I'm a Professional Book Marketer and I help authors SELL MORE BOOKS.
The business of books is 1% about having a "good book" and 99% MARKETING.
I coach authors and writers how to write their books in such a way that THEY BENEFIT even when they give their books away.
How is that possible? It's actually pretty easy, barely an inconvenience.
Authors should be including 'calls-to-action' and access to additional content within their books to incentivize readers to visit their websites and collect email addresses.
They should also include links to their social media profiles within their books.
And they should also use their websites to give away sample chapters (or other types of digital lead magnets) to collect email addresses and build a valuable email list of interested readers and prospective customers.
You want to get your book into as many people's hands as possible and, if you're a new author, giving away books can be a lot easier than selling books.
I teach my clients about the 80/20 rule of book marketing this way:
Give away 1,000 books (these can be digital so no cost).
20% of those people (200) will JOIN your email list.
20% of those people (40) will BUY SOMETHING from you (physical book, online course, membership, webinar training, etc.).
20% of those people (8) will BUY WHATEVER ELSE YOU'RE SELLING such as coaching or consulting.
To find these EIGHT CLIENTS, you give away 1,000 books.
Since 2011, I've sold hundreds of thousands of books and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties exclusively as a self-published author.
Leveraging self-published books is easily the most powerful thing you can do for your business today.
Where else can you have a physical product available for sale on the world's largest and most trusted marketplace and, when it sells, Amazon will literally do ALL OF THE WORK and send you a royalty check every month?