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Ask PZM, December 2014
Q. Do you have any
suggestions for bulk or sponsored book sales?
This book marketing area is a wonderful opportunity for authors although
I can only share my own experiences and thoughts on this topic.
In May, 330 copies of my paperback HOW TO SUCCEED IN HIGH SCHOOL AND PREP
FOR COLLEGE were ordered from CreateSpace.
I suspect that an elementary school ordered these books for its
graduating 8th grade class as this is the ideal target audience for
the book.
Then more recently 40 paperbacks copies of my novel MRS. LIEUTENANT were
ordered from CreateSpace. In this case I
suspect a book club or high school class because I have book discussion
questions and a high school lesson plan on www.MrsLieutenant.com
Now I have been pondering how to get more of these sales.
First question for all of us is: What are the likely groups that might be
interested in buying our books in large quantities?
Here we need to think outside the box, as the saying goes. And we need to think for both fiction and
nonfiction after considering that there are two different target markets.
One potential market is the direct readers, such as book groups and
schools. The second potential market is
sponsored books.
Direct readers
With the direct readers you could, for example, offer an author visit or
skype call in connection to a group reading of your book. Or if you have a children’s picture book, you
might offer to do a classroom art activity around some aspect connected to the
picture book.
You can start locally by contacting high schools or community colleges in
your area. For many readers meeting an
author is very exciting, so an author visit can definitely encourage group
purchases.
Note that the purchases can be the ebooks instead of the physical
books. And in either case, the book
discussion questions and high school lesson plan, for example, can be included
in the books themselves. (I have this
material in the ebook of MRS. LIEUTENANT but not the paperback. It would be relatively easy for me to add
this same material to my paperback on CreateSpace.)
Sponsored books
In this scenario you locate companies who could benefit from the
marketing goodwill of giving away your books for free to their customers or
clients. Again, these could be the
physical books or the ebooks.
For example, if you have written a book about estate planning and
included information on life insurance, you might approach an insurance company
and ask if the company would be interested in buying copies of your book to
give to their customers. You can offer a
wholesale rate that provides revenue to you and costs the company less than
buying the books retail.
You could even do this if you have written a novel whose storyline
concerns a major plot about insurance.
Even a cautionary tale about insurance could be of interest to an
insurance company.
Note that you can license your ebook so that a company may give away as
many copies as agreed upon for a set licensing fee. This financial arrangement can be very
beneficial for both parties.
And if you have more than one book, of course those books are listed at
the end of the sponsored book. In this
case you’re being paid to have free advertising for your other books.
Branding
opportunities
If you are a self-published author, you can also offer branding
opportunities for your sponsored books.
You can, for example, add content to your book about the company
sponsoring the book. You can even add
the company’s name to the cover, such as “The Ideal Insurance Company presents”
[your book title].
While there might be cases in which two companies sponsoring the same book
would not be a good idea (such as the only two department stores in a small
town), in most cases you can offer branding opportunities to numerous
companies.
Prior commitments
If your ebook is on
Amazon’s KDP Select with its ebook exclusive requirement, you will need to end
the KDP Select commitment before your ebook can be given away. And although I am not a lawyer, I would say
that this would be true even if you were adding sponsorship branding material to
the ebook. It’s still the same ebook,
and you don’t want to get in hot water with Amazon.
The good news is that
KDP Select does not require exclusivity of the physical books, so even if your
ebook is on KDP Select, you can look for bulk deals for the paperback.
Finding companies interested in
sponsorship opportunities
Here I don’t have any
specific advice. I personally am
interested in finding high school teacher associations who might be interested
in either HOW TO SUCCEED IN HIGH SCHOOL or MRS. LIEUTENANT.
(If you have any
suggestions for me, you can leave these in the comments below. Unfortunately I won’t be able to respond in
the comments. As Joylene and I have
known for some time, her blogging software doesn’t allow me to leave comments. Yet I do read all the comments each month and
am very grateful for the positive responses.)
Put on your thinking
cap and brainstorm the different kinds of companies who could benefit from a
branded sponsorship opportunity with your nonfiction or fiction book. Hopefully this brainstorming will produce
several opportunities for you to pursue.