How to Publish Public Domain Books and Profit Nearly Forever – Part 3
By now, as you’ve followed my articles, blogs, books, and podcasts, you’ve seen a remarkable evolution in public domain publishing.
All of this was built on the point that you have to add value to public domain works to profit from them. Otherwise, distributors don’t really want to have just another version of that book up there as competition.
We’ve gone over how and where to publish them.
Some strategies have been touched on, but not really scoped out for you.
1. Extract chapters or sections from several books as an anthology. This is more common than you suspect, and has been a classic approach. Drawbacks is that this can quickly become a book which isn’t profitable for POD publishing. eBook publishing on Amazon will require you to prove every single author’s death and verify each book is in the public domain.
2. Extract and publish chapters on their own. This fits into the popularity of short reads on Amazon and also as POD paperbacks. Hardbacks, not so much.
3. Create courses which expand on each chapter as lessons, with additional study guides and other content upgrades.
4. Series of PD books can then be sold as either a series of courses or one mega-course with that above strategy. The courses recommend buying the book, and even perhaps special spiral-bound study guides available only from Lulu, which then increase book sales and income.
5. Evergreen course launches with judicious use of FB ads to encourage discovery can improