What is it?
If you have a captive audience that trusts you, selling books and e-books directly to your subscribers can be a straightforward way to monetize.
Use them to delve deeper into subjects touched on in the main newsletter, or offer exclusive content not available in your free offerings.
A popular way to launch is to offer the first chapter to subscribers for free. That way you'll get people invested in reading (and paying for) the remainder.
The Good and the Bad
- Create once, sell forever
- Great "foot-in-the-door" product to generate revenue from new subscribersin the first few days
- Leads to easy upsells of courses and coaching later
- Takes a lot of time to create.
- The packaging of content as a book means readers will only want to pay < $30 for it
Examples to Steal
Ali uses the first chapter of his book as a lead magnet for his newsletter.
Once people have had that first taste, it's perfectly possible they'll convert on either the $10 e-book (or $20 hardback).
But if not, he has their email - and he can remarket readers with additional snippets until he makes the sale.
But why send people to buy on Amazon, who take a commission on every sale?
Here's where Ali's scale comes into play. He's big enough that he can generate enough sales to rank in popular categories where he is likely to pick up new eyeballs who haven't encountered him before.
So beyond the book helping him make money, it also helps him get discovered.
Charles is an SEO guru who makes 6 figures per year selling e-books.
He has a suite of over 10 e-books, but let's take a look at his most recent release.
The "Six-Figure Freelance SEO 2.0" is an update to a book released a couple of years ago. So it took far less work than writing a new one from scratch.
Even so, when he announced the update last month, he quickly sold over 200 copies for $99 each. This was achieved through a combination of posting on X/Twitter, and a promotional cadence in his email newsletter
The regular price is $179, so we can conservatively estimate this single e-book has generated at least $25,000 in its lifetime.
