Welcome to today’s presentation. For those of you who don’t know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn. I’m the creator of doneforyou.com. We specialize in three things and creating offers. We specialize in building sales systems that convert. Then we also specialize in setting up marketing automation so that your business runs without you. And what we’re talking about, and so I got on a roll and then audio cut out, and then that’s it. So it is what it is, right? So the audio is good. I’m watching my audio level indicator there. So everything seems to be working okay.
Should you sell, publish an ebook or print-on-demand
In the previous sessions, we have talked about how to set up sales funnels to sell your eBooks. Your eBooks, your digital work, whether it’s an ebook, whether it’s a paperback. We’ve talked a lot about sales funnels. We’ve also talked about formatting Kindle books and the benefits of selling digitally versus selling print. Today what we’re going to do, and this is an extension of the same conversation, which is, should you sell eBooks on your website? Should you sell print-on-demand? Paperback? What are some of the caveats of both? And that’s what we’re going to discuss.
First of all, we talked about traditional publishing. We talked about self-publishing a little bit.
self-publishing = you can keep more money
At the end of the day, you can keep more money. You can take dollars out of doing what you’re doing. Self-publishing is print on demand for lack of a better term, meaning as the book or the product gets ordered, then it gets created, packaged, and shipped.
CreateSpace
It happens like lightning-fast. Amazon created, or they bought a company called CreateSpace. CreateSpace was this innovative platform that you could upload your doc file, your PDF, whatever. They’d format it as a book, they’d send you a proof, and then they would mass distribute it.
They would send it to Barnes & Noble. They’d send it to Amazon. They’d send it to all the places that you wanted to sell your paperback.
Kindle Digital Publishing
Amazon had their Kindle Digital Publishing, which is the way that they, and then they ended up merging them. So now they’re on the same platform. Kdp.amazon.com is where you do both. It’s where you sell your Kindle books, publish an ebook, it’s also where you sell your physical paperbacks for sale on Amazon. And then it also, they have a distribution to some other providers too.
Digital products and eBooks versus Print-on-Demand
Now, I wanted to bring these two things together so that you could understand how they help it work on a macro basis. Partly because right now in the pandemic that we are in, books are not essential, so for the longest, for like a month, a good month after the pandemic broke out in the United States, I read books all the time, physical books. I like physical books more than digital books. So I order a lot of physical books. What happened was I would order these physical books and I would have a ship, it would take three weeks for them to ship them to me. And I know the warehouse is a couple of hours away, so there was a problem.
What happened is I ended up having to buy a couple of Kindle books because there were books that I wanted to get through. After all, they were highly relevant to something that I was doing right now. I wanted to get through them, educate myself on something, and then implement it and turn it around really quickly and I couldn’t do that. So I ended up having to buy the Kindle book and the audiobook. I listen to audiobooks all the time too, but I had to buy the Kindle book, which is fine, but I can’t highlight a Kindle book quite the way that I would, well, a physical book. The way I read physical books, I don’t have any books here. The way I read books, I highlight them. Then I go back through and take some notes.
I’m a diligent reader now, not when I was in school. What happens is so many people, so many internet marketers, so many people who are selling digital courses, publish an ebook, and everything online, what they’re doing is they’re putting together a free plus shipping offer or a digital offer.
Digital Offer
The digital offer is such that, or the free plus shipping offer, you have a tripwire. The tripwire is a low-end offer, four dollars, and 95 cents, or a dollar, or two dollars or free plus shipping. So it might be a free physical book, and then it’s $4 and 95 cents to pay for the shipping or $6 to pay for the shipping. So it’s a free thing. It’s a low-end offer. And then they match you up to, usually a $37 upsell.
Maybe it’s, it might be 97. It might be 67, but they match you up to an upsell. If you don’t take that, they send you to a down-sell. And the down-sell is 17, 27, 37. Then they match you to another upsell and that second upsell is usually quite a bit more expensive. Usually, it’s a couple of hundred bucks or whatever. Because of this upsell path, you generate more money for a buy, throughout life with this prospect.
Physical Books
Now, when you sell on your own and publish an ebook when you have your physical products, your books, and you’re shipping your books, you’re fulfilling them in your processor you’re taking the money for the books yourself.
First of all, you’re not paying some marketplace like Amazon 30% or 60% to hold for their service in there. You’re keeping 100% of the money. You’re also paying for the book. But the point is you get to 100% control the upsell path. So you can go from a tripwire offer up to the upsells, all the way through the matrix maximizing your order value. You might take a four-dollar and 95 cent buyer and turn them into a $100 buyer just by going through the right upsell sequence. And that is really what maximizing sales funnel conversion is all about. Now, a publishing house, they’re not controlling pricing, they’re not controlling the product. They’re not controlling deliverability, when you’re working with them, at least.
In this aspect, you are controlling all aspects of the pricing and deliverability, which gives you maximum control over the buying process.
Ebook or Digital Product
Advantages
Now, the good part about publishing an ebook and digital product is that you have instant delivery. You can, your offers are instantly deliverable. You have a higher price point, so you can charge as much as you want for this stuff. There are no deliverability issues. So at the end of the day, you just give somebody a download link and that’s all. They open it, they read it, whatever, you don’t have to worry about the mailbox or anything like that. There’s no fulfillment, there’s no printing, there’s no warehousing, which is huge.
