The Truth About Book Writing, Being an Author (8 page)

Chapter 11

The Cumulative Book Writing Method

A
s another effective and innovative means developed so that my clients could come up with a workable way to fund their own projects and ensure their books end up high quality, the
Cumulative Book Method
was born.

The Cumulative Book Method resolves a number of undesirables, including:

• having to wait one to two years or more to enjoy the satisfaction of having a completed book
  
• not having the means to completely fund your book writing project
  
• wanting an additional income stream
  
• not having a large enough following for when the book is launched
  
• not making enough profit on your book
  
• and many more undesirable things.
  

How The Cumulative Book Method Works

Here is the Cumulative Book Method in brief:

From the book that will eventually become your main print book, you write and publish, one-by-one, as many e-books as you have planned chapters or topics (of your main print book) that will stand on their own in either helping someone to:

1. overcome a problem

or

2. achieve a goal

This is extremely powerful in allowing you to achieve a great many things! Let’s break this down into smaller pieces for better understanding:

Here’s how it works

*
Once your main print book’s concept, purpose, strategy, goals, and other very important aspects, have been determined and clarified, you can then determine the best strategic sequence of writing your book’s topics and chapters.

After that, you will be able to begin to:

1. take a planned topic or chapter of your main print book and write it, turning it into a stand-alone product (e-book) that can benefit your audience
   
2. get a powerful cover designed
   
3. properly price your e-book
   
4. publish it on Amazon’s Kindle or sell it at your website or blog
   
5. start making money with immediate book sales
   
6. ...repeat process with another topic or chapter.
   

This resourceful method begins to fund your book project

for things like:

• editing
  
• proofreading
  
• cover design
  
• being able to afford to invest in having an Author Coach who will show you the ropes for success, like helping you to write and market your book, and helping you as the author of your book to achieve your biggest goals
  
• getting a landing page to collect e-mail addresses and build that all-important list of interested and excited prospective buyers
  
• putting together a small team to help market your book
  
• setting up your blog and website
  
• putting together a small team to build up your social media
  
• and so forth!
  

This is a really exciting book writing method because of the early impact that you are able to create. It’s extremely empowering in so many ways!

It even eradicates the challenge of having to come up with tens of thousands of dollars for paying a professional book writer when you can’t afford to. (See chapter,
What Is A Good Writer Worth?
, for more information on what you can expect to pay for a professional book writer).

Like with the Author Coaching approach, you are looking at investing about one-tenth the cost to hire a ghostwriter
and
you get to begin making money early in your main book’s project.

So if you can’t afford a professional writer, this is a safe and prosperous method, as long as you make sure that your e-books are HIGH QUALITY. That’s rule number one—always, first and foremost!

This method also makes it possible to earn a great deal more profit than you will on your main print book alone. I’ll explain how you will make greater profits from your e-books shortly. First, let’s look at the importance of having a print book.

Why You Have To Have A Print Book

Your main book will have many extremely effective things from which you will gain that are much more important than your per-book profit. So don’t count your print book out by any means. You have to have a print book too for many reasons.

For one thing, having a print book will create more prestige and respect from the people that you need it from. You will better impress a potential client for your business, the media will take you more seriously, the speaking circuit will want and pay you more ... the list goes on to the importance of having your main book available in print form.

Greater Profits

You will make more money on your e-books than from your main print book. Here’s how and why:

If you were to offer your main print book on
Amazon.com
for $12.95, for instance, and if your book were to have 20 chapters or topics that could stand on their own in helping others achieve or overcome one specific thing, this would mean that you could sequentially come out with 20 e-books.

And if each e-book were to sell for $2.99 apiece, that equates out to about $41.86 based on Kindle’s 70 percent profit option.

The profit on your $12.95 print book that will eventually be put on
Amazon.com
, (which is different from Kindle) is about $4.50. This is without taking into account other likely cost factors, which can bring the profit down to as little as .85 cents per book.

Don’t forget, this is just about direct profit. You cannot put a price tag on the clout, influence and effectiveness of having a print book. It far exceeds the profit margin, giving you the power to open many great big doors that would be impossible to open without a print book.

In either case, I think you’ll agree that making about $42 dollars for your material is nicer than $4.50. So with this method of book writing, you can earn more profit from your e-books, not to mention the additional leads (people reaching with strong interest about what you have to sell them).

