CK: Geoff, you had just talked about the importance of people understanding the value of publishing an eBook versus the print version of the book. Can you start there with that value conversation?
GA: Absolutely. So let’s just take a look at some statistics. Last year eBooks outsold regular books on Amazon two to one. There’s a huge market. I just checked today, there are over 2.5 million eBooks on the Amazon Kindle Store right now and over a billion people have some kind of an eBook reader, whether that’s a Kindle or a Nook or they’re reading on Kobo or they’ve just got the eReader app on their computer or their iPad or their phone. So, it’s an enormous reach, and it’s a market that authors just can’t ignore. You can earn up to 70% royalty with eBooks versus if you’re with a New York publisher you may only be making 7.5% or 10%. So the royalties are there.
Here’s a quick example. If you’re selling an eBook for $4.99, let’s call it $5, and you sold 10 books a day, that works out to over $1,000 a month in revenue. Imagine if you have five eBooks.
CK: Yeah.
GA: A nice, little, tidy income. So there’s definitely a value there in royalties. But in my experience, that’s not the reason to get into eBooks if you’re a serious transformational author. The value of an eBook when you’re just starting out is credibility. It’s a really quick way to get published and to have something to hang your hat on that says “I am the author of,” and actually it’s fairly easy to be able to say “I am the bestselling author of,” because as I’ll share later on it’s the way Amazon sets things up with subcategories. Often, you don’t need to sell a whole lot of books to become a bestselling author on Amazon.
The value of an eBook is really as a marketing tool, and I know you’ve talked with others about platform and the importance of building a platform, which is really the sum of all the people that you can reach and that know you. So, your email list, your social media, the contacts you have through speaking and so on. An eBook is really an incredibly valuable list building tool and it’s quite possible for you, if you’re creating products and programs and workshops and you do speaking, to leverage that eBook to create income on the back end of that eBook as well as creating demand for your upcoming physical book if you haven’t yet published it.
So, I see, that’s the value of the eBook. The royalty piece is nice, but the value of it as a platform building tool is really the important thing to know.
CK: And let me just speak to that real quick, because one of my clients just recently published first, her eBook, and she just came to me saying, “Oh my gosh, I need your help. I thought we were only going to do the eBook but there were people coming up to me saying that now they want to buy five, 10, 15 copies of the print book to give it as gifts.” So now I’m kind of working with her in the middle of everything else, making sure that we get the designer to get the files for the print version and help her get it up on CreateSpace and all that kind of stuff, and she was just kind of taken aback. I think she ended up a best-selling author – and the demand for the print book from the eBook caused her to text me saying “You’ve got to help us. People want to buy these in bulk.” So, just imagine that for yourself. Wouldn’t it be great for all of you to be getting messages from people and emails and calls from people saying “I’ve got your book on eBook but I want to buy multiple copies and give them as gifts?” That’s sweet for an author.
And that happened for her just because she got the book up on Kindle as soon as she could. You know? So what you’re saying Geoff is absolutely true.
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As a trainer, speaker and award-winning online marketer, Geoff Affleck helps transformational authors build their marketing platforms and sell more books! He is the bestselling co-author of “Enlightened Bestseller: 7 Keys to a Successful Self-Help Book” and “Breakthrough!: Inspirational Strategies for an Audaciously Authentic Life.”
See Geoff’s eBook at www.transformationalauthor.com/geoff
