business.

Invite readers to join your email list

Your email list is natural way to bring your readers into your network and have them continue to engage with you. By inviting them to sign up for your email list right within your book, you are suggesting an action that will benefit both of you.

Why?

The reader is loving you. Now you are telling them how they can get to get more of you for free. Your email list is how your readers will be able to continue to engage with you. They can keep up to date with your news – content, events, products and new books that may interest them.
People respond to invitations and calls to action. By letting them know you care about them and their success, and that they can get more information via your newsletter, you are deepening their engagement with you and your brand.

It can take from seven to 11 touches [email, social media, webinars…] before someone is ready to buy from you. Your newsletter will insure they get multiple touches and keep you top of mind.

Invite them to an online class or a webinar

Your reader is loving you via your book. Now you invite them to an online class or webinar where they can experience you live, as well as get to ask questions. This can be irresistible to someone who has connected with your message in print or e-book format.

You will want to set up your invitation to be evergreen. Readers may be seeing the invitation in your book today or in one year, so you don’t want to send them to a webinar page that has expired.

Invite them to a strategy session

If you are a coach or a service provider, an invitation to a strategy session, while the most direct of the lead generation methods, can help readers become clients more quickly. A strategy sessions is a discovery call that can end with an offer if there is a mutually agreed upon fit. It’s a great way for a reader to get to know you and find out more about what it might be like to work with you.

To make it easy for you to set up these strategy sessions, I recommend you use an online calendar scheduling tool and build in a few screening questions; that way you can manage your time better and screen out requests that are not the right fit.

Invite them to your live event

If you host a regular event, annually or biannually, why not invite your readers to attend. This is both a great way to fill your events as well as provide a way for your readers to get to meet you. As an author and expert, they look up to you and will want to meet you in person and get to work with you.

My client Mai Vu put an attractive graphic featuring a special event offer towards the back of her book. She began filling her Hot Life, Hot Love™ event earlier than ever before, as readers used the coupon to sign up.

When Should You Start planning the Lead Generation aspects to your book?

If you haven’t started writing your book, this is the perfect time to think about how you’d like to continue to engage your audience/readers once they begin reading your book and beyond. Design your book to include one or two of these calls to action, so that once published, your book works even harder for you as a lead generation tool. If your book is already written, you can always revise it to build in your call[s] to action.

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Jane Tabachnick

How I Got My First Book Published by @mayachendke

October 17, 2016 by Maya Chendke Leave a Comment

by Maya Chendke | Featured Contributor

As a self-published author, one of the most frequent questions that I get is why I didn’t work with a large, traditional publisher. But I also get asked how much it costs to self-publish, and how fast a writer can expect to be on the New York Times Best-Seller list.

While we’re both waiting for a call from the Times, here is the story of how I got my first book published.

Writing

When I started writing Awake but Dreaming back in 2007, it was truly a labour of love. I was expressing and daydreaming, squeezing out pages on lunch breaks at work or into the wee hours of the night. I wrote relentlessly, feeling driven to share the amazing dramedy I had built up in my imagination.

My 500-page book – note, less is more – took me about a year and a half to write while juggling a full-time job and life’s other commitments. But it was what I could manage, and so it came about in a slow and steady way. Many writers that I’ve met started out this way, too, as it’s a big risk to abandon a salary and dive headfirst into low-paid (or unpaid) writing work.

As I was getting close to completion, I began having conversations with potential agents in the US and Canada, where I live. There was interest, but the book wasn’t quite yet done, and I was overwhelmed by the back-and-forth – and lack of response from many – during the querying process. I made a lot of stupid rookie mistakes, like typos or frankly, total dipshit-sounding query letters. There were times when I wanted to hide under a rock.

Takeaway: Check yourself before you wreck yourself. Before you decide to set out to find the agent of your dreams, read “mistakes 101” agent-search articles on the internet. There are steps and expectations and you’ll save time and anguish if you know how the process works before you start making calls and firing out letters.

