Rarely can an author make a living solely on book sales. However, authors can achieve their dream of independence by building a business around their books.
Creating a business centered on your published works largely means monetizing your expertise. For example, you could deliver a service or provide products related to your book (e.g. consulting, coaching). You might sell attendance at workshops, online courses, teleseminars and webinars or videos that you offer about your book’s topic.
People always want and are willing to pay for expert advice. Writing a book on a topic – presuming you seriously researched the topic – makes you an expert. So long as your writing develops trust and likeability with the reader, this expert status allows you to use your book as a springboard for selling related services and products.
Experts who offer services and products sell more books. As people learn about your services and products, your website visits will rise, generating more awareness of and interest in your books.
More book sales means more business. As people discover your business through your book, they’ll seek out your services or products. Remember, the reason someone picked up your book is that they had a problem that needed solved. So long as your books helps them to at least partially solve the problem, those readers will seek you out to meet additional, related problems that they experience.
In essence, your business and your book sales constantly feed one another, each leading to more of the other. Even better, as you provide more people with products or a service that they need, you develop ideas for new books, while book sales can help shift the direction of your business to areas that are more lucrative.
______________
My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.