How to Make Money with Your Book by Adding Your Own Products

One of the ways I discuss in my new e-book, Author’s Guide to Making Money with Your 99-Cent Kindle Book is how to sell your other books and products to your readers – through your book. This article is a short adaptation from the “Your Products” chapter in that book, so enjoy!

Being an author (or aspiring author), you already have at least one product—your book. And being a smart, savvy author, you understand that the more books you write, the more you’ll naturally sell. So it’s almost a no-brainer that one of the things you should feature in the back of your book is your other books. If a reader likes what you said in your book and you advertise another book at the end of it, chances are they’ll purchase your other book as well. Get enough books under your belt and you’ll start to gather a following of people who want to “collect them all.”

Besides books, you may have other products. Maybe you created a training course. Maybe you have a tracking system your audience would love. Products can be digital, printable, and even hardcopy. Here are some more ideas for products you can create:

• Templates—For a non-fiction e-book, if you write about anything such as writing sales copy or creating flow charts, if you can turn those ideas into templates other people can then easily adapt for their own projects, you have the makings of a great product.
• POD Products—There are a few awesome print-on-demand product sites that let you create your own branded line of products. Zazzle.com and CafePress.com are two of them. You can create one image and have it printed, fulfilled, and shipped directly to customers from these companies. If you’re writing fiction, you can brand your entire POD product store around your book and characters.
• Training Course—A training course can be as simple as a long PDF with step-by-step screenshots to do something or a series of videos of you showing an actual process via screencast. An example of a video course would be my Self-Publish On Kindle course available in The Book Ninja Academy.
• Systems—Do you use a system of spreadsheets to track something specific? Turn it into a product! Who says you have to keep giving everything you create to solve one of your own problems away? Package it, sell it, and advertise it in the back of your book.

I’m a big fan of not re-inventing the wheel. If you’re just starting out as an author, you’ll need to take some time to build up your product selection. If you’ve been at it a while, or even if you’re changing focus and have a lot of older content, many times that material can be revised and repurposed into a fast product. Don’t make it harder on yourself than you have to. Take inventory of everything you have available to you, and brainstorm out on a white board or sheet of paper how you can turn what you already have into additional income streams and advertise them in your book.

Check out my new Kindle book, Author’s Guide to Making Money with Your 99-Cent Kindle Book, for more products you can easily create and ways you can make money inside your book!

Have you experimented with any of these products? What other unique product ideas have you come up with? Share them below!