Hi steves,
As you may have noticed, over the last year or so there's been a huge rise in the number of authors that are giving their (physical, paper) books away for free (plus shipping), and the number of marketers telling you about it.
Wondering why?
Well, if you are, you're not alone; lately I've been asked a number of times "what's with all the free books?", so in this email, I'll explain what's going on.
At the core of it, a lot of it boils down to the big best-seller lists, like the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal. Making it onto those lists requires you to sell a *massive* number of books; estimates vary, but it's something in the range of 11,000 copies in your first week to make it onto the listing, and another 8,000 books or so each week that you want to stay on there.
That's a *lot* of books!
And there's a huge value to making it onto these listings; for one, it'll help to sell a lot more books, but in addition to that, there's massive street cred that comes with being a "NY Times Best-Selling Author", and that translates to increased speaking and consulting fees, and lots of other advantages.
So the pressure's on for serious authors (working with serious publishing houses) to sell *very* large quantities of books.
But how can they do it?
Sure, if they've been smart about growing their audience, they've got a list of people who like and trust them, that they can email about the book. But how many book sales is that really going to create?
Not as many as you'd think. Here's some rough, back-of-the-napkin math, assuming an author has 50,000 subscribers (a list size that most authors can only dream about!):
50,000 subscribers x 20% open rate = 10,000 email opens
10,000 opens x 10% click rate = 1,000 clicks
1,000 clicks x 30% conversion = 300 books sold
Just 300 books sold?!
(And a 20% open rate, 10% click rate, and 30% conversion rate are all insanely high, and unlikely to happen in real life.)
Now, sure, you can have special incentives and bonuses, and you can email more than once, but even if you do all that, it's unlikely that even an author with a very significant mailing list will get anywhere near the 11,000 book sales that it takes to make it onto the best-seller lists.
So the author needs to reach a *lot* more people.
That's where JV partners come in. This isn't new in the online marketing world; if you've got something great that will benefit a lot of people, of course you'll enlist the support of sympathetic marketers to your cause!
But you can't ask someone to promote your book the way they would promote a regular training program, because there's no money in it. Say, for example, they're promoting a $1,000 program... well, a standard 50% commission will earn them $500 on every sale, so there's a business case to be made for doing the promotion.
The math looks very different with a $20 book, though; after the publisher, printer, and distributor all take their cuts, there's only about $1.50 left over for the author, and even if the author very generously gives his entire cut to the promoting partner, it still wouldn't be attractive.
It sounds like a dead end, but often dead ends are where the most elegant solutions are found, and that's exactly what happened here.
The solution that emerged is to offer the book for free + shipping, for a limited time. It's a more attractive offer, which means that a lot more people are going to raise their hand and pull out their wallet to get a copy of the book.
If that's all that was involved, though, the author would end up losing large amounts of money, and the promoting partners wouldn't get paid!
That's why a second step is then added, either immediately upon checkout, or in the days or weeks ahead: a special offer is made for everyone who bought the book to buy a special, limited edition, discounted training program offer, that is only available to them, for a limited time.
It's generally a great offer (better than anything usually available publicly), and even though most people are satisfied with just the free book, enough people do buy that second offer to pay for the cost of printing and mailing all the books, and also to pay the promoting partners a healthy commission.
It's pretty brilliant, actually, because it's a true win-win-win.
The reader wins by getting a free book, and also a very special offer that isn't available anywhere else.
The promoting partner wins because it's something great to offer to their readers, and they'll earn a generous payout for their trouble.
And the author wins because a lot of partners have good incentives to promote, and a lot of readers have good incentives to grab the book, which means the book gets into the hands of a lot of the right people's hands.
So yeah... that's what's going on with all the free books. :-)
And speaking of free books, two of my friends are offering them, right now!
There's Jeff Goins with his new book The Art of Work (free + shipping). It's a great book that I've read cover to cover, and I know you'll enjoy.
And there's Ryan Levesque's new book Ask (completely free if you enter the coupon code DINY2015 while supplies last). I've learned a lot from Ryan, and I know you will to.
Grab them while they're still available, and let us know what you think of this whole strategy! :-)
Danny Iny
Firepole Marketing
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