Planning Your Business 4
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What about self-publishing books? Can I make money doing that?
Yes, you can make money self-publishing books. The Internet is making it easier than ever to do so. But you must be able to write good, interesting copy, have a clear target market, and be able to put a lot of effort into marketing and promoting your book.
Careful planning is essential if you want to make a profit. You need to choose a subject carefully, based on who you can sell the book to. The better you can determine who will buy the book and what specific channels you can use to reach potential customers, the more likely you will be successful at self-publishing.
Contact major book distributors and chain stores to find out what you'd have to do to get them to carry your book. Don't forget the online booksellers such as Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble (BN.com). You may find it easier to get your book distributed through the online stores than through retail stores. As an added benefit, being carried by an online store lends credibility to your book and helps assure customers their order will be fulfilled. That will increase your sales. In a test I ran on my own web site, I got three times more orders for one of my books when I linked an "order now" option to Amazon.com than I did when I had the "order now" button linked to a shopping cart on my own web site.
To keep costs down, find a printer who can work from your disk or from laser printouts. You can find ads from these "short run" (small order) printers in the advertising section in the back of Writer's Digest magazine. Depending on the length of your book and the printer, expect to pay about $4 to $6 each to print 200 copies of a 5½ x 8½-inch book. The actual total will depend on the number of colors you use on the cover of the book and whether there are photos inside. Order only a small quantity of books at first. Use sales figures from the first run to determine how many more copies of the book to order. Be sure to keep track of all your expenses as well as how many you give away to friends, family, or as promotional copies so your estimates of what you can sell and what your profit is will be realistic.
In addition to contacting major book distributors, look for niche markets that your book would appeal to. Talk to owners of those stores—or those web sites and see if you can work out some kind of deal to have them sell your book on their web site. Often you can encourage them to sell your book by paying them 10 to 15 per-cent of the price of each book they sell.
If you don't have the money to have your book printed or want to test the response to it before you do have it printed, consider publishing it electronically. You can set up shopping cart software that automatically displays a link to download the book as soon as the buyer's credit card is approved. If you sell how-to books or any downloadable book that's lengthy, look into print on demand publishing as well, and offer a printed version at an increased price as an alternative (or in addition to) the immediate download. On products selling for more than $50, we've seen pretty much a fifty/fifty split between customers who just want the downloadable copy only and those who want a printed version and are willing to pay more to get it.
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