Question: How can you sell your books and make money? Answer: All you have to do is use the same method that we use repeatedly, without fail.
1 Start with What You Want to Accomplish
Know what you want the purpose of your book to be. Do you want to help raise the IQ of kids? Do you want to help people in struggling relationships? Do you want to warn people about the pitfalls of making bad judgments? Do you want to help people love more? Do you want to help people increase their scores?
A book can do just about anything, from just experiencing a fanciful getaway from the everyday drudgery of life or learning to think about or do something to increasing one’s human or spiritual potential.
2 What Will Your Book Be About?
Your book will have a particular message, tone, and theme. How-to books are the easiest to make money with. Here’s an example of some How-to books:
Bake a Cake, Be Happy, Bees and Honey, Breakup Better, Business via Cell Phone, Cook Better, Create Your Own Art, Decorate, Exercise, Find Love, Fish, Fly a Plane, Gambling Tips, Get 6-pack Abs, Get a Better Job, Heal a Broken Heart, Increase Business, Increase Productivity, Invest Better, Live a Better Life, Lose Weight, Make Arts and Crafts, Make the World a Better Place, Manage Disease, Meditate, Read Body Language, Read the Stars, Save Your Marriage, Self-heal, Send Love to the World, Survive Infidelity, Travel Better, Use Computers, Use Herbs, Win at Games, or how to do Yoga.
The possibilities are endless. And any of the aforementioned books could be easily monetized.
If your book is not a how-to book, you need to turn your book into a series of hypothetical examples of how to move through a process or life in general. For instance, any book, such as The Hobbit, could be turned into a way to manage one’s career, family, education, or life path for excellent adventure and outcome, metaphorically, chapter by chapter.
Or consider writing another book. We do this all the time, in 90 days or less.
3 Start Writing the Book
If you still need to write the book, start writing it today. We accomplish this feat by committing to writing at least 500 words a day, every day, for 90 days. Usually, one or more of us do this at any time, so when someone starts doing this, like you, for instance, you can do it along with one or more of us, and we can help be your accountability partner.
This sounds like an impossible task to many, but we make it so easy. Just write whatever you want about your topic any day. Do this freestyle without any preset order in mind. Just keep writing your 500 words a day, then at the end of 90 days, sort out your writings, put them in order, separate them into chapters, then create your table of contents.
Build your ook organically. In this way, it is like just writing from your heart or automatic writing. If you’re writing with us, we can help you with writer’s block if you’re frustrated and looking at a blank page.
4 Prepare to Teach the Book
While writing the book, think about the many ways you can conduct classes to reach the people your book was written to reach.
5 Format and Publish Your Book
After the 90 days are up, format your book and publish it. This is easier nowadays with the advent of on-demand self-publishing. There are many ways to get this done with little or no investment.
Back in the day, I was known as the 7-Day Author, and I wrote a book and taught a class on how to write and publish your book in 7 days. That book is out of print, and now we do it in 72 hours. Don’t let this part stop you; you can do it in tandem with us because we’re doing it all the time, or you can just write it up and publish it through Amazon’s Kindle on-demand publishing. There is no cost to publish. You will have to buy copies of your book to sell with your product, and if you are publishing through Amazon’s Kindle program (KDP), you can purchase inexpensive author copies of your books at well below wholesale.
6 Create Your Product
Give yourself a month or a month-and-a-half (or two months if you have to) to create your product or course, where you will be using your book as the textbook.
You will need to come up with all the ad copy, graphics, and worksheets and, hopefully, find friends who will help you with the dry run and testing your delivery methods. You may need slide presentations or other presentation tools. And don’t let this overwhelm you. We used to do this with makers and an overhead projector or easel with large presentation pads; some still do that today.
Just get started and make it better as you go.
7 Sell Books Make Money
Here’s where you can easily make a living doing what you love, connecting with your audience and helping them in whatever way you can, as you sell books and make money doing it.
You put on your own classes. You charge money for the classes, and the students buy your book and the textbook, and that’s what my friends and I have been doing since 1980.
And it’s easier today than ever before. My friends and I were always tied into doing live classes. Rent a space, advertise in media, sell tickets in advance, blah, blah, blah. That was until the COVID pandemic barred us from doing so. This was the blessing inside the curse of the lockdown. It forced us to
GO ONLINE
Doing so enabled us to reach more people at a far lower cost as we sold more books and made more money.
I still travel and do live classes. This is how I travel and enjoy the various places and environments around the world while deeply connecting with my people face-to-face and letting the events pay for it all. But I serve far more people live streaming online now than I do live, in person.
Do this, and you’re not just selling books and making money; you are leaving a legacy, building an enterprise, and/or leading a movement.