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Sure. The best place to start is by keeping very close tabs on the types of books you want to write. Watch the new titles coming out, and track what they're doing to promote. You'll see a direct correlation between how well the book is marketed and how well it sells. The Publisher's Weekly deal newsletter is a great resource for finding new titles. Amazon is the best overall research database. Also, start to pay attention to how your favorite books are structured. The hard part of non-fiction writing isn't really the factual content, it's how the whole book is put together. Once you get the structure right, the rest of the book comes together pretty quickly. For both of my books, I spent probably 60% of my time working the outline. The overall lack of marketing sophistication among authors is astonishing. Publishers aren't good at it either: they'll handle negotiating with retailers, and some pitch in with PR support, but most of the time the author is on their own. If you know even a little bit about online and/or direct marketing, you have a massive advantage. If you already have an audience through a blog or business, you're golden. Here's the landing page for my first book: http://book.personalmba.com/. That page has a 30%+ conversion rate to a retail visit. Among the retailers I can track, 50% of the people who visit a retail page for the book end up buying it. Just being able to track this simple stuff is huge, and makes it possible to spend more money on marketing. Treating each book like a product that must be supported indefinitely helps a lot - way too many authors launch a book without planning long-term support. Depending on what you want to write, you might seriously check into self-publishing. Working with a large publisher has some great benefits, mostly in terms of editorial, art, and production support, but you give up a huge chunk of royalty and control when you sign a publishing contract. You can hire contractors to do most of these things yourself. I really enjoy working with Penguin/Portfolio, but I still run the self-pub numbers every time I think about signing on to do a new book. Print-on-Demand Book Publishing by Morris Rosenthal is a bit dated, but it's still a good overview of the tradeoffs. As far as revenue: when I started, I was advising early-stage entrepreneurs full-time, and my first advance was a nice bonus. Now, somewhere around 80% of monthly income is royalties and advance payments, and I'm no longer doing active advising. The rest comes from courses, both online and offline. Every time I agree to write a new book, that's a nice bump in income for the year. I'm in the midst of re-doing my online course, so when that launches, it'll probably be a larger percentage of income. My income isn't huge by CEO standards, but I'm well past my personal point of diminishing returns. My best advice in terms of finances is to keep your overhead low: being an author takes a lot of time, but doesn't require much stuff. Once you have a decent computer setup, the major costs are research and travel. Free time becomes the scarce commodity. Helpful? |