Otherwise, your targeted readers will be able to buy the same benefits from your competitor at half the price.
While your competition will limit your ability to set prices, at least a little, they do make coming up with a figure a lot easier. (And don’t forget that you’ll be giving away a large chunk of that income to your affiliate sellers.)
So when you’re looking to sell your knowledge, you’ll want the e-book to be at least 50 pages. You’ll want it to contain solid, practical information that delivers real benefits. And you’ll want it to be priced in line with the competition rather than relying entirely on the perceived benefits the book will bring.
That should be enough to give you a simple information product that can deliver a steady chorus of KaChings.
GETTING PHYSICAL WITH PRINT BOOKS
When you can create an e-book that’s as short as 60 pages, charge as much as $77 for it, sell thousands of copies, and do it all on your own terms, according to your own schedule, and without having to ask anyone’s permission first, why would anyone want to create a print book?
That was the question that went through my mind when David Hancock, a former mortgage banker and the chief executive of New York publishing company Morgan James, suggested turning my e-book into a print book that would be published and distributed in traditional hard- and soft-cover versions through his firm.
We had met at a conference, and although we’d hit it off right away and I was flattered by his offer, my initial reaction was skeptical. The e-book was selling well. In fact, it was selling better than I could have hoped. Producing a print book would mean reorganizing the content, and worse, it would also cap the price. It’s unusual for a book to sell for more than $25 or so, and authors are usually last in line to get their share. By the time the retailer, publisher, and printer all have their take, traditional authors are usually left with a tiny fraction of the cover price.
Stephen King and Dan Brown might be able to fly around the world on their private jets, but for many of the names you find in bookstores, writing is a second job. According to Morris Rosenthal, author of Print-on Demand Book Publishing: A New Approach to Printing and Marketing Books for Publishers and Self Publishing Authors, a book with a sales rank on Amazon of 5,000 will sell around 90 copies a week on the site. The company’s sales of books, music, and DVDs totaled $5.35 billion in 2008, while Barnes & Noble and Borders together sold $8.35 billion worth of media. If every sale on Amazon represents another 2.5 sales in bookstore chains, then a book that makes it into top 5,000 of the world’s biggest bookseller will be moving a total of around 900 copies a month.
If the book sells for $24.95 and the author’s royalty is 15 percent, he or she would be taking home no more than $1,350 per month—a nice additional income but not something to give up the day job for. And your book has to be among the top 5,000 of Amazon’s 4 million to earn it.
Of course, all of those are back-of-the-envelope calculations. Publishing is terribly complicated, and the figures can range all over the place, usually downward, but my experience is that they provide a pretty good guideline. When you’ve just seen an e-book generate $10,000 in two days, traditional publishing really doesn’t look very tempting.
But print books can deliver two things that e-books can’t. The first is distribution. Amazon might be the biggest bookseller in the world, and it is possible now to offer e-books and even your own Kindle books directly from the site, but it’s still only one outlet. According to research company IbisWorld, the United States had around 34,000 bookstores as of 2008. Although the number is declining, that’s still a massive market that an e-book can’t reach.
The other benefit of a printed book is even more important. Being an established author gives you prestige.
Becoming a traditional author is difficult. You have to create a detailed proposal that explains what your book is about, describe the competition, and say how your book will be different. You have to send it to publishers and agents and hope that one of them is interested enough to bite. As the publisher of a popular web site, you’ll have an advantage. Your site will give you a platform, a built-in audience that’s already keen to learn about your book. But you’ll still have to be prepared to absorb lots of rejection.
For publishers, every new book is like investing in a new business venture. They want to be as certain as they can be that the money they spend on the advance, on printing, and on marketing is going to come back. The safest response is always no.
This means that those authors who have made it through the process, whose names appear on the covers of books, and whose pictures can be found on shelves in stores have an unbeatable level of prestige. If a publishing company considers them expert enough to back with its money, then potential readers should trust them, too. Being able to say that you’re a published author, in the traditional sense of the word, immediately puts you head and shoulders above your competitors. It delivers extra traffic to web sites, increases the sales of affiliate products you want to promote, leads other entrepreneurs to want to partner with you, and can even give you a path toward a career as a professional speaker.
So even though my AdSense book was doing very well without ever seeing the bottom of a printer tray, I wasn’t completely
