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Common Mistakes Made by Home Publishers
with conventional (not eBook) publishing
- Writing
first and marketing later. See download of Revolution Course for explanation.
- The "big
market" fallacy. The thinking that assumes the larger the market
the more people will want your information. This is only true if the
cost of contacting that market is cheap and easy. Most big markets are
best left to commercial publishers who have the infrastructure to reach
it. However there are some extremely profitable ways to reach huge audiences.
This is done through press releases and "stealth marketing"
techniques.
- Thinking
that the road to riches lies in Direct Mail. Most direct mailings from
new publishers completely fail to bring in more than 0.5% response.
Direct mail is an area with its own risks and expertise, but there are
other areas, such as newsletters, that do not require any DM risk whatsoever.
- Underpricing.
The basic rule in mail order is to take the cost price of the product,
add all the packing and posting costs and use at least ten times this
figure as the selling price. One of the best aspects of Home publishing
is that the cost of supplying paper and ink is relatively cheap. Mark-ups
of fifty times the cost price are not uncommon. Another way is to assume
a poor response of, say, 0.3% and price your product to break even at
that point when you take the cost of the mailing into account.
- Most people
start by producing a cheap manual and trying to sell it by direct mail.
The current high costs of direct mail mean that a one-manual product
will not make any long-term profit unless it is very highly priced,
usually in the three figure number category. The reason why you get
offers of cheap manuals from other companies is either because they
are new companies (and soon to expire) or the goods offered are loss-leaders,
so that the company has your name to make other, more expensive offers
to.
- The backend
product rule states that the first sale (be it a manual, book or whatever)
doesn't make a profit; it just gets you a customer. You make a profit
by selling this customer new, related products. This is why correspondence
courses always make money - automatic, presold, backend products. Most
people forget the backend product rule.
- Going
to a commercial printer. By using the right equipment a new home publisher
can produce everything himself before going to a commercial printer
service for big runs. One of the reasons why Home Publishing is now
so extraordinarily powerful is that it is cheap and easy to test new
products in this way without committing yourself to large print bills
before you know if the concept is going to work.
- Spoiling
the Ship for a "ha'penny" worth of tar. Old English nautical
expression meaning that the look of something has been spoilt because
of a simple omission or lack of care. People DO judge a book by its
cover and care must be taken to use the Spielburg Principle - adding
value to the product by ensuring it looks good.
- Poor understanding
of the market or customer such as offering a high value item to a market
that cannot afford it. Classic example is a "How to save money"
book sold by mail order to those who cannot afford it because they cannot
save money!
- 90% of
the world's home publishers concentrate in the Business Opportunity
market. That's why 10% of the world's home publishers make most of the
money! Looking outside the box can make you very good money indeed.
Best
Tips
- Spend
money on your printer, not your computer. Using a Pentium IV
with a zillion megahertz of RAM to start a home publishing business
is like digging a window box with a JCB Tractor. Gary North, one of
the USA's best newsletter writers writes on a DOS based machine for
most of the time. The secret lies in producing clear, professional looking
print that is crisp to look at. The best information in the world will
not sell if it's printed on toilet paper using a dot matrix printer.
- Don't
write a book. Don't write anything. Spend time looking for a suitable
market or group of people who share a common problem and then create
the solution to that problem.
- From Bill
Myers. People don't buy prevention, they buy cures. Don't do a project
that tells people how they can avoid falling in a pit. Do a project
that shows them how to get out of the pit they just fell in.
- Remember
that the headline of your direct mail piece, or ad, is 100% of the advertisement.
If the prospect doesn't read the headline, he won't read the body copy.
You should have 20 headlines for each piece of body copy. Test each
one in rotation until you find the best one and then write another 20!
- Websites
are becoming the norm in all commercial businesses. They should be regarded
as a shop window that your prospect can browse through, NOT as a lighthouse
that attracts moths to a light while you do nothing. For Home Publishers,
a well organised website means that information products can be sold
and downloaded immediately from the site.
- Don't
offer anything that can be purchased or worse still, obtained free of
charge, in the high street. The buzzwords are "Instant Gratification".
Customers will prefer to drive to town and come home with a product
the same day than wait weeks for a mail order delivery. They want it
- They want it NOW.
- Avoid
subjects like Health, Financial or Legal advice unless you are a qualified
professional in those fields. Suing companies like McDonalds for not
writing "Hot" on their coffee cups is now standard practice
for sharp lawyers. If you want to write on a contentious subject then
this can be very profitable BUT you are leaving yourself wide open to
legal action.
- Copyright
(Spelled as the right to copy) your work by posting it to yourself
in a sealed envelope and leave it unopened. You MUST put the words
'Copyright DATE YOUR NAME' (e.g Copyright 2006 Phil Gosling) on
any work you publish. The post-stamp date may confirm your claim.
Gerald Wennerstrom, a professional script writer, has been kind enough
to point out that this 'poor man's copyrighting' probably would not
stand up in a court (he himself has set up a spoof envelope 'proving'
he wrote Star Wars). If you really want to protect your work you
should register it. See http://www.copyright.gov/
(US) or http://www.patent.gov.uk/copy/
(UK)
My view is that in the last 20 years in home publishing I have only
seen two instances of copyright infringement. One was in the UK and
the person was sued. The other was deliberate pirating (cloning) of a
website, including the book it was promoting. This was a deliberate
criminal act and on the Internet, where anonymous people can register
similar domain names to yours and can set up a web page in hours, it
is extraordinarily difficult to pin anyone down to a country, never
mind find a lawyer in that country to take action. And the costs are prohibitive.
In any case, you can only copyright words, not ideas. If you bring out
a revolutionary book you will find copy-cat works soon appear in
different words and ways. It's called competition.
Let's talk turkey here. Even if you reach the heady ranks of 'Guru'
the chances of someone stealing your work are very low, and you can
spend more time and money preventing it, than the risk was worth. Add
a copyright statement to all your work and concentrate on selling it.
- Type "public
domain" in your search engine and you will see thousands of pages
of information on a vast range of subjects that can be legally downloaded
and copied. Most of this is from the United States whose government
has an enlightened policy of allowing the public who paid for the creation
of that information by taxation, access to that information.
- The Swiss
watch principle. In 1972 the Swiss held a virtual monopoly on the world's
watches with 90% of the world's dollar turnover in sales. In 1975 the
digital watch started to make inroads and by 1979 the Swiss share of
the market slumped to 5%. Instead of competing they went up-market and
sold very expensive watches to people who didn't need to ask the price.
They now only have 6.2% of the world's turnover in watches - and 80%
of the turnover in dollars. The point here is to sell high value items
to people who can afford it. Don't write a newsletter for cat owners.
Write a very expensive newsletter on very expensive cats to people who
can afford very expensive "puddy" cats!
[Compiled
by Phil Gosling, Chairman, Home Publishers Association]
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