10 min read · Written by Grant Rayner on 15 Nov 2023
Share by emailLast week I focused on some of the key aspects of writing and publishing books as a product, covering ideation, writing, editing, publishing and pricing. I’ll continue the discussion in this article, focusing on marketing and income analysis. I’ll also share some thoughts on evaluating your audience, as well as some other benefits of publishing. I’ll wrap up with some parting advice and an analysis of whether writing books is actually worth your time (for some, it may not be worth your time at all).
Let’s start with marketing.
Publishing your book is only part of the journey. The reality is that you’ll be lucky to get a single sale unless you actively market your book. From my own experience, in a week where I don’t post about my books, I rarely receive any sales at all.
Marketing takes time, and this time has a cost (assuming that you have other things you could be doing with your time that can generate revenue).
Social media is a good option to promote your book to large groups of people. However, you may find you’ll receive mixed results. If your books are technical in nature, you’ll find LinkedIn to be a good option for social media promotion. Using LinkedIn, you can promote your book to your existing network. You can also join groups related to your niche and promote your books to members of those groups. You’ll find that there will be some initial interest; however, expect that your sales will plateau over time. Basically, anyone who wants to read your book will have bought themselves a copy and you may end up speaking into the void.
If your books are of general interest, you may find success promoting them on other social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and the newly minted Threads.
It will help to build up a substantial following on social media well before you publish your books. However, your audience will need to have a good reason to follow you. A useful approach is to write articles on the same topic as your book. After a year or two of writing useful articles, you’ll have an audience ready and mostly willing to buy your book. Even then, if you’re writing a technical book, anticipate a natural limit on sales. You’ll need to get inventive.
Affiliate programmes provide a way to incentivise others to market your books for you. The way an affiliate programme works is that other people will mention your book in their blog, or post it on their website. Each time they sell one of your books from their platform, they’ll receive a commission of the sale price. You’re able to set the commission when you set up your affiliate programme. A typical affiliate commission is 10%. However, if you are only selling ebooks and have no storage or shipping costs, you could increase your affiliate rates to as much as 50% to incentivise your affiliates.
If you’re considering an affiliate programme, you’ll want to be selective regarding who you allow to promote your work. Especially if you provide other professional services, you’ll need to be careful regarding how your association with your affiliates may impact your reputation.
If you’ve written a technical book, you might also find it challenging to find people interested in promoting your book. The incentive for them will be that your book is sufficiently interesting that people in their network will want to buy it. If that’s not the case, there’s little financial advantage for them to become an affiliate.
You could run ads on social networks to promote your books.
Ads cost money, and may not be a good solution if you’ve written on a technical topic. As an example, I’m not entirely sure I could set up targeted ads on social media for people interested in security evacuations. I certainly could do so for travel security, and it’s something I may consider in the future.
You’ll find a lot of resources available online for ads on Google, as well as Facebook and Instagram. If you wanted to prepare a short video about your book, you could also explore ad options on Youtube.
One thing you should do as an author is reference your book in other products and services.
As a start point, your books should reference your other books. I do this in the end notes, providing a link to my publications page. I’ll also be sure to mention relevant books in my Medium articles and Substack articles. These links have probably been the biggest driver of sales.
I also integrate books into my other projects. When I run training, I have a slide that showcases my books. When I write a proposal for services, I reference the books relating to the service. When I send someone an email from my business account, I include a link below my signature block to my books.
My objective here is to ensure people know I’ve published books and they’re available for sale. As much as possible, I make it relevant to people’s interests. If you’re reading something I’ve written on crisis management, it makes sense to share a link to other books on the same topic.
Let’s shift focus from marketing to a more sober look at the business side of writing and publishing books.
As you consider writing and publishing a book, you’ll need to be clear-eyed regarding how much time is involved with writing, editing and marketing, and how challenging it will be to recoup the cost of this time through book sales (let alone turn a profit).
A simplistic way to consider the revenue that can be earned by selling books is to consider the fact that you may sell 10 books a month. Your direct costs will be platform fees and transaction fees. Based on that model, you can get a sense of your monthly profit from book sales.
However, that doesn’t tell the full story of the impact of writing books on your overall business. It’s important to remember that, unless you intend to become a full time author and make it your business, there are costs associated with how you spend your time.
Let’s say you set aside 100 work days to write a book. If your normal consulting rate is US $1,200 per day, your book has already cost US $120,000. Add US $2,000 for professional editing. That’s $122,000. You decide to price your book at US $12. Excluding platform and transaction fees for the moment, to recover your investment in one year you would need to sell 10,166 copies of your book. That’s between 27 and 28 book sales every day.
Let’s look at it a different way. Again, you decide to price your book at US $12. On average, you sell two books per week. Your revenue is US $24 a week, or US $96 per month. Platform and transaction fees average at US $15 a month. After these costs, your profit from book sales is US $81 per month, or US $972 per year. Based on the cost of your investment ($122,000), the payback period for your book-to recoup your investment would be a little over 125 years.
How’s the book writing business sounding so far?
That’s not all… To make any sales at all, you’ll need to actively market the book via social media, which will take at least an hour a week (you won’t get any sales without marketing). If your hourly rate is $200/hour, that’s $800 a month for marketing. Did I mention you’ll also need to review and update the content of your book at least once every few years?
Let’s look at this from a different angle. What if you had spent your time consulting instead of writing books. Let’s say you spent 100 days writing your book (in reality, it would be much more than this, but it’s a nice round number). Had you spent that 100 days delivering consulting services, you would have earned US $120,000 (based on a US $1,200 daily rate). So there’s an argument that by writing your book, you’ve probably lost money.
