When writing and publishing non-fiction a course in miracles, there’s tremendous earning potential just through book sales. This is particularly true if you become popular in a broad interest topic, and particularly if you’re prolific with your writing and publishing. However, unlike fiction, non-fiction offers you a huge amount of earning potential beyond simply the sales of books. In fact, in many ways, when a reader buys a book from you, that can be the very start of a customer relationship that can even be worth tens of thousands of dollars in income.
The reason for this is when publishing a non-fiction book, you’re generally solving someone’s problem, or answering someone’s question: So your book will answer their questions and help solve their problems. And the better the book, the more it starts your relationship with the reader in a positive way. Of course people who buy your book are interested in the topic. They may be superficially interested, or they may be hugely motivated to dive much deeper into the topic. With such readers, your book is just the start of your relationship with them. So that’s where your relationship with your readers becomes more of an “information publisher and coach” rather than just an author. I’ll be talking through five ways you as an author can build an entire portfolio of offers that can increase your income significantly, by turning a simple book publishing business into an information publishing and coaching empire.
Dan Kennedy is quite prolific as a book writing, with a focus on helping small businesses with their marketing. But that’s just a tiny percentage of his income. His books introduce readers to his website, his paid newsletters, his courses, and his consulting. For example, he mentions that just one reader who purchased one of his books from a $1 bargain bin in a store, turned into a client who’s now paid him well over $100,000.
Anthony Robbins is a hugely well known motivational coach who publishes books and these introduce new coaching clients to him. His information and coaching business is vast, and even though the books bring him a small percentage of clients overall (the majority come through infomercials) they’re highly qualified. Melonie Dodaro publishes a popular book about successfully using LinkedIn to grow your personal and business brand. And that book leads the reader to her website where she offers more in depth courses, in-person coaching, and services.
Of course it’s important to realize that a large percentage of people who get your book will look at it only briefly if at all. It will be a small percentage who really dive into your book and then visit your website, take up the free offer you make to readers in return for their email address (very important!), and then check out your other offers.
However that small percentage will come to you very much sold on your way of communicating, so they’ll be hugely receptive to other offers of yours. In some ways, they’ll transition from your book to your website already fans of yours, and this makes selling to them so much easier than attempting to sell to someone who’s never heard of you before.
Okay, so let’s dive into more detail about ways to turn a book reader into a hugely valuable customer, while at the same time offering tremendous value to them every step of the way (since every time you over-deliver to a customer, it makes them more likely to buy from you again, and to recommend your products and services to others).
If the subject you’re writing about is particularly narrow niche, a 100 page book may cover the entirety of the subject. However, most books, even on very niche subjects, can go more in depth and be turned into a fully-fledged training course. And in particular can be communicated in multiple media formats: audio, video, and tool kits (more on this later).
So you need to transition your book readers to your website. A great way to do this is to offer them bonuses if they visit your site at private page (just for book readers) and sign up with their email address. This way, they get access to great bonuses that aren’t available to regular website visitors, and you get their email address for regular follow-up.
And you follow up on them by email with great content, and also some offers (don’t overdo it however of they’ll stop reading your emails). This is a great opportunity to start presenting them with your courses and other offers, and also to encourage them to become a regular reader of your blog by emailing them links to your latest posts (or the best post from the last seven days) once a week.
