Publishing your own book will give your public speaking career a tremendous boost in credibility, which is directly tied to the income that can be earned. Nothing validates your expertise quicker to more people with greater authority than a book. Besides being a profitable product for Internet and BOTR (Back Of The Room) sales, it's a powerful selling tool for scheduling more speaking dates at higher fees. Remember, your own book will be a 50 to 350 page advertisement of your expertise and services, and your readers pay you for it, rather than you paying to advertise to them.
You've heard it said about freebies, “You can't beat the price.” Well, matter of fact, you can beat “free.” It happens every time someone buys your book, which means they pay you so they can put your gigantic ad in their home or office. The beauty of this is, it will usually be there for many years because few people throw books away.
Here are some basic realities about book publishing you should consider before embarking on the challenging and rewarding project of creating your own book:
If you choose the trade publishing route but don't have a completed manuscript right now, it will take at least two years to get your book into the bookstores—and this is if everything goes well. Before your write the entire book, write—or hire a professional to write—a killer Book Proposal (BP from now on). Anything less won't get taken on by a legitimate trade publisher. A BP is a business plan to give prospective publishers the information they need to decide whether it can be a profitable project for them.
If you self-publish (selfpub from now on) with a Print On Demand (POD) company, you can have books within days. My son, Brian, recently received his 8 ½ by 11-inch book consisting of 300 pages. He supplied the artwork for the cover and four days later he held the book in his hand. Four days! The POD company did a superb job, full color covers and professional looking throughout. He ordered only two copies: at a cost of $10.21 each.
Quantity-ordered rules per copy cost. To make the most money on BOTR sales, you need to order at least a thousand copies, which will knock the per copy cost of most books down to somewhere between $1 and $3, and you can sell it for $14.95, 19.95, or more. The exciting thing is that half your audiences will usually take your book home with them. When you speak to 200 people, you will be able to take a profit of $1,000 or more from that single event.
But there's no need to rush into a quantity printing. POD enough copies for one speaking gig at a time, and go to regular book manufacturers after you get good at selling your book from the podium. You also need to have one or more people there to make credit card sales, a procedure that must be organized in advance.
The good news here is that selfpubbing can be an enormous help in securing trade publication—and will probably make that happen sooner. Not only do you get books two years sooner by selfpubbing, but you will also be on your way to having a market-proven product to offer trade publishers. This greatly reduces a publisher's perception of risk. And if you do it right, you can work out a deal to keep on selling hardcovers of your book BOTR while giving a trade publisher an exclusive on paperback sales to bookstores and their other outlets.
Your book will get all the promotion you give it yourself. This is true for both selfpubs and trade books. Major publishers will bust their budgets promoting somebody like Clancy or King. What will they do for your book.? If you don't have a strong audience, don't expect much—or even any—promotion. Why? Because they would lose money doing it. This is why a platform—which you have as a public speaker—is so important in finding a publisher.
Publishers don't sell books to bookstores, they ship them on consignment. Books that don't sell within a few weeks go back to the publishers to make room on the shelves for the flood of newer titles. The common saying is, “Books have the shelf life of yogurt.”
At least 500 new titles are published every working day by the American trade book industry, not including selfpubs. Since publishers can't justify spending money promoting most books it's no wonder that they look to the author for promotion so his or her book won't be returned by the bookstores.
Ø
