Making the Most of your Business Book and Profiting from its Content

Most book marketing companies and self-publishing services prioritize book sales as the key to a book’s success. They’ll push all kinds of book promotion schemes like reviews, email lists, and paid book ads, all with the intent to push sales.

While this is the cornerstone of fiction, memoir, and autobiography success, business books are in a different league and have the potential to outearn every book focusing on sales.

So, how do you reach the point of earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue from your business book without focusing on sales?

Where does the Business Book Juice Come From?

When you author a business book, you put yourself in a position of authority in your field, you pave the way to becoming a thought leader, and you instill trust in your brand. These are the first steps toward reaching your earning potential with a business book.

Of course, trust doesn’t equal revenue, nor does being a thought leader.

As a business leader, coach, or entrepreneur, you are in the business of selling a product or service, and that’s what drives your company’s revenue. In fact, most nonfiction books only earn about $1,000 in sales revenue. You’re not in the business of selling books, so you don’t want to pivot and try to sell books. You want the book to help you sell your product or service.

Publishing companies and book marketers are in the business of selling books. While you do have the chance to sell copies when utilizing book marketing and publishing services, they’ll only take you so far, and they’ll never help you realize the full potential of where your book can take you and your business.

If you want to leverage your business book for the highest earning potential, you’ll have to understand where the “juice” comes from, because like any business venture, a book has its strengths, target audience, and niches where it will perform best.

The most effective ways to earn revenue with your business book are:

• Speaking Engagements
• Courses and Workshops
• Consulting Opportunities
• Business Growth

For some business leaders, these sound obvious, but that doesn’t mean they are easy areas to break into or explore. That’s where having a business book comes in handy. Remember the discussion about authority and trust? Well, authority and trust are what will give you access to these revenue streams, and authority and trust are built through your published book.

Earning Revenue with Your Business Book

We can’t talk about making money without looking at the numbers, but the truth is, a business book can be as profitable as you want it to be. Between all the ways you can generate income with a business book, you can pick and choose which ones best align with your goals, or you can give them all a try and see what feels like the right fit. You should also consider whether you want your book to generate passive income or if you’re happy with an active role.

As with many business ventures, what you put into your business book will decide how much you get out of it.

Speaking Engagements

One of the most widely utilized benefits of business books is the speaking engagements. Whether it’s at a business conference, as a podcast guest, or a spot on a radio or television show, these speaking engagements provide a lot of potential revenue.

Published authors are a hot ticket at a lot of speaking events. First-time authors and new speakers can earn as much as $5,000 per speaking engagement. One speaking engagement a month could bring in $30,000 additional revenue in six months. As an experienced speaker and author, you can earn $50,000 for a speaking engagement, skyrocketing the earning potential into hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual revenue.

If you’re at a business conference and you’re one of the speakers, you’re in a great position to sell a few books, but also engage with potential clients/customers. On top of your earnings from the speaking event, you could bring in additional revenue through expanding your client base.

When it comes to podcasts and radio, and television show guest spots, you probably won’t earn an upfront fee. These speaking engagements are designed to leverage someone else’s platform. With that in mind, you’ll want to choose the shows that align with what you’re offering.

If you are in real estate and write a book about your business, you wouldn’t want to be a guest on a debut author podcast, because the listeners will most likely be avid readers and not listen to that podcast for real estate. You’d want to guest on a real estate podcast where you can talk about your book, or on a large enough show—like Oprah—where the audience size is so large, your notoriety increases by association, and there are enough people in the audience who fall into that niche simply because of the massive reach.

Guest spots on shows and podcasts are a more passive way to leverage your business book as they may not require travel, and you don’t need to write an engaging presentation, and the revenue comes from growing your platform and reaching new audiences.

Courses and Workshops

Your business book contains chapters and content with repeatable results and a successful process. It’s an untapped goldmine for developing courses and workshops based on your book content. As a bonus, you can suggest your book as companion material for your courses and workshops, encouraging some book sales.

A course, depending on length and depth of content, can cost anywhere from $150 per attendee to $10,000 per attendee. You can host them in person or virtually. In-person provides a more intimate setting, where virtual courses allow for larger attendance and reaching people from all around the world. You can break your book into smaller courses and then have a fully inclusive flagship course, and have a sliding pay scale for the different levels.

Virtual courses are a fantastic way to generate passive income as well, as you can pre-record all the material, and people can attend and watch in their own time. You can host pre-recorded courses on a website, and they’ll continue to pull in revenue without your active participation.

If your flagship course costs $10,000 per attendee and you have 50 attendees per year, you’re looking at an additional $500,000 annual revenue, curated straight from the content of your book.

Workshops have many similarities to courses, though they tend to be shorter, in-person, and more intensive. Workshop seats cost between $50 and $500 per person. If you hosted a quarterly workshop weekend for 20 people at $500 per ticket, you’re adding $40,000 annual revenue to your business with a four-weekend time obligation.

Consulting and Coaching

Consulting is a highly lucrative business with consulting packages running from $50,000 or more a year. Since your business book establishes you as an authority in your field and helps outline your process, it opens the door for consulting. This may come naturally when people connect with your book or see/hear you speak somewhere, or it could be an intentional venture.

Onboarding two consulting clients a year has the potential to bring in an additional $100,000 annually.

When you devise a consulting package, it’s a good way to get your book in people’s hands by offering the book along with other material in your package. Furthermore, it’s an opportunity for passive income on your part, as you can establish an internal team that handles the consulting side of your business without overextending other operations or putting more work on your plate.

Coaching is another means of bringing your book’s content to life in a profitable way. Coaching services provide a lot of versatility, like courses. You can create coaching tiers that have a monthly fee, anywhere from $10 to $150 per month, and with each tier, you can offer more comprehensive and engaging material.

A top-tier coaching package with 100 monthly subscribers could bring in $180,000 a year, again leveraged off the content in your book and the authority you establish as a published author.

Business Growth

It’s a lot harder to put numbers on business growth opportunities because those numbers vary depending on what business you’re in, your product or service, and what growth opportunities you’ve already taken advantage of.

However, there is no limit to business growth, and you can take it as far as you want.

A business book can attract a lot more partnership opportunities, expansion locally, nationally, and internationally, and avenues for growing your revenue through increased exposure.

Authoring a business book brings you many levels and layers of earning potential that ride off the content and notoriety a book brings you as the face of your company, and the revenue streams you can develop for your company. Each opportunity is easy to scale depending on where your business is at and where you want it to be, and the more you put in, the more you’ll get in return.

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