If you’re an author, you want to sell as many books as you possibly can. For one, there’s the money. For two, when you’ve poured yourself into a book, you want to share your message and your words. That’s why in addition to direct marketing to the individual consumer (see last week’s post), Brendon Burchard talks about going after special sales, also known as book bulk sales. This is where a company, for example, buys large quantities of your book to give to all their employees or to everyone who attends a certain conference. In his Experts Academy seminar, Brendon offers specific ideas on how to approach companies, as well as how to use a white paper as a money-making product.
The white paper (also known as special report, long article or secret guide to a specific topic) is essentially an authoritative research paper that pulls together information on a particular issue. The example Brendon offers has to do with a company that claimed it was all about innovation but had nothing substantive about innovation on its website. Brendon wondered what the company was doing about training its employees regarding innovation, and figured they might not have gotten that far. So he researched what other companies were doing on that front and wrote a paper about what works, what stops and starts innovation, and best practices. Then he approached the initial company’s PR/marketing person. Step by step, he shows how he parlayed that initial contact into getting a royalty every time one of the company’s employees downloads the white paper, which is often since the company promotes the paper internally.
But back to book bulk sales.
Brendon also discusses what he calls the “truckload trifecta” that aligns a nonprofit with a corporate sponsor. The idea is to find a larger audience such as a nonprofit, organization or major association whose members would benefit from the book and then to find a sponsor who is trying to reach a population with that focus. The sponsor buys the books (yay!) at a discount and pays for the mailing—which is a fundraiser for the organization—in return for credit. Win-win-win.
The other sales strategy I liked a lot has to do with creating a training manual based on your book. Brendon gives an organization’s trainers (or a university’s professors) a free copy of his book and a couple of chapters of his instructor’s guide. The instructor’s guide is so complete, providing everything from the chapter objective, information about key terms/topics and supplemental reading to creative instructor notes, homework and tests, that it makes teaching the topic a breeze. He charges a one-time fee of $1,500 for the instructor’s guide (positioning that as a bargain compared to his $25,000 keynote speaking fee), knowing that trainers and instructors will continue to order the book term after term because they know how to teach it.
Nothing like moving a lot of books rather than settling for one at a time!
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