Welcome to the Books, Brands and Business podcast with your host, Chris O’Byrne from jetlaunch.net. This episode is from a video training that I recorded for my Facebook group, Make Money With Books. You can join the group at jetlaunch.link/group. Now let’s jump into the training.
Today I want to talk to you about an interesting idea. Now I’m involved with, I have an e-com business and I’m involved with e-com specifically selling products through Amazon’s FBA Fulfilled by Amazon program. And I have been going through some training materials. I bought this course, it’s called the Proven Amazon Course. And in the Proven Amazon course, there is a module that is really a separate course. It’s all about bundling. So here’s the idea and here’s what they talk about in the bundling.
So if you are selling, for example, a springform pan and you want to bundle it with something else so that you can have a new listing, make more profit, there are different reasons for doing that. You could add other products such as, for example, you could add like mixing bowls and spatulas and things that you would also use when you were using your Springform pan.
But then there’s another idea and this comes from that bundling course, which is to take a book and maybe you write a book with Springform pan recipes, and then you add that to your bundle, and even if it’s just the pan and the book, now because you have such a great prophet margin on books, you can add that and create this unique bundle that nobody else can copy and it’s your book and it’s your information that’s going in there.
Well anyway, this is all some really cool techniques and strategies for selling e-com products. But then I thought, this is perfect for my authors. And so as an author, you’re always looking for ways to, especially if you’re in this group, you’re looking for ways to make money from your book. Now, one thing that I talk about doing a lot is to take your book and then create an audio version and then create a course from your book.
You can also create workbooks in journals and planners, what they call low content books because they’re mostly, the content is mostly added by the person who buys it and fills it out. For example, if it’s a planner or a journal, you have a certain number of pages that all kind of, maybe they look the same. There’s not a whole lot of content that’s going into it until the person who bought the journal or planner starts writing in it and workbooks are the same way.
So most people that have workbooks in the nonfiction genre can easily create a workbook that goes with it, and maybe it’s just 8.5 x 11, maybe it’s spiral-bound, and it’s designed for people to take the information that they learned from your book and then apply it to their lives, apply it to their business, apply it to whatever it is that your book talks about.
Now here’s the cool part. Let’s say that you have a book. For example, one of my authors, she has a book about chair yoga. Okay. What can she bundle with that as a product where the book is part of that bundle? Well, yoga is fairly easy. There are yoga mats and yoga clothing, there are all sorts of yoga accessories that can go along with that book. So you could, and I’m not going to get into the details of ordering products and private labeling and all that, let’s just say that it’s fairly easy to do. It can be done and so maybe you order a bunch of yoga mats and you bundle it with your book and you put those together in a new package. It gets sent into Amazon and then it just gets listed as any other Amazon product and you can sell it.
You could do that with all sorts of books if you, especially if you have anything in like the health field, or if you have a recipe book, you can bundle that with cookware and bakeware and things that fit with whatever your book is about. If your book is about something that’s a little bit harder to come up with ideas for, then you can get creative or you can simply create the workbook. So in some cases, you may not have a product that goes with it.
For example, this book, I just got this book yesterday, it’s been out for a while, but I sign up for this free plus shipping thing. Anyway. If you had a book about sales and how to sell, what kind of product goes along with that? Well, maybe you could come up with some things like, well, I’m not really even sure. You’d have to be creative to come up with some of these products, but you could easily create a workbook. You could create a journal, a planner, things that people are going to use.
There’s that 10X book. Well, with a book like that, think in terms of the person who is buying the book, what frame of mind are they in? Well, they’re in a frame of mind of success. They’re buying that book because they want to be more successful. They want to 10 times their output, the work that they do. And there is a psychological phenomenon that occurs, and when somebody buys a book that’s going to solve a problem for them, once they purchase that book, they feel, maybe not rationally, but they feel as if they have solved their problem. That’s why so many people buy books and then never actually read them, is because they feel like they’ve solved the problem just by buying that book in the first place. So if somebody is buying this 10X book, for example, they’re probably thinking, you know, success. They’re thinking, I’m going to be a millionaire or a multimillionaire, and then you can start getting a little more creative. What kinds of products would somebody who feels that they are successful would buy along with a book about success?
Well, they might buy an expensive pen. They might buy a watch, they might buy some sort of, of course, the workbook and journal idea goes along with that, but be a little more creative. What kinds of products would somebody that is successful buy to go along with this? And so that could become the product that you sell.
So now you’ve got your book and you’ve got your physical products that go along with that. Your book is still for sale on Amazon via KDP or IngramSpark or whomever you use, but you’re also creating more opportunities to sell both your book and extra products and increase your profit margin and get a whole new audience of buyers from Amazon that you normally wouldn’t reach.
Then if you combine that with doing Amazon ads, that is going to greatly increase your sales and your profits as well and of course give you lots and lots of more potential customers for the rest of your business because you’re bundling your book with that and your book has some sort of ad in there, right? And you’re going to have an offer, you’re going to get them to sign up to your mailing list. And so that is kind of a new approach to things, is to think in terms of physical products that you can bundle with your book to create more offers and opportunities for profits and to leverage that Amazon sales platform.
Thanks for coming along for the ride. If you want to be part of a tight-knit community of people learning how to make money with their books, join my FB group at jetlaunch.link/group. That’s the best place to ask me questions and get fast answers.