Writing a book (or having a ghost-writer create it for you) can make you a six-figure income, even if you don’t sell a single copy. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to sell your book – you should! – but you can also use the book as a business-building leave-behind that can generate new clients, and new income.
Let me tell you how writing a book can work for you – by telling you how it worked for me.
A few years ago, I ghost-wrote a 350-page book for a long-time client for $1,250 plus 10 percent of all sales. It seemed like a good deal at the time. But my client used the book as a loss-leader for her business (instead of as a self-contained profit center), so sales were low, and royalties were nearly non-existent. Worse, getting my royalties out of her was like pulling teeth. Bottom-line – as a revenue-generator, writing a book – this book – did not turn out to be a profitable venture.
However, as part of my compensation for writing a book for my client, I got a box of nicely-published hard-cover copies of the book. A few months later, I handed one out in a business meeting – then barely a week later, I got a call from the man I’d presented the book to – he wanted to retain me to help him market a new business venture. This led almost immediately to a long-term consulting arrangement that paid me thousands of dollars a month, for 24 months – over those 24 months I earned between $5k and $7.5k per month, pushing my gross profits into the low six-figures. This success transformed what had been my worst-paying publishing disaster into my most profitable book-related venture. Suddenly, that book I wrote for bupkus turned into a loss-leader that made it the most profitable single book-writing project I’d ever undertaken.
This blog about writing a book and using it as a loss-leader to generate business is based on information found in my forthcoming book, Write Now! Writing YOUR Book – to Attract New Clients and Make You a News Media Expert, which will be published on Kindle and CreateSpace early in 2018.
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