Episode 037 – Want to be a Bestselling Author?

High Ticket Sales Secrets | Coaching & Consulting Business / Personal Branding / Sales Training / Marketing / Get Clients

Welcome to another episode of High Ticket Sales Secrets. This is Dan Lok.

Today’s Question

I got a very interesting question the other day and I want to take some time to answer it here. Here’s the question: “Dan, how do you become a bestselling author?”

Now, there are many ways to accomplish this. It also depends on how you want to define a bestselling author. So do you want to sell in terms of New York Times Bestselling Author? That’s a very different thing. Let’s say in Canada, in order to hit the bestselling author status, you only need to sell five thousand books. It’s not like you need to sell millions of books like Chicken Soup for the Soul, like Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. I’m not talking about that.

Why Become a Bestselling Author?

So what is the purpose of becoming a bestselling author? I think a lot of people, a lot of even authors and coaches and consultants, they misunderstood that, “Well, I’m going to sell and make $1 per book” – let’s say that’s your royalty, “…and I’m going to sell a million books and then I’m going to make $1M.”

That’s not quite how it works. It’s very, very, very, very difficult to sell a million books. In my career, now I’ve done 13 books and a whole bunch of them have become bestselling books, I can tell you that my royalty is a couple of hundred bucks a month. That’s not a lot of money. And over my career, maybe tens of thousands of books but not hundreds of thousands of books, and definitely not millions of copies of my books yet. I made millions of dollars from my books, okay?

You Don’t Make Money Selling Books

So you don’t make money selling books. I’ll say it again. You don’t make money selling books. You make money by using the books. You don’t sell your books. Your books sell you. You want to use your books to promote your core services. You want to use your books for positioning. You want to use your books as a business card, that’s what you want to do – to pre-sell, pre-qualify, pre-motivate, pre-educate your potential clients. That’s how you use the book. So forget about trying to sell millions and millions of copies, that’s not where the money is anyway. And you don’t need to sell millions of copies to make millions of dollars. You can sell few copies.

One of my students, Jana, she’s working on a very particular book which I can’t reveal on this podcast. It’s a very particular book for a very particular audience. I can share the language. It’s going to be in Chinese. It’s very particular affluent Chinese. It’s not a very thick book and she’s not aiming to sell hundreds of copies at all. It’s not important for her. She only wants to maybe produce a hundred copies to give her to her dream prospects and clients. That’s all she needs and that’s a very smart way of doing it instead of giving them a business card.

Becoming a Bestselling Author is Not Difficult

So think about how you want to use the book or the purpose of the book. And to become a bestselling author is not that difficult. If you list your books on Amazon and you can run an Amazon bestselling campaign. If you know what you’re doing, you can promote it in a certain time and you drive all those sales within a period of time and you push it to a top bestseller, let’s say a number one bestseller on Amazon even for a day, you are officially an Amazon number bestselling author even for an hour. You can use that in your marketing for the rest of your life.

And that’s very, very powerful. That’s what you want to do. You’re not trying to actually become a highly popular author so you make money selling books. That’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to increase our perceived value in the marketplace and to further elevate our status in the marketplace by “using a book” that we publish that you can use as a business card to promote your stuff. That’s what we’re trying to do. So knowing yes, if having that bestselling author status even in Amazon, if that helps you, go for it. Do the Amazon campaign and hit number one, that’s okay.

If you go to my Facebook group, the High Ticket Coaching and Consulting Community, you will see I just hit it recently. My student Harold just recently hit it as well in the e-commerce category – in multiple categories actually. It’s not that hard. You don’t know it but knowing you don’t need it in order to make a lot of money with books. You could get it but you don’t need it. And you could get it, fine.

The Bottom line: Use the Book to Build a Business

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met authors who have very successful books that they have actually gotten a lot of media. I know one particular expert, she’s been actually on Oprah twice before. She’s got no money because she doesn’t have all the back-end and everything else in place before she got all those exposure. So you got no exposure, you sell some books, you make a little bit of money. So what? So what? You have not built a business. Use the book to build the business. That’s what I’m talking about and that’s what I teach. So just keep that in mind.

Until next time. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

Remember: change your offer, change your life.