When I discuss how to write a book , I almost always run up against the price concern. If you’re writing a non-fiction book, you pretty much know how much it will sell for. $19.95, $29.95 maybe even $39.95. But how would you like to sell it for $100, $200, $300 or even more! Here’s how you do it.
Walk into any bookstore and you can readily see the price ceiling you’ve got to contend with for non-fiction books. Everyone knows the prices will be less than $50 (unless you’ve created a university text). Call it competition, call it price-point recognition, whatever you’d like. But when you think about how to write a book, you’ve also got to be thinking about how you will present the book to the final buyer.
What you may not have considered when you write a book is that you can dramatically increase the perceived value of your non-fiction book just by changing the way you present it.
Remember, I’m just talking about the way you present the book. I’m not talking about changing the content of your book, or anything else. You can literally take two copies of the same manuscript and be faced with a price ceiling of $39.95 for one, and an unlimited ceiling for the other.
Here’s how it’s done. You’re going to self-publish your mega-money book. Now, before you get all bent out of shape, realize that this will be the easiest form of self-publishing there is.
You’ve simply going to take your manuscript to your local self-publisher (known as Staples, or Kinko’s or some other equally famous spot) and get a dozen copies of your manuscript copied on three-hole punched white paper… the cheapest they’ve got.
Time for a little unabashed, self promotion: If you haven’t asked for my Free CD, “How to Write a Book On Anything in 14 Days Guaranteed!” then you’re just plain nuts! It’s free, no charge, but you can bet this $100 CD will be carrying that price tag very shortly. How do you get it? Just email me at Free CD, Please, or CD_please@writeabooknow.com and make sure you include your name, your mailing address and your telephone number in the email. Now, back to the article…
Next, get a few three-ring binders. The one with the clear plastic window in the front works best. Don’t get them any bigger than the manuscript. No sense in over publishing something. In that clear window, take another page, your title page, and slide it in.
Voila! You’ve just changed your book into a manual. And as anyone knows, a manual has a much higher perceived value than a ‘book.’
As soon as people want to talk to me about how to write a book, my first question is, do you want to make a lot of money (a lot of people don’t, by the way). If they do, I suggest they forget about writing a book, and start thinking about writing a manual instead.
Now, to be honest with you, your manual will never grace the shelves of bookstores (unless you want to change the manual back into a book, but that’s another story). Your manual will be offered to people at your speaking engagements, on your website, in your direct-mail offers and via other marketing efforts. But the price! If you do it right, your book will be bringing you in profits of $300 for each and every copy sold.
If your traditional book was sold for $29.95 you’d have to sell 100 copies to get the same sort of profit for yourself.
So when you think about how to write a book, give writing a manual a thought as well if you think your non-fiction material will lend itself to that direction.
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Cheers,
Steve Manning