Of course, in reality, it’s not possible to be delivering services all the time. A good way to approach writing a book is to use the time when you’re not engaged on projects to write your book. Alternatively, if your objective is to demonstrate your knowledge of a particular topic, you could write an article every one or two weeks. An article will be more accessible than a book, and is the regular nature of an article means it is more likely to build your professional reputation with your potential clients.
As a security professional, you’ll probably want to write about an aspect of security that’s relatively specialised. As you consider your potential topics, you’ll need to carefully assess your audience.
There’s a huge difference in the attention someone will get by writing a book on “How to Get Rich on LinkedIn Working Only 2 Hours a Day” in comparison with someone writing about, for example, security evacuations. You could probably count the number of people who care enough about security evacuations to read a book about it on one hand.
Of course, I knew the challenges going into the project, yet wrote the book anyway. It’s the only book that exists on security evacuations, and I’m delighted to have written it.
(It might be interesting to note that while I don’t sell many copies of The Security Evacuation Handbook to individuals, I have sold quite a few copies to organisations.)
Let’s explore other benefits of writing books, as well as some parting advice based on my own experience. Then, I’ll share a final perspective on whether it’s worth doing, sharing some of the benefits I’ve gained from writing.
If your primary motivation for writing and publishing a book is profit, you may find yourself disappointed. From my perspective, every book I’ve written has been designed to provide advice to my younger self. When I was first starting out doing what I’m doing, what do I wish I had known?
Sales have fluctuated. While bulk sales to organisations have been a saving grace, I’m still nowhere close to recovering the full investment in time and cost that went into these books.
However, since publishing my books, my consulting business has flourished. I’ve been contracted to deliver multiple projects in my areas of speciality. These projects alone have more than offset the costs involved with writing these books. In addition, I’ve been asked to speak at industry conferences and universities. I’ve even been offered full-time jobs by people who have read my books (which I politely declined). As a professional, these benefits are tangible and can convert to revenue earning opportunities. However, the harsh reality is that I probably could have got the same result by writing articles.
Before wrapping up, here’s a few thoughts on what I’ve learned from the process.
Take notes. As you deliver projects, or as you think of new ideas, note them down. Ensure you use a system to enable you to quickly find related information. All of my books were built on notes that I’ve maintained for over two decades.
Start with articles first. If I had my time again, I would have started writing articles and then used these articles as the basis for a book. Writing articles helps to build your confidence and skills as a writer. More strategically, writing articles also help you build an audience, which will be essential later when you publish your book. Without a large number of people interested in what you write about, it will be very difficult to sell your book.
Get testimonials. Social proof is extremely important to convince someone to make a purchase. Ask your readers for testimonials and publish these testimonials to your website.
Offer samples. If you’re self publishing, potential readers may have a concern regarding the quality of your work. To overcome this hurdle, offer PDF samples on your website that customers can download for free.
Work to a marketing schedule. I’m not great at marketing my books, largely because I’m always busy with other projects. If you don’t market your books, you won’t sell any. It really is as simple as that. You’ll need to leverage social media and newsletters to get the word out. Establish a weekly schedule where you post on different platforms. As noted earlier, this process will take time and effort.
Enable notifications for updates. I’ve updated several of my books multiple times. Whenever I release a new version, anyone who has already purchased a book receives an email notifying them of the update and a link to download the new version. I also include a note regarding what’s changed.
Consider series, sets and bundles. If you’ve written multiple books, there are a range of different options to package your books for sale. You could develop a book and supporting templates. You could develop simpler books for sale at a lower price, enabling customers to enter your world at a low cost. Take advantage of different options to incentivise sales.
Let’s wrap by be taking stock.
I’ve probably painted a mixed picture regarding whether it’s actually worth writing books.
Does that mean it’s not worth writing a book? To the contrary - you should absolutely write a book. But don’t view books as a money-making endeavour. Instead, view books as a way to demonstrate your experience. Writing also helps you clarify ideas and can help shape other products. That was certainly the case with the books I’ve written.
While you should technically factor in the time it takes to write the book, the reality is that you can probably afford one hour a day to write. If you’re writing articles, you may already be sitting on a pile of book-ready materials. Even still, writing a book may be less about adding a new revenue stream and more about developing your own professional capabilities and reputation.
I published most of my books during the COVID-19 pandemic period. I couldn’t travel, so couldn’t deliver projects. Instead of sitting back, I decided to finish a few books I had been working on for years. I got on a bit of a roll, and ended up releasing 10 books in total during the pandemic. I was able to do this because I didn’t have the distractions of normal project work. After the pandemic, I’ve started working on a book about information security for travellers. This is taking me significantly more time, because I have a host of concurrent projects (consulting work, bag design and manufacturing, application development, and two Substack articles a week).
I’ve found my books and articles to be an effective way to demonstrate my knowledge and experience. When I write proposals, I include details of my books as a means of demonstrating my expertise. While this approach may not resonate with everyone, it can certainly provide an edge over some competitors. Even still, it’s critical that you’re known to your potential customers. Writing a book is no substitute for in-person interactions to build mutual trust.
The books have also led to other opportunities. I’ve been asked to pitch for projects specifically based on my books and articles. Companies have purchased my books for their security teams. I’ve also been invited to present on my areas of speciality to a Harvard MBA class (remotely), and I’ve been invited to present at numerous security industry events. A key benefit has been increased engagement with security professionals with similar interests. This effect has helped build a community of like-minded professionals.
If you aren’t ready to write a book, start with articles.
But write something!