Editing & Producing

Disheartened by the closed-off book publishing industry, I quietly set about finishing the manuscript and then sat on it for a while, futzing over it, editing compulsively. Eventually I came across a self-publishing company and I impulsively set the wheels in motion without fully understanding what I would get in return or where my book would be distributed. After getting halfway through the production process, I realized that their distribution wouldn’t work for me, and I switched to another company. But in doing so, I lost a few thousand dollars and had to re-start production. Fortunately, as a self-publishing author it was only my own money, so I ate the cost and continued on my merry way. And on April 1, 2011, my book went live on Amazon, and it felt like all the stress and heartache was worth it.

Takeaway: Take a beat and understand what you’re getting in to. It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of thinking you found “the one,” especially after feeling rattled by the traditional process. But it’s important to read terms and conditions thoroughly, and understand how distribution will fit with the marketing plan. And naturally, you’ll have generated your marketing plan well in advance, right? Right?

Promoting

Some people may be intimidated by the writing of the book, others may be more overwhelmed by the promotion of it, and promoting it is no easy task. It is supremely important to have a marketing plan in place to sustain public interest in your book once it’s released. When it first comes out, all your friends and family will want a copy, but how are you going to get strangers to buy it?

I started out strong with guest blogging, industry parties, and workshops, preaching the sermon of self-publishing. I attacked my grassroots hustle like a boss! But when my time and attention shifted to other areas of my career and personal life, it became next to impossible to sustain the effort. I wanted to sell the book to film, work on sequels, and take up more guest-blogging residences. But I couldn’t do it all, and I had to accept that, life had shifted, for the time being.

The thing is, in my day job, I am passionate about helping small businesses with their marketing. I learned that, as an author, I needed help with my own – because an author is effectively a small business, too.

Takeaway: If in doubt, reach out. Finding people to help you is crucial; you need to build a backend that lets you do more. Once you start publishing, the biggest asset you will create is your following, so invest your time and resources wisely.

Re-starting

Today, in addition to building my entrepreneurial work in marketing and digital, I’m working on two new books – one fiction and one non-fiction. Self-publishing is a lot of work, and I’m not opposed to re-visiting the traditional book-publishing arena, now that I understand exactly how much time, effort, and resources are involved in bringing a book to life. I have a few literary agents on my wish list and may explore that avenue again. But ultimately, the first step is to just write it out.

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Marketing consultant, entrepreneur, writer and horse mom Maya Chendke is going through a powerful start-up year. Her company, mPath Creative Consulting, works on website, marketing, content and social media projects that flex her signature hybrid style of creative/analytical. She is also part of a virtual anti-agency, Horsefly Group, where she leads clients with clever ideas and her color-coded iCal.

Her entrepreneurship track record includes a couple of start-ups and a self-published novel (Awake but Dreaming). A rogue introvert, you’ll spot her at start-up meetings sporting riding breeches and a messy bun as the Woz to her Jobs-like partners (or the Sandberg to their Zuckerbergs).

Maya has an MBA from the Rotman School of Management where she was a standout presence in the male-dominated business school environment. She has a certificate from the Stanford Graduate School of Business Summer Institute for General Management and a Bachelor of Journalism from Ryerson University.

She loves to help people make the most of their marketing budget and has an addiction to analytics. She is always on the lookout for great talent and great projects and loves to facilitate introductions.

In her downtime, she’s diligently rehabilitating her rescue horse and reads ~20 books a year. Tweet her @mayachendke

Maya Chendke

Biz to Book Part 1: Why Turn Your Business Idea into a Book by @DIYMFA

October 27, 2014 by Gabriela Pereira Leave a Comment

Photo Credit: eef llc via Compfight cc

by Gabriela Pereira | Featured Contributor

When I first started my business, I didn’t know it was actually a business. I thought I was writing a book. I went to a mentor and asked what he thought of my book idea. He replied: “Sorry to say this, Gabriela, but I don’t think you have a book here.” My heart sank, but my mentor continued. “What you have is the core concept for a business.” All I could think was: uh-oh.

Exciting as it was to think that my concept might be bigger than just one book, this idea of turning the book concept into a business terrified me. I had no idea how to build a business. In fact, I never really considered myself a business-minded person until starting DIY MFA. But building DIY MFA as a business first was probably the smartest thing I’ve ever done. Here’s why.

1) You can’t publish non-fiction without a platform.

