How authors can use webinars to sell more books
If you are an expert who has written a book on your area of expertise – or you are in the process of writing one – surely you already know that it is not enough to publish the book and wait for the money to come rolling in. You need to do more, much more, to promote it (if you want more sales) and yourself (if you’re using the book to position yourself as an expert).
Webinars can be a powerful tool to help you as an author. Here are three ways you can use them to help you as an author.
1. Market Research
Your readers are looking for you to help them with one or more of these four things:
- solve your problems
- answers your questions
- Know your challenges
- meet your goals
The more your book does these things, the more successful it will be. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what readers want.
One way to find out is with a free Q&A webinar. You invite everyone in your network (and ask them to forward it to their networks too), show up for the day, and simply spend an hour answering questions people ask. do not promote anything; just answer your questions. You provide an extremely valuable service, and in return you discover exactly what your market wants to know.
I’ve seen people do this with no more structure than what I just described. But you can add some extra features, and at the same time make it easier for yourself, in several ways:
- Invite attendees to email their questions to you ahead of time, so you have time to prepare your answers.
- If you already have some structure for your book (for example, you know it has four main sections), organize the questions into this same broad structure.
- Record the webinar and have the recording transcribed; this could even provide new material for your book.
2. Customer Webinar Bonuses
To encourage people to buy your book as soon as it’s released, offer an additional webinar for customers who buy it on a certain date.
In this webinar, you simply give a presentation that outlines the main concepts of the book, answers readers’ questions, and perhaps even provides additional material. Don’t worry about repeating some of the book’s content, because attendees will appreciate learning the information in different ways.
Of course, a webinar is just one of many ways you can encourage “early” sales, but it has a number of benefits:
- A webinar has a date attached to it, so it creates a natural deadline.
- You can serve all of these readers at the same time, so you don’t have to limit your offer to a certain number of readers (unlike, say, offering them a free 15-minute consultation).
- The recording can become a product in its own right, which you can sell individually or as part of a bundle with the book.
3. Webinar Series
One downside of a book is that it only gives you one point of contact with your customer. Most people will not read a book more than once, and very few of them will read the whole thing even once!
You can address this by offering a series of ongoing webinars on the book’s content, either just for customers (as a bonus) or for anyone (as a promotional opportunity).
The purpose of your webinar series isn’t just to promote book sales, though you’ll do that anyway. It’s also continuing to position yourself as an expert and stay top of mind with your target market, so that when they’re ready to buy what you have to sell, you’re their first choice.
Again, webinars are not the only option available to you. But if you’re willing to commit, they can be a very powerful option, because your attendees can interact with you live.
