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Most people who embark upon the journey of writing a book envision selling millions of copies. This would be a life-changing experience for many. One of the best things about selling millions of copies is the passive income they generate: if you are selling tens of thousands of copies per month, it’s very easy to set time aside for your next book. But there are a few drawbacks to focusing on this dream.
Most people who embark upon the journey of writing a book envision selling millions of copies. This would be a life-changing experience for many. One of the best things about selling millions of copies is the passive income they generate: if you are selling tens of thousands of copies per month, it’s very easy to set time aside for your next book. But there are a few drawbacks to focusing on this dream. First, by the law of averages, it just isn’t very likely. And second, many people who are coaches, speakers, and even those who focus primarily on authorship, aren’t writing books for the sales (although everyone admits that the vision of sales is a vision of Shangri La).
Any social media platform that has hit the monetization phase severely restricts what you can share without paying for it. The concept of sharecropping is essentially about farming on land someone else owns: they get to extract their rent, and they get to decide what that rent is.
An email list, on the other hand, is like buying your own land. Sure, you’ll pay Mailchimp or Mailerlite or another platform a fee to host your list, but your list is like an R.V.: if you don’t like the rent on Mailchimp you can pick up and go elsewhere with your list. So if you have to pay to host it, what’s the difference? The difference is that when you send an email, it gets delivered to everyone on the list, then it is up to them to open it. How to get them to open it is another topic entirely. But when you post something to social media, the platform controls how many of your “friends” or people who don’t know you will get to see it.
I’ve seen quite a few techniques over the years, some of which are pretty complex, but let’s refer back to the title of this blog: using free books to build an email list.
You can have a free book lead magnet on your website or even on your social media page. You can use QR codes on a business card. There are plenty of ways to put it in front of people. My favorite tool for giving away free books is Bookfunnel. With Bookfunnel you can upload an ebook and it will be automatically delivered to your reader after they give you their email address.
For nonfiction, you may want to give them the ebook that delivers the core message of your coaching or speaking career. For fiction, you may want to do something like what I’m going to do in this post. I wrote seven short stories about my character Stetson Jeff. The Stetson Jeff Adventures are a six-book series, and the short stories are extra-canonical, meaning that they don’t relate to the six-book series. This way, I can share the character with my readers without any spoilers, and also without giving away the core series that I hope people will then want to buy. Finally, it puts those readers into my email ecosystem so they can get to know me over time and eventually they may happen upon one of my other books.
I’ve put the “Close Encounters of the Stetson Kind” book into two formats in Bookfunnel. One where you can get the book for free, and another where payment is optional (suggested donation $1.99). This allows people to think “hmm, I could get it for free, but I know Adam worked hard on this. Maybe I’ll use the payment link instead.” Once I had done that, I then set up a Paypal link where people could order an autographed paperback. Now I have three links, giving people all sorts of options. Some of these links won’t automatically capture an email address, but then, some people would rather give you a bit of money than their contact information, and that’s okay. Giving people that option is a great way to build your audience.
With all that said, here are the links for you to see what I mean!
Get my Close Encounters of the Stetson Kind short story collection Ebook for FREE here.
Get it for a donation of your choice here.
Get an autographed paperback here.
Happy email list building! As always, coaching and consulting is a great way to get your project and career to the next step:
Interested in talking? Contact adam@victoryvision.org for a conversation and there’s a good chance he’ll send you a book after you’ve chatted!
Book a complimentary consult with him here: https://calendly.com/adamfleming/vvp
Adam G. Fleming, PCC, has been working in leadership/executive coaching since 2007. He published his first novel in 2012 and his first book on coaching (The Art of Motivational Listening, Entrust Source Publishing) in 2015. He now has 16 titles available on Amazon. He is the CEO and lead ghostwriter for Victory Vision Publishing, Inc.
