December 25, 2020 4 min read
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Here’s a story I hear all too often. You’re a professional, you sell your time, and you are looking for leverage. You have a lifetime of success, but nobody knows who you are. You don’t have what’s known as a “platform.” You’re looking for ways to produce multiple streams of income beyond selling your time or knowledge. You want to reach out, impact lives, and help a lot more people with their transformations. Sound familiar?
What if in less than 90 days you could create something that would give you 18 streams of income, increase your credibility and reach, and help you build an audience and monetize it?
Kary Oberbrunner is an author, coach, and speaker who helps individuals and organizations clarify who they are, why they’re here, and where they’re going, so they can become “souls on fire,” experience unhackability, and share their messages with the world.
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Oberbrunner knows firsthand the power of owning your narrative. As a child and young adult, he had a paralyzing speech disorder and an addiction to self-injury. Yet, over the last 20 years, he’s ignited over 1 million people with the story of how he overcame those debilitating conditions.
He does this with a unique book publishing model.
Why books?
Most people view a book like a business card.
Think about all of the events you’ve been to where someone hands you their business card without you even requesting it. It’s like an unwanted solicitation. Because you don’t know this person, you have little context on who they are or how they can help you, and as a result, most of those business cards end up in the trash.
Oberbrunner takes a different approach, believing that business cards don’t change lives, but books do. If a book is positioned as an actual business, it has an amazing opportunity to increase people’s influence, impact, and income.
Today, a book is much more than just a paperback or a hardback novel. Most people are away from physical books during the day, but almost nobody is more than five feet away from their smartphone, which is also an audiobook player.
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Audiobooks are the fastest-growing publishing platform on the planet right now because they are so accessible. It’s tough to carry a printed book around, but it’s very easy to keep a smartphone with you. Whether you’re exercising, driving, commuting or just hanging around the house, you have the opportunity to get an audio education. The average person commutes enough to earn a Ph.D.’s worth of expertise in just three years of listening to audiobook content.
Audible enables authors to earn bounties rather than a single audiobook sale. If one of your readers joins a particular audiobook program from your affiliate link, for example, you could make as much as $70 per sale.
Ebooks are another author-friendly medium because the author retains 70% of the profit, which is unheard of in the print world. Years ago, a traditionally published author would have been lucky to retain 14% or 15%. As you expand into traditional paperback and hardcover versions of your book, the profits and income streams keep growing.
One of the bigger income streams for book authors is a self-study course. Let’s say you have a book on relationships. Oberbrunner encourages everyone to have what he calls “back ads”—calls to action at the back of a book that promotes further engagement with the author—that says something like, “Your next best step is to take my digital/self-study course by going here,” with a link and information that leads them to your course.
People may only pay $15 or $20 for your book, but they’ll pay 10 times that for a course because, in their minds, they’re getting much more value. There’s usually video involved, a guidebook, exclusive access, a login, and a password. Courses are inexpensive to create compared to the massive value they create for the consumer. The customer can stop, pause, and restart at will. Many courses have communities tied to them so they’re meeting and getting involved with other members with similar interests.