One reason for this is because you are able to place your 5, 10, 20 e-books into many different categories on Kindle. So you are able to cast a
much
wider net and reach more people that way. When you know what to do, your e-books can be a
very
powerful marketing tool!

If you’d like to know more about this technique, feel free to contact me at
[email protected]
.

Approaching the Cumulative Book Method correctly can really pan out for you in so many ways. What I have described here is just the tip of the iceberg. Having the advantage of referring each of your books, one to another, will increase your e-book sales. And being able to publish them in different categories will create an incredible amount of exposure to the millions of daily visitors on Kindle!

Your exposure, ability to reach a wider audience, drive traffic to your website or blog, build your list, help fund your main book project ... it’s an author’s and entrepreneur’s dream come true!

* * *

______________________

^****
This is achieved effectively with an Author Coach in Author Coaching Sessions as mentioned in the chapter,
An Author Coach Is A Great Option—
You can hear more about a group mentoring program that does the same thing from a
short audio message
about this here:
www.WriteABookAndGetPublished.com

Chapter 12

Survival Of The Fittest

L
et’s face it, money is often an obstacle to getting one’s book written professionally. And it is a challenge that causes many thousands of authors to resort to substandard “solutions” and ending up settling for a lower quality book that falls short of its ability to create the impact necessary for success.

This is because they believe that there are no other options available. And it’s a great example of how, with limited knowledge, we are limited by our choices and decisions.

“A poor book is better than no book at all,” is often the reasoning. But this is a grave mistake. And it is strongly recommended that you either pursue authorship by doing things professionally ... or not at all.

Authorship Is a Bonafide Business

You, as the author, are the proprietor of your own business. Your products are your books; as well as any other related things or services you might decide to offer.

Authorship is a bonafide business venture. And just in the same way you would expect other business owners to take their ventures seriously in how they made their products and delivered their services—especially since they are charging for them—there is absolutely no good reason why anyone should ever think that they can produce a poorly-made book and then try to sell it to others. It is not only poor business practices, it is unethical.

Even “not knowing the difference between a good book and a poor one” is no excuse that any book buyer would accept. So, it is not a reasonable or acceptable excuse for you. “Oops” or “sorry” will not satiate the upset that book buyers experience, and it will not lessen the number of people who will
never
buy another thing from you in the future. Business owners are expected to know their crafts and products. They are getting paid by their customers.

The dictionary refers to the word, “professional” as ‘a person who gets paid for expertly doing something.’ By sheer definition of what a professional is, you, as an author, need to produce a book of high quality by supplying exceptional information worthy of payment.

Survival of The Fittest Author

Survival is not just a matter for the wild. “Only the strongest survive” pertains all too well to authorship just as easy as it does for the wild planes of Africa.

Don’t think for a moment that civilization is in some way more forgiving than the savage beast. Selection of the fittest in civilized societies is alive and well. And if you don’t do your best for something you charge for, you’re not going to make it for very long.

A Personal Experience As An Example

A few years ago, I went to a new coffee shop that was close to my home office. I was really excited because it was nice and close to my home office and I would have a place where I could go when I wanted some quality coffee or to mingle with mankind after too many hours of solitude, staring at a computer screen.

When I ordered a cappuccino, the owner delivered to me a
very
wet latte. What this means in layman’s terms is, she added way too much frothed milk. In fact, it was all the way to the top with liquid and very little foam, making it even a very poor latte!

And when I tried to let her know, very kindly, the difference between a cappuccino and a latte, she shut me out by telling me that she knew what she was doing, she was the “expert.”

Not only did she make it obvious that she had not studied her craft, but she had no idea how to run a business either. A true entrepreneur would have listened to what her audience needs and desires, because supplying just that will always make one very successful through a path of least resistance.

I had predicted that she would be out of business in less than two years ... giving her ample time to first completely drain all of her life savings with a negative cash flow every week. Then, as things got really frustrating to her, she would begin to blame “the people of Clearwater” or “the economy” for her misfortunes, not the fact that she sabotaged her own success!

The things people use to excuse their failures are incredible. All she ever needed to do was learn her craft or at least have someone on her team who was an expert in her line of business!

