Hi! I’m Dale Beaumont and welcome to Get Published TV. This is the only dedicated show on the internet to help authors and aspiring authors to write, publish and market their own bestselling book in eight minutes a day or less. Now, in today’s video, we’re going to continue on from the last two videos where we introduced you to this whole idea which is, don’t think book, think book series. Yesterday we spoke about three reasons about why to think book series as opposed to just a book. They were -- just to summarize again, it makes it a lot easier to write. Number two, it doubles or triples your chances of being published or being picked up by a book distributor. Number 3 was it gives you a hell of a lot more exposure and also a lot more credibility as well. They're the first reason, now we’re going to go through the second three and maybe any more that pop into my head as I’m doing this video.
So number four is, this is from a numbers point of view, it works in your favor much better. Now let me just show you an example here. Here is a book by a friend of mine called Peter Sheahan and this book here, if I can just kind of flick to the end, its actually around about 260 pages but lets just say that its 300 pages because there are many books out there. In fact a lot of my books, this is one right here is 300 pages. Now in Australia, I sell my books for $32.95 because it’s a 300 page book. Or maybe if you're in America, maybe it’s at $24.95 which is basically the average price of very thick business books. Now, if you just have one book, that’s 300 pages right, let’s just say the maximum price that you can sell it for is $24.95 U.S. However the interesting thing is if this book was half the size, so it was only a 150 pages, then it wouldn’t be half the price. It’d probably -- maybe 10, 20 maximum 30% less. So here we have another book and this book here is actually only -- let me just check this out here, its only a 140 pages so its about half as thick and it’s a bit smaller in size as opposed to this book just here but if this one sells for $24.95 U.S. This one can sell -- I’m guessing probably maybe $19.95 U.S. or maybe 17.95, something like that. This is in a bookstore right.
Now, so this one is only a small percentage less so you could either have one book that sells for $24.95 or you can have 2, 3, 4, 5 books that also for 19.95 each and if you do the maths, obviously you're going to make more money if you're time is in that by 2, 3, 4, 5. Depending on how many books that you actually want to write. So, what I believe is the trendiest kind of movie more towards smaller books that are about more specialized topics and an author that I really love is a guy called Seth Gordon and a lot of his books are only maybe, you know a 100 pages, maybe 120 max. Another very famous business book, probably one of the most successful in the last decade is “Who Moved My Cheese?” Another book, very successful as well is the One Minute Manager which again is only a very small book probably about 70 pages or so. So we’re not talking about really thick books because people’s time is becoming more and more squeezed and people are looking to access information quicker and faster. We call them the airport read and what the airport read means is that you pick a book up and if you say in, Los Angeles and maybe you're flying to Chicago, so you pick a book up and in one plane trip of two or three, you know, two and half hours you’d be able to pretty much read the majority of the book and you’ve essentially got that information. And there, the books that are really kind of, you know, moving quickly of the shelves are books that people can actually read quicker and faster. The books that aren’t as intimidating. So, what's I’m saying here is that the numbers from a commercial point of view work much better in your favor. So again the same rule applies to fiction as well. Instead of writing a book that has 400 or 500 pages, maybe write, break it up into two parts and do two 250 words each. Again, you're going to sell it for maybe ten or 20% less but now you’ve got 2 books in the market place and if you add the numbers together, of course you're going to make overall a lot more money and have more exposure.
That number 5 is that, you get to create a following by having multiple books. And that is something that’s really, really important. There is a great book again by Seth Gordon about tribes and its about how you can actually create, you know, fans, how you can create a sense of community, how you can get people to actually follow you. So if you can actually carve out a niche in a particular marketplace and you can populate that niche with lots of information and lots of books in this case. Then quickly you get seen as the expert in that particular field. And what's cool about it is that people actually then will -- if they start to like you and see that you know a lot about that particular topic, they may come to your website, they may subscribe to your newsletter. They’ll start to actually become a fan of your work. And that makes sales so much easier in the future as well. So here’s a little bit of a sneaky kind of a tip that you may want to think about. See, I have in my books, so we’ll talk about this in a lot more detail later on. But these 15 books in the Secrets Exposed series, in each of the books, I have bonus gifts. Now, we’re going to talk about selling in bookstores and stuff a little bit later on but selling in a bookstore because I have self-published, I get about 35% of the recommended retail price and if we minus all the cost which are about another 10% then I get around about 25% or at least 20% profit from every books sold which is in a bookshop. Now, I’m going to explain that in more detail in a future video. So I make, say 20%. However, if someone actually goes to a website, because they're downloading some free materials that I give away and this can also work for fiction writers which I’ll talk about in a future video as well. It’s not just for non-fiction writers. They can go to a website and then when I release book number 2 or book number 3, I can either direct them to the bookstores and they can buy it there and again I get 20% or I can actually do pre-release and if I self-publish of course, I release it directly to my database and say, would you like to buy book number 2 in the series or book number 3. And then if they buy it from me directly, then I’ve got no distribution cost and no -- I don’t have to give away a large percentage to the bookstores which looses over 50%. So what you can then do is you’ll be making after your cost and if there are maybe, say 10 or even -- to be conservative 20% if you self-publish then you're getting 80% profit because they're now -- the costumers are dealing directly with you as opposed to going through the bookstore where you're only getting 20%. So again, another little tip which we’ll talk about more fully but that’s another reason why to do a series as well because you -- again, its maximizing your profits and you'll also going to create a bit of a following as well because either more books you have, the more your expert status increases, the more people will become connected to you and if they’ll like you, then they’ll buy -- want to buy more from you.
And number 6, and I have said all of these other points and some of them are highly commercial but at the end of the day as well, you get to impact a lot more people by having a series of books as opposed to just having one book and really that’s what it’s all about. Yes, you need to make money as an author but you also want to create an impact, you want to get your work out there to as many people as possible and again, just to use my example here, I could’ve done one book in what I call the Secrets Exposed series. But now I have produced 15 of these books as well. And by having lots of these books out there in the marketplace, over 200,000 or maybe it’s close to 250,000. Now, if I add in my first book that I wrote called The World at your Feet then I know that I have made a difference and I’ve impacted hundreds of thousands of people and I wouldn’t have been able to reach nearly as many if I just only had one book because people are going to be attracted to different titles and there a whole lot of other things but I’ll need to wrap up this video right now. So let me just quickly summarize again the six reasons and there's probably more and I’ll probably -- maybe talk about them in another video later but the six reasons to think book series as opposed to just book are: it makes it a lot easier to write, it doubles or triples your chances of being published or picked up by a book distributor, you get more exposure and a lot more credibility because of it, the numbers as you’ve seen work much better in your favor, you get to create more of a following and more of a community and also when you're selling directly books, again you can make more money and number six is you get to help more people and make a bigger impact on the world.
So, that wraps up this video talking about the importance to think book series, not just a book. So, hopefully now that idea is locked inside your brain and it’s made a huge impact on my publishing career so I got to say big thank you again to Mark Victor Hansen for sharing that pearl of wisdom, with me. And now, I want you to take this idea and I hope it helps you in your publishing career. This is Dale Beaumont from Get Published TV. See you again next time.
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