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Attract More Readers than Most Best Selling Authors

by donmitch

Many people dream of writing a best-selling business book.
Surely, the world is waiting for their unique wisdom . . . or so
they think. The reality is far different. The average business
book offered by a major publisher sells about 5,000 copies. Even
if everyone who gets a copy reads it, that's not a lot of
influence.

By comparison, a best selling business book typically sells
50,000 to 100,000 copies.  Of those copies, about 10 percent will
ever be opened . . . and less than 5 percent will be read cover
to cover.  Reach 10,000 readers.  Big deal.

Let's look at how creating breakthrough solutions (ways of
accomplishing 20 times as much with the same time, effort, and
resources) can change the result.

When both usage and delivery effectiveness improve, stakeholders
can gain 20 times more benefits than from either improvement
alone. When that combination happens, these two complementary
breakthrough solutions acquire the power of 20 or more individual
breakthrough solutions. That's what I mean by a breakthrough
squared solution. You can also think of this concept as
developing a 40,000 percent improvement, or a 400 times increase
in benefits.

To some, that goal may seem remote. Keep an open mind while I
share an example of creating breakthrough squared solutions for
inexpensively attracting more readers to my books.

In 1998, a best-selling author friend told us that it was
important to distribute tens of thousands of free copies of
business books either just before the book is published or right
after publication. Tom Peters, coauthor of In Search of
Excellence (reissue edition, Warner Books, 1988), tells the same
story about one aspect of how that book became a blockbuster.

When I was writing my first book, I heeded that advice. Before
publication, I sent out thousands of draft copies for advance
reading. After publication, I sent out thousands more free copies
of the completed book to influential readers. In addition, I
created a Web site for the book and put all but two chapters
online there for free reader access. The cost to do this sampling
was over $40,000.

I estimate that these activities have directly yielded 20,000
people who have read some part of that book. That means our cost
per reader for just this activity was about $2.00.

Since royalties on books like ours are usually around $2.00,
this was a money-losing proposition unless this distribution
yielded sales of at least 20,000 additional books. In the case of
our friend, this was no concern because his company had paid this
sampling expense.

My costs, however, came out of my personal pocket. I needed to
do better.

For my third book, I decided to create a breakthrough squared
solution for advance distribution. For that book, I only provided
free advance copies to those who helped us create the book. The
cost for those copies was about $1,200. I then wrote brief
articles based on the book and arranged to have them published in
prestigious journals and magazines.

I next condensed the articles and turned them into brief guides
that the online bookseller Amazon publishes for free. In the
first four years, I estimate that over 50,000 people read some
part of that book through these efforts. I estimate that total
readership through this approach will swell to 100,000 people by
the time the third book has been in print as long as the first
book has been. If that occurs, I will have produced 100,000
readers at a cost of $1,200. That means the cost per reader will
be $0.012.

The first book's campaign cost 166 times as much per reader as
what the latter campaign did, and I will actually draw more
readers with the new, less expensive effort. These estimated
results will provide me with a 66,000 percent solution compared
to our first approach (16,500 percent lower cost per reader
multiplied by 400 percent more readers).

For a forthcoming book I am developing, that sampling solution
has been further enhanced. The pre-launch involves a blog in
which the material is tested for reader reaction. I estimate that
more than 200,000 people will have read some part of the book
through the blog before the book is published, and the cost is
only the electricity to post the blog entries.

I will also reuse the Amazon guides that worked well for the
third book to add another 100,000 readers at limited cost.
Publication publicity will probably draw another few hundred
thousand people to the blog samples.

I also plan to send millions of excerpts for free by e-mail to
people who subscribe to various complementary newsletters. We
should be able to increase our total readers by several hundred
more percent. Since I carry advertising on the blog, I have a
revenue offset to our costs. If enough clicks occur from the blog
to advertisers' sites, this sampling program may well turn out to
be free. As you can see, repeating such a process on the same or
a similar problem can be profoundly valuable in making further
improvements.

Now you know how you can reach best-selling reader levels for
your next business book. What are you waiting for?

Donald Mitchell is an author of seven books including Adventures
of an Optimist, The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution, The 2,000
Percent Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook, The
Irresistible Growth Enterprise, and The Ultimate Competitive
Advantage. Read about creating <a
href="http://www.2000percentsolution.com">breakthroughs through
2,000 percent solutions and receive tips by e-mail</a> by
registering for free at

http://www.2000percentsolution.com .

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