Once upon a time, it may have been possible as an unknown author to write a non-fiction book (or series of books), and have it sell well enough that you were able to make a living just from writing and selling books. The way publishing is structured these days, the harsh reality is that it’s much more difficult for an unknown author to get a non-fiction book deal. Why? Because unlike fiction and narrative non-fiction (i.e. memoir) where you write the book first, prescriptive non-fiction is sold on proposal. This means that in order to get a publisher to sign off on your idea, you need a platform.

Many people think platform means having a lot of Facebook “likes” or Twitter followers, but the truth is it’s much more than that. Sure, having 50,000 Twitter followers is great, but what a platform really means is that you’ve positioned yourself as the “resident expert” on your topic. At the heart, platform is all about branding and positioning. You have to show that for your topic, you are the go-to person in your niche. Then when you write that book proposal, the publishers will understand why you’re THE person to write this book.

Depending on your niche, your business can actually become the platform for your book. All those things you do to build your business are the same things you need to do for your platform. Your email list, your social media presence, your website, these are all parts of your business that can strengthen your platform and help build an audience for your book.

2) You can start bringing in revenue and honing you concept.

The beauty of building the business first, is that you can not only build traction for the book idea, but you can also start bringing in some revenue right away. Remember, there’s about a 1-2 year lag between when you write a book and when it finally gets published. That’s a long time to wait to get paid. If you go the traditional publishing route, you might get an advance for the book, but don’t spend it right away. It’s a good idea to reserve it for marketing and helping to promote the book. If you self-publish then you’ll only start seeing revenue from the book when it’s released, which could be a while.

Also keep in mind that while print book sales tend to rely on making a big splash immediately after the launch, eBooks work a little differently. It takes time for ebooks to build traction in the online retailer systems. Reviews, SEO and metadata all contribute to your ebook “playing nice” with Amazon and other retailers. This means it could be as long as a year after a self-published ebook comes out for it to really hit its stride in terms of online sales. You can build the business and bring in some revenue while all this is happening.

3) You can put concepts into action and test them.

Once a book is published, it’s hard to rejig or revise things. This is why building the business first is key. It allows you to test out ideas from your book, implement them, and even collect case studies by working with clients. This material can all contribute to your book down the road.

This is especially true if you’re following the lean entrepreneurship model and you’re launching your business on a shoestring budget. In this case, the process of iterating and testing things in your work will help shape not just your business, but your book. As you knuckle down and do the work, you’ll see connections between different areas and structure your business accordingly. These decisions will influence how your business (and your book) evolves.

Case Study: DIY MFA

When I started DIY MFA I thought of it as a book first, business second. After speaking to that mentor, I started testing out ideas for products and services I could offer under the DIY MFA umbrella. I started small: a blog, a newsletter and one webinar. This was back in 2011. Since then, I’ve taken on writer-clients (some of whom have gone on to get book deals), have built a strong email list and launched a 10-week course. I’ve also seen that original book idea translate to countless web articles, and have honed the structure of the DIY MFA content by testing it out, one post at a time. While the DIY MFA book is still on the horizon, I know that having built this business first, the book will be stronger for it.

And who knows, maybe one of these days, I might just start writing it.

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Gabriela Pereira is the Instigator of DIYMFA.com, the do-it-yourself alternative to a Master’s degree in writing, and she holds an MFA from the New School (New York, NY). While undercover as a graduate student, she learned the inside scoop on MFA programs, invented a slew of writing tools all her own and discovered new, more effective way for writers to learn their craft. Now she wants to share what she learned and help writers around the world get the “knowledge without the college.”

Before founding DIY MFA, Gabriela taught several writing courses in New York City at organizations like: 826NYC, Everybody Wins, EHTP and a local writing workshop she built from the ground up. More recently she has shifted gears to teaching exclusively at DIY MFA but continues to speak and lead workshops at national and international writing conferences both online and off.

Her favorite thing to do is come up with new dastardly plans and innovative resources for DIY MFA. When she’s not working, Gabriela loves to write middle grade and teen fiction, with short stories “grown-ups” thrown in for good measure. She is represented by Jeff Kleinman at Folio Literary Management and is currently working on a book on writing.

Gabriela lives in NYC with Lawyer-Hubby, Little Man, Lady Bug, and a trifecta of feline critters. You can connect with her on Twitter (@DIYMFA).

Gabriela Pereira