That’s what Amazon’s 30 or 60%, that’s what they get you for because they’re printing it, warehousing it, fulfilling it, the whole deal. Do you know what I mean? That’s what you’re paying the money for. Sure, you have to take that on. But if it’s digital, you don’t, you just, set up the matrix, and then you just go from there. And you also get higher margins when it’s digital too.
Disadvantages
1. Less Credibility
Now the bad part if you publish an eBook and digital products is possible there’s a little less credibility. So you might not necessarily get the maximum amount of credibility when you publish an ebook because everybody can write and publish an ebook and everybody can throw it up online. Whereas if you have a physical book, you have the credibility that is associated with that physical book.
That’s a big thing. Do you know what I mean? That’s a big benefit of having a physical book is having credibility. The credibility is transferred because you have this physical book, this manifestation of your work that you’re able to sell to them. Now, if you don’t have a physical book, if you just have a digital book, then you can’t hand it to somebody. You can’t say, “Here you go. Here’s a book.” It’s like, “I’ll send you a link,” and then it’s no different than a webpage. So there might be a little less credibility when you have just a pure ebook.
2. Higher Refund Rate
You also might have a higher refund rate. People might not necessarily appreciate it when you publish an ebook as much as the physical book, they might not even read it because they don’t have something physical to crack open and read. So they might consider it, they might send a refund. Some people don’t and won’t understand, and this is less of an issue now than it was a while ago. But sometimes people still don’t understand eBooks. They don’t understand how they read them. And some buyers don’t value them as much, even though they pay more for the ebook itself.
Print-on-Demand
Now, some print-on-demand stuff. Having a physical book that Amazon prints for you or somebody prints for you and you print as the orders come in.
Advantages
1. Print what is needed. You only print what you need, which is fantastic. An order comes in, then it is printed, and then it is shipped.
2. Lower Refund Rate. It is a physical item and they receive it in the mail.
3. You also have higher customer satisfaction normally.
When somebody is receiving something in the mail, you usually get better conversions. And then people usually like it better because it’s a physical, tangible item that they have access to. And then there’s also higher perceived value because it’s a physical book and it’s more traditional.
4. Higher Credibility. A lot of the credibility that is bestowed on authors is now bestowed on you.
Disadvantages
1. Higher Cost
Now the bad side of print-on-demand, higher costs. I mean, you have to pay for the book to be printed. I have eight and a half by 11 textbooks that are being printed now. I’m waiting for the proof copy. I should be getting it in the mail. That eight and a half by 11 text copy is $22 to print. That’s just the cost of it. It’s full color. I mean, it’s beautiful. I’m hoping it’s beautiful, but it’s $22 a print and it’s a textbook, it’s 274 pages long.
Obviously, the pricing, the pricing of that textbook is 99 bucks on Amazon. So higher costs. And even then, I think I’ll only make like 10 bucks per sale because it’s the cost of printing, and then the Amazon shipment fulfillment, all that other stuff.
2. People don’t get the item immediately
At the end of the day, I get my 10 bucks. Do you know what I mean? Another bad thing about print-on-demand, people don’t get the item immediately like they do digital, and people, you can update the product. So like when publishing an ebook, if something changes, you can log in, make the change, add it to the PDF, and then that’s it. Whereas, you can’t do that with a physical book. You can’t change something that is already sitting in somebody’s library. They understand that, but that also means that once they have that thing, the relationship is stopped unless they opt-in or do something else with you. But you can do both. And that’s the beauty of it.
You can do physical and digital products
If somebody doesn’t buy your physical product, you can down sell the digital product. You can offer them a free plus shipping offer or a free. If they don’t buy, you can exit pop them into a four-dollar and 95 cents digital offer. If somebody doesn’t take the digital product, you can down sell the physical product. So there are lots of ways that you can move back and forth between physical books, print-on-demand, and also digital products. And you just need to remember, the two mediums are two products. At the end of the day, two things, the two mediums, are two different products. It’s two different offers.
You’re going to have two different sets of sales copies. They’re going to be the same. They might even be on the same sales page, but you might have two different buttons or you might exit pop into the digital-only offer for 4.95. One of the beauties, like we’ve been testing a lot of different products and offers, right now, the thing that is working better than anything else is a 4.95 digital ebook. So it’s five bucks. In the world of tripwire offers, it is sitting in the same place as a free plus shipping offer did before the pandemic because access to availability, access to actual physical books, and shipping physical books because they are nonessential is slow and expensive.
People are opting for buying digital books. And now I don’t think the industry is ever going back to physical because I mean, even the cost of a print of a $3 paperback and the $3 in shipping, it’s still just a pain in the ass compared to just publish an ebook And now we have grown accustomed to reading eBooks, into valuing eBooks, at least $5 worth. Do you know what I mean? So that’s one of the beauties of what has happened lately or what is, in this digital transformation, it’s one of the nice things about how this is all working out on publishing an ebook. So you’re going to see a lot more of that in the future, the digital books and moving away from the physical textbooks.
For Questions and Guide
With that, if you have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/start. Fill out the application. I am happy to, and we’ll jump on an action plan call, and we’ll talk about your sales funnel and your traffic, and everything else. So many questions at all, let me know. Go to doneforyou.com, check it out and I’ll talk to you soon.
