Every day in Africa the Lion awakes knowing it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or starve. And every day the Gazelle knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or perish. The Moral of the story? No matter who you are, you’d better wake up running. – African Proverb

Several years ago we had a variety of clients that we worked with regularly in our ghost writing projects. Each client was over the moon when their books were finished and they finally got their hands on the finished products. Over the years most of them came back to us and had a second or even a third book done with us, all with our truest appreciation.

Our only concern was getting the book done, not marketing or selling it – they took care of that for themselves, but as long as we did our part and gave them something amazing to sell, they did the rest.

Being the curious numbers analysts we are, though, it came to our attention that some books did VERY well (millions of copies sold in some cases), others, often by the same client, only sold a half dozen copies all told. And our clients were still happy with us.

Now for a numbers analyst, that didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense to us. So we talked to all our customers and discovered that they sold millions off the speaking engagements they landed for having such a sexy looking authority-establishing book to their names, so they didn’t care how many books they sold, just that they sold their high ticket products from stage because of the doors having the book opened for them.

While that made sense, we were still driven to understand why some books sold like gangbusters, and others effectively died on the vine – what was the difference? What was the secret to selling business and personal/professional development books?

Well we called up our buddies in charge of major retail operations in book sales, and our friends in the publishing world and discovered that they didn’t have much of a clue about what made books sell either because they weren’t in the business of selling books when it came right down to it either. In fact it’s kind of an industry inside joke because they get asked all the time, and none of them really have much to offer as an answer, it turns out. Publishers make money by the paper and ink sold, not by the author’s books being sold as unique to the author. Book stores lease shelf space to publishers, so they make their money effectively in real estate, not book sales, so they’re not really able to help much there either. That leaves the author who is usually so painfully inexperienced at the whole thing as to be more of a liability than an asset to the objective of selling large volumes of books at a time, at least as far as statistics have come to prove thus far throughout history.

It turns out that since 1642 when commercial publishing became ‘a thing’, no one has made a special effort to understand why and how books sell in large volumes, and again I’m specifically referring to business, personal/professional development books, and to another extent ‘How-To’ books can be included in that list as well. At least until now.

We started in 2013 to really dig into this issue and have since developed well over 1200 different marketing strategies and tactics to market and sell large volumes of books, ebooks, and app books, and more importantly, how to monetize them in smarter and more profitable ways.

With cost of customer acquisition in some cases as low as $0.083 and monetization strategies that can convert that to as much as $8,000 per lead, the business of making money from books of various forms isn’t the straightforward ‘write book – sell book’ one naturally comes to think of it as. Instead we have discovered a wealth of book selling strategies that can provide you the Expert Authority installation you need as an expertise-based author, but that can also generate revenues as real products, not just as something that takes up space in your garage.

In just one model we can demonstrate sales of over 30,000 copies consistently often as high as 91-100k copies or more depending on the venues we can get your book accepted in.

In another model, businesses buy copies for all of their employees, either as a holiday bonus or as a workplace training tool, or any number of other reasons. As more than 51% of Americans in the private sector now work for Large Enterprise firms (those employing 500 or more employees and doing more than $1B in business), with enough work we could get your book sold to 25 or more firms, getting you an average of over 30,000 more copies sold. And if we applied 6 or more of our strategies at the same time, you could fairly reasonably expect to see of 250,000 copies sold over an 18 month period. And using the industry standard rates for reader transformations, you’d be looking at generating roughly 100 avatar clients that way, clients whose world you’d change and in turn they would change your world too.

If that’s something you think you could sink your teeth into, then we should probably talk. Like soon now.