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Thinking Beyond Just Selling Books

Establish and Utilize Your Platform of Authority

By Peyton Quinn

Perhaps your answer is “because I want to get my ideas out there,” or “to get my story out there,” or “because I just like to write,” or maybe it is “because I want to make a living this way,” or perhaps you even dream of “getting rich with my book.”

Okay, let’s look at that last idea, getting rich off your book. At times people ask me how much money I made on my first book, A Bouncer’s Guide published by Paladin Press in 1990.

My answer is that I have made less than $30,000 in royalties in those 15 years! You can’t even live on that, much less “get rich,” now can you?

But then I add, “However, in those same 15 years the book has allowed me to make about $276,000.” That may sound like a lot of money at first, but $276K plus $30K adds up to just $306K and divide that by 15 years and you get just about $20K a year. I certainly can’t live on that either! So OK, what is my primary point here?

First, you have to stop thinking in terms of just “selling books” as your means to making your authoring pay. When I wrote A Bouncer’s Guide 15 years ago I did not expect to make any real royalty money from the sale of my book. After all, I got just 8% of the retail book price until I sold ten thousand books and then I got 12%.

For a book that sells for $20 at full retail that means I make about $2.40 per book. Hence, it should be obvious that no real money was going to come from book royalties.

I now had more than a decade of experience in observing many individuals’ responses to adrenal stress and “stand up aggression” by another human being. As it turned out, I left that bouncer “career” after about eight months to create a small, start-up software development company that specialized in providing programming services for HP’s ATE equipment. The company grew rapidly and I negotiated the first contracts ever awarded for outside programming services from IBM and one other mega-corporation for ATE work.

However, it was not long before I tired of managing the company I had created. After just two years I realized the company had become a “monster” that had all but pre-empted my life. I simply did not want to spend my life running this company and watching out for 26 employees anymore. Starting the company was a great adventure, but running it day-to-day was drudgery and an unending exercise in crisis management.

It was during this time I began writing A Bouncer’s Guide, and thus planning a “way out” and a new career doing something I actually enjoyed. I sold my share of the software company and embarked on my plan to “make authoring pay.” Though I did not expect these efforts to pay even a fraction of what I made with my software company. Indeed, I used a good amount of the money from selling my share of the company to start my RMCAT self-defense training center.

What the book did do for me was to provide a platform of authority with which I could sell my instructional services in the self-defense training industry. This was my plan from the very start. You better have a viable marketing plan as well, and hopefully one that does not rely solely on the sale of books to make authoring pay for you.

For example, your book might allow you to market your services as a “paid speaker” on your given topic. Right or wrong, once you have a book published, you are then labeled as an “expert” in the field.

My next book, Real Fighting: Adrenal Stress Conditioning Through Scenario Based Training strongly reinforced my “platform of authority” by detailing the methodology I had developed and used for a new and more effective self-defense instructional method than the traditional Asian-based martial arts systems. Since I had achieved black belts in three Asian martial arts I already had some “platform of authority” in that small world.

Over the years of teaching my program drew attendants from all over the world to my training complex in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Some of these people were already internationally known martial arts “gurus” themselves too.

Hence, not only had I succeeded in establishing a “platform of authority” in this special field which allowed me to attract well paying attendants to my training programs, but there then came another benefit as well.

My RMCAT, self-defense training program gave me ten years to observe how people from all walks of life respond to human aggression and the adrenal stress dump. These people included very experienced martial artists, corporate raiders, real estate tycoons, combat veterans suffering from PTSD, cops, housewives and even some people so meek that they could, at first, not make direct eye contact with anyone.

I recognized that this observational experience was all but unprecedented across such a diverse a group of people. Hence, I saw the opportunity to move beyond my platform of authority in self-defense training and move into the larger field of personal self-improvement.

The way people handled stress and human aggression was a very key factor in their success in any field because it so strongly and authentically reflected the true strength of their deepest personal self-image.

Indeed, I saw that my previous success in the software company I had started years before was largely because I had learned how to deal with people correctly and effectively. This was especially true with hostile people or people with a less-than-strong personal self-image.

In that software company I had used some of the same psycho-dynamics I used as a bouncer – I had to motivate people to behave in their own best interest -- and also needed to achieve my own goals. Often, this was accomplished with no violence at all. These elements of insight into the predatory mind also informed my RMCAT self-defense training method.

Consequently, I now saw that I needed to develop a new platform of authority in the self-improvement field. This was begun with my third book, Freedom From Fear: Taking Back Control of your life and Dissolving Depression.

I decided I would self-publish this book because the POD industry had matured and I already had a following of contacts to sell directly to. Marketing was thus somewhat simplified for me, that is at least for the first few thousand copies sold.

The book sells for $18.95 and costs me about $4.67 to produce. Even after shipping costs I make about $12.58 per book sold. That means instead of making 15% of the retail price, I make about 65% of the sales price of Freedom From Fear. Sales on Amazon.Com and from my own www.rmcat.com website have now exceeded 3,200 copies.

By now you may see that I do not really expect to make a decent living on those returns. My plan is to bring my message to a larger audience than self-defense training alone would allow. After all, self-defense training is just a small subset of self-improvement training. I am now working on cracking into the professional speaking field of the self-improvement industry.

This article began with the question, why do you want to write? Now it is time for you to think about, why do people read?

That is where your plan to get your book and your name out there and establish your platform of authority begins! Your target market is identified by who will want to read your book and why. Is that market big enough? And, more importantly, will it establish your platform of authority, and what kinds of other products and services can you create?

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Peyton Quinn is the author of three books on self-defense and self-awareness, including his latest release:

Freedom From Fear: Taking Back Control of Your life and Dissolving Depression
ISBN: 0975999605

Visit his website www.rmcat.com
Contact him at quinnp1@aol.com