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During the past 28 weeks, we’ve been exploring ways to plan, write, and promote your book. Now, it’s time to enter the final stage of the Publishing Success Cycle, Step Four, Profiting.
During the next few installments, I’ll share ideas and tips for leveraging your book into higher profits for your business.
Learning from the successes of others
As we have seen so often in the past, the starting point is to get in the habit of constantly researching the competition online, studying the websites of authors who have written books in your field.
The goal of analyzing your competition’s websites is not to copy them, but to explore ways other authors have profited from their books, suggesting ideas you can adapt for:
- Creating information products, like reports, updates, videos, worksheets, templates, and webinars that readers of your book are likely to be interested in.
- Developing coaching and consulting services that will help your readers implement your ideas and recommendations.
- Building your speaker’s platform, cultivating invitations from event planners and speaker’s bureaus to deliver high-paying corporate keynote speeches, presentations, and workshops.
Research tips
Here are a few ideas to help you make the most of your explorations:
- Look beyond the obvious. When searching for profit ideas on author sites, expand your search beyond the authors and experts in your field. Explore the websites of authors in a variety of subjects.
- Know where to look. When you’re at their websites, explore keywords and navigation links like Products, Services, Coaching, Consulting, Assistance, To Learn More, and the like. You may also locate useful ideas in the Calendar, Press, or Media sections of their websites.
- Expand your horizons. Look for profit ideas used by others who write books in similar fields. Look for ideas that you can be the first to offer in your field!
For example, instead of just exploring author profit ideas from authors who have written books in your field, consider expanding your research using, as a guide, Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten’s The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. Start by creating an alphabetical list of the authors of the 100 Best Business Books, search for their websites, and create links to the websites. Then, visit each website and explore how each author profits from their books.
Another option is to visit the archives of Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten’s 1-800-CEO Reads Top 25 Business Books of the Month to identify successful business-oriented authors and study their websites. You can go back many years, studying the most important books from different months.
Or, you can visit the Author Page of the Harvard Business Review, and similar book publishers, and track down the websites of their authors in order to study how they profit from products, services, and speaking.
Tracking the results of your research
As always, the key to success is to carefully track the results of your research, so you can easily pull-out the most important lessons.
To help Published & Profitable members and my personal coaching clients keep track of the author websites they visit, and the profit ideas they’ve gathered from each site. You can download my Author Profit Tracking Worksheet, along with previous worksheets, from Published & Profitable’s Active Garage resource page.
You’re invited to download the worksheet, and print as many copies as you need on 3-hole punched paper. Fill out the worksheets by hand, tracking each author’s products, services, and speech/presentation topics. Then, store the worksheets in a 3-ring binder.
Author profit ideas and examples
Few authors are fortunate enough to be able to ignore profit opportunities generated by their book, beyond what they earn from the initial sale of their book!
I encourage you to spend a minimum of 30-45 minutes a week studying how other authors profit from their books. For more inspiring ideas and examples of how other authors are profiting from their book, I invite you to visit my growing (22+) online list of Author Profit Ideas at http://urli.st. In fact, you’re invited to add links to your favorite author profit ideas to my online list, or you can add submit your author profit ideas below, as comments
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