How to Make Money with Your Book

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One of the most common questions we get from potential authors who are about to write a book is something along the lines of:

“How do I use my book to make money?”

It’s a reasonable question. The bad news is you will probably not make (substantial) money by selling copies of your book. The good news: there are so many other ways you can make money with a book—and usually a lot more money than you’d make by focusing on selling copies.

Melanie Johnson and Jenn Foster cover countless different ways you can leverage to turn your book into a profit-generating machine in their Marketing Mastermind program, coming soon. The list includes ways such as consulting services, paid speaking events, freelance clients, offering a service, understanding taxes and write-offs, raising money from investors, and so much more.

Some of the most common ways you can make money with your book include:

1.     Consulting Services

A book is what establishes a consultant as authoritative and raises their visibility about the competition. For a consultant, a book is the best marketing you can do. 

2.     Paid Speaking

One of the major ways to make money from a book is through speaking engagements. It’s challenging to become a professional paid speaker without a book. People have started speaking careers without books of course, but almost all professional speakers eventually write a book; and when they do, the fee they ask usually triples.

John Ruhlin is a terrific example. He was a successful corporate gifting expert but was only able to charge about $5K for an engagement. He published Giftology, and now regularly books keynotes for $30K or more.

3.     Coaching Services

If you are a coach of any sort, chances are that people have problems differentiating between you and any other coach—what makes you the expert and why they should work with you. At Elite Online Publishing, we offer several coaching programs, one of which is our VIP Book Content Creation Day, lead by our CEOs Melanie and Jenn. This service makes sense because they are masters at this craft.

A book is a great way both to display your expertise and explain what your work with them would be like.

4.     Clients for your Agency

Every agency owner knows what a pain client acquisition can be. A book doesn’t magically solve this problem, but it does make it much easier to both find and close new clients.

Deb Gabor had this problem with her branding agency and used a book to not only solve that problem, but to catapult her agency to the next level. She now works with companies like Dell, NBC, and Microsoft, and she credits her book as the reason her agency stood out from other agencies.

5.     Book Sales

We said earlier that book sales are not the best way to make money- but there is still money to be made with them! Once you have a book that appeals to a specific crowd, there are lots of ways to help spur book sales:

–       Facebook ads can often convert into book sales.

–       With bundled promotions, you can give free things away to incentivize people to buy books direct from your author website.

–       You can sell live at events (where you are a speaker, for instance).

–       Guest posts that feature key lessons from the book can also draw book interest.

Ultimately, if you positioned your book properly, you don’t need to worry about selling copies—you only need to worry about how the book converts to what really matters to you.