As suggested in the best selling book by Jenn Foster and Everette O’Keefe, “One of the most effective ways to make money with your book is to leverage your book for speaking engagements. You can do this in several different ways.”
Here is a free chapter from Books to Bucks to describe how to leverage your book to increase your bottom line by booking speaking engagements.
“Locally, you can use your book in order to get speaking engagements at nonprofit events and at service organizations. It’s often very easy to lend an opportunity to speak in front of rotary clubs, BNI groups and also for local nonprofits if you have a book.
We’ve spoken before on how authors really are a rare thing, and these organizations rarely get calls from people who are authors, let alone Amazon Best-selling authors.
Getting a speaking engagement is often just as simple as finding who the proper contact person is at the target organization, making a phone call and introducing yourself as the author of an Amazon Best-selling book, etc.
Very often, they will bend over backwards in order to find a time for you to come and speak to their group, provided that your topic is useful to them.
In an environment where you are not able to sell, it’s very important for you to recognize that people are likely to come up afterward and want to get more information from you. If you strategically plant in your talk statements about the clients that you work with and the
things you do with clients, then you will be planting in the mind of your listener the fact that you work with clients and that you help them with these areas.
There will almost definitely be people in your audience that will come up to you afterwards and ask to do business with you or at least explore that possibility. When this occurs, understand that it is your book that helped get you there, and it is your book that is helping you make money in this circumstance.
But there is also a way to make money on your book even though you can’t sell your book at an event like this. One of our clients, when speaking to rotary groups, gives the rotary group the option of either allowing him to sell his book while donating a portion of the proceeds to the organization, or he will give them a certain number of copies of the book, to make sure that each person who is in attendance gets a copy of the book.
That incredibly powerful tool is gone over in detail in chapter 16. But just understand that having a book positions you as a desired speaker and then positions you with authority when you do those speeches. As you know the subtitle of this book is The Top 20 Ways to Make Money on Your Book (even if you haven’t written it yet). We want you, potential speakers, current speakers and those professionals out there who speak all the time without a book of your own to know that with a book, you can get so many more speaking gigs and speaking engagements. With a book, you have that leverage to position yourself as more of an expert speaker or more of an authority to speak on the certain subject. It’s very important for you to recognize that once you are an author, Amazon Best Seller or not, you may now command higher fees as a speaker. Not only are you more likely to be selected for speaking opportunities, but you’re more likely to get higher fees as a result.
One of our clients, who we are not at leisure to disclose, saw his speaking income increase 600% following the publishing and launch of his Amazon Best-selling book. He found that organizations were far more likely to engage him as a speaker, and he also found that he
was able to significantly increase his fees.
This curve of increasing fees that he is on will continue as well because as he gets more and more opportunities, he is able to be more and more selective. He is able to raise his fees because he knows that he will have enough speaking opportunities, even with a substantially
higher fee.
One great story on how to leverage a book for speaking engagements comes from one of our mentors, Ed Rush. Ed wrote a book called Turning Clicks into Profits, he wrote this book particularly with the legal industry in mind. He and his team then called local bar associations and informed them as part of their book launch that they were on a speaking tour and offered to come and speak to their organizations. The bar associations were thrilled to have an author come, teach their people about how to market their law firms online, but they were concerned that Ed might try to sell something, which they simply don’t allow in their bar association meetings. Ed quickly assured them that not only would they not be selling anything at the event, but that they would like to go ahead and give a copy of the book to every person in attendance. Each of the local bar chapters were ecstatic over this offer. When Ed arrived at the event, he gave everybody a book which, of course, made everybody very happy and pleased. He then went ahead and spoke in detail about how they could generate more business by marketing their practices effectively online. In the midst of the conversation, he dropped statements like, “What we do with our clients is…” and “When you meet with us…” throughout his presentation. Inevitably, he had at least a handful of the people in attendance approaching him immediately after the meeting in order to seek his company’s assistance in marketing their business. This was so effective that the attorneys would sometimes get in competition with each other. They would try to engage Ed’s firm exclusively to exclude any of the other people in attendance from working with him in their marketing.”
You too can leverage your book to make money through speaking, even if you haven’t written it yet!
Click Here to have Jenn or Melanie contact you with more information on how to make this happen!
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