What’s a Product Worth? – Really?
Following my speech at the Expats Club here in Chiang Mai yesterday, the audience asked a lot of good questions. But one – the very last – struck me as especially important.
“You told us,” one audience member said, “that you’re selling an audio product, and that you sell it for $44. That seems high to me. How do you justify that? How do determine what price is fair and proper?”
So I told the audience a little story. Several years ago, a friend of mine, John Harricharan, wrote a little ebook – maybe 18,000 words – and put up a sales page on the Internet. John told me that he was thinking, ‘Okay, this is a pretty short book, so I can’t charge much for it.’
He priced it at something like $17, and almost nobody bought. John was about to take the whole thing down when one of his marketing friends asked if he had tried selling it for a higher price. Well, no he hadn’t, so just for the heck of it, he raised the price to $24.
And this little, short, 18,000 word ebook sold better.
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‘Hmmm… that’s peculiar,’ John thought. So he tried it at $27. And his sales conversions rose further. So now he became curious. He raised the price again. And again. And each time, the sales conversions improved.
Sales didn’t level off till he reached $97, so he left it there for the next several years. And for several years he’s been selling that little ebook – The Power Pause - for what looks like a ridiculous price. Why? Because customers say that’s how much it’s worth.
The point of this little story is that the value of your ebook – the value of any product is not what you think it should be. It’s what customers are willing to pay for your product. It has nothing to do with “fairness” or what other ebooks are selling for.
Sales Environments – Good or Bad
Now, the worst place in the world to sell your book may be bookstores. Those folks know very little about building the value of the books they’re trying to sell. They only know how to line your book up on the shelf along with all the others. The customer can take your book or leave it. That’s cold. True, they may do aisle displays, or turn some books face forward, and they may even have an author in for a book signing, but as value-building goes, that’s all pretty insipid.
The best way to sell your book is letting the world know about it, letting everyone know just how special your book is, telling them exactly what your book can do for them. A sales website is good for that. You’re only representing one book, so you can do a good job of telling the visitor about the benefits.
But there are other ways to do this job. Take the book Chicken Soup for the Soul as an excellent example.
Rocket-Boosting Your Book Sales
Have you ever read all the activities that Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen do every day, every week, every month? They were determined from the beginning that they would never leave the fate of their book in the hands of the publisher, nor in the hands of – God forbid – bookshops.
So Canfield and Hansen went out and interviewed a bunch of successful authors – writers who had books on the bestseller lists. They asked a simple question: “What would you do today to sell a million books as fast as possible?” They wrote down all the answers they received, and ended up with 1,094 different activities for promoting a book. It’s exhausting just to read it all. They were overwhelmed by that list, so they broke it down and decided to do things in rotation. Just five or six or seven things a day.
But every day.
They ended up taking a nice little book that dozens of publishers had refused to touch, a general-interest little book that had no niche market, and through massive, massive action and incredible persistence, built it into a worldwide bestseller. They turned it into a major brand. Once it was known by just about every person on earth, THEN they started niching it down into a wide variety of market segments.
They now have so many niches that it seems like a caricature of a book campaign:
- Chicken Soup for the Teenager’s Soul
- Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover’s Soul
- Chicken Soup for the Grieving Soul
- Chicken Soup for the Kid’s Soul
- Chicken Soup for the New Mom’s Soul
- Chicken Soup for the Girl’s Soul
- Chicken Soup for the Prisoner’s Soul
- Chicken Soup for the Girlfriend’s Soul
- Chicken Soup for the Grandma’s Soul
- And on and on…
But first came the simple, generic “Chicken Soup for the Soul.”
So how long can it be before we see Chicken Soup for the Alien Invader’s Soul in the stores.
Frankly, by conventional standards, their book should never have succeeded. No reputable publisher wanted anything to do with it. And yet, succeed it did. It succeeded because Canfield and Hanson made it their personal mission to build towering perception of value. And instead of raising their price to $97, they got (seemingly) half the people on earth to buy one of their books at regular bookstore prices.
They did it through enormous dedication. Through persistence so dogged that they make the word “fanatic” seem lukewarm.
They believed in their book. If you’ve written a book, do you believe in it that much?
Or if you’re a coach, how convinced are you that people will benefit from hiring you? If you’re an accountant, or a school teacher, or a truck driver, how much do you believe in the services you’re providing?
Or is it just “something you do”?
Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.
– Robert Collier, author of The Secret of the Ages.
When Hansen and Canfield started, they sought all kinds of advice on making their book a success, so they went to an expert, Ron Scolastico. He told them that “if you go to a large tree every day and take five swings at it with a very sharp axe, eventually, no matter how huge that tree is, it’ll fall.”
Simple, huh?
So these two men set themselves the task of doing at least five promotional activities every day. Interviews, radio talk shows, trade shows, TV appearances, book signings, press releases, book fairs, seminars… you name it, they went out and did it. Day after day, year after year. They didn’t get tired of what they were doing, either. Nor bored.
Because they continued to believe in their book(s).
And think about this – what if you were that consistent? What if you sat down and wrote just five 300-word pages every day. In one year you’d have 1,825 pages written.
In ten years that’d be over 18,000 pages… almost 5.5 million words… nearly 110 books of 50,000 words each.
Ten years of simply writing 5 pages a day.
Remember the old rule… writers write. That’s the only thing that opens the door to being a writer. Good writer, bad writer, it doesn’t matter. They write.
Isaac Asimov was famous for turning out something like 500 books in his lifetime. That’s what consistent effort accomplishes.
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Back in the sixties, I read nothing but science fiction. I was quite obsessive about it. And in 1968 or so, a new writer showed up. I read his first book, and it was truly bad. I didn’t read any of his next several books, but I remembered his name (because the quality had been memorably low).
Then in the seventies, the market shifted and, thanks partly to Stephen King, horror fiction became a huge fad.
This new writer obviously noticed the market changing, and he changed with it. He began turning out horror books. I read one of those, and it wasn’t a lot better, but he had improved a bit. Nevertheless, he kept on writing. And writing. Under his own name, plus several pen names, he churned out up to eight books a year.
And he continued improving.
These days he’s quite a good writer with a nicely lyrical style that occasionally sings beautifully. Over the years, Dean Koontz has had ten hardcovers and 13 paperbacks on the New York Times bestseller list.
When he began, he wasn’t a very good writer, but he WAS a good businessman. He knew the power of keeping doggedly at it. AND he appreciated the wisdom of finding a market – a group of buyers who want to spend money on something specific – and putting a product in front of them that they want to buy.
I hope you paid attention to that last paragraph because there’s tremendous value in it.
So whether you write, or you coach, or you do anything else, here are four questions for you:
- Do you really believe what you’re doing gives value?
- Are you persistent? Or do you get restless and want to wander off and do something else?
- Do you have a long-range vision of how you want to impact your world in 10, 20, 40 years?
- Do you know specifically, exactly who your target market is?
Answer these four questions (with anything other than “no”) and you’ll probably have a very good business.
Cheers from warm and smiling Thailand,
Charles
By the way, one of the very best resources for authors is Dan Poynter’s Para Publishing website. Here’s a page where you can access an entire library online about writing, publishing, selling, promoting and fulfilling.
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Oh, and John Harricharan’s Power Pause ebook? He once tried to retire it. Just took it off the market. But people kept writing to him – they wanted it back – so he put it online again.
And now John has converted it into a video (actually a series of 12 videos). You can view the entire Power Pause online for free.
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And if you’re wondering what it takes to be a successful writer, here’s an article by Dee Power (very well known and respected on Warrior Forum) which tells you the nine characteristics you must have (or cultivate) to be a successful writer.
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