It’s a simple requirement for success, wouldn’t you say? To either become an expert through learning or bring someone in to be the expert in order to be able to acquire your own success is a very small order to fill.

And thus we have another law of success ...

Success Law #7

EXPERT KNOWLEDGE, OR THE GUIDANCE OF AN EXPERT, IS WHAT IS NEEDED FOR BEING ABLE TO PRODUCE THE QUALITY PRODUCTS/SERVICES THAT IS DEMANDED IN THE “SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST” ENVIRONMENT THAT EXISTS WITHIN THE WORLD OF BUSINESS.

Bottom line, paying customers will
not
tolerate inferior products. Purposeful or not, it is a bait and switch. In other words, there is a promise of something, but something else of lesser quality is given instead.

Whether spoken or simply understood by the nature of common expectations, if you don’t deliver the goods promised, you’re done for!

It is expected that when you buy a car, it will run properly. It is expected that the food you order at a restaurant will taste good and be prepared in a healthy, clean environment and not make you sick with food poisoning.

IT IS EXPECTED THAT A BOOK YOU BUY WILL CREATE A CERTAIN EXPERIENCE OF LEARNING, INSPIRATION, ASSISTANCE, ENTERTAINMENT OR MOTIVATE.

Some Tough Love For Aspiring Authors

Once that unspoken bond of trust has been severed, it is very difficult to ever repair. You’d be better off thrown into a cage of hungry lions than to have to face the angry critics that are the book buyers who’ve been duped with their dollars and valuable time!

They’re so willing to do so because, in their eyes, there are plenty of other car dealers, cooks and there is no shortage of authors with great books to put one’s trust in and give patronage. So unhappy readers can nuke an author faster than you can say, “fraud.”

People expect you to be a professional and produce a professional book. To do otherwise would be fraudulent.

You really need to get the point that: YOU ARE NOT GOING TO FOOL ANYONE BY TRYING TO THROW TOGETHER, ALL BY YOURSELF, SOMETHING AS INVOLVED AND REQUIRING NUMEROUS LINES OF EXPERTISE TO ACCOMPLISH AS A BOOK!

The only “fool” in the end will be ... _____ (I’m not going to say it. You fill in the blank).

Don’t try to fly a 747 jet airliner by yourself and don’t try to create a book all by your lonesome! Any questions?

The fact that someone would even think that they could reveals just how badly they need to either become an expert or have one on their team. Make sense?

Okay, enough of the rough stuff and tough love.

Don’t fret about this ... just don’t be lax about your book. Don’t cut corners with your book. Don’t do anything half-heartedly with your book.

And all that wonderful passion of book buyers will be the fuel you need for immense success beyond your wildest dreams!

With so much love, desire, necessity, value and passion there is for books, you really have to work very, very hard to fail as an author.

And with the options now available to you, failure is most certainly not one of them with regard to getting your book written in high quality!

A Beautiful Thing

With the process of polishing under the responsibility of editors and proofreaders, with you writing your book under the knowledgeable guidance of a professional Author Coach, it is simply a beautiful thing!

Essentially, our efforts as an author, business owner, entrepreneur—call yourself what you wish, you’re all of these—boil down to two results. You create either
good effects
or
bad effect
s as a reaction to what we do.

You may have heard people say in passing that “All press is good press.” What they are referring to is, whether the information being published about them in the news is good or bad—“it’s all good,” so they think. But this is not even remotely true. It seems that only PR specialists understand this. Thank goodness for PRs!

Going after the generality of
being in the thoughts and minds of others
or
getting ANY press no matter what kind
is dangerous and foolish. There needs to be more control of things than that!

It is important to be well thought of, not notorious! The former creates goodwill, admiration, positive results, a willingness to interact with, and greater survival potential. The latter creates ill will, disdain, negative results, no willingness to interact with, and poor survival potential.

You can build a financial empire with a valuable book as your engine to blaze a trail for you
.

This is yet another reason of how having a quality book is essential for your immense success. The lesson here is not to compromise because of some road block. Retain the high level of quality while doing what it takes to make it all happen.

Luckily, you really don’t have to get too busy figuring out a solution with the great ones being shared with you in this book. Hopefully, your biggest problem is in which option to choose of so many wonderful avenues you now have at your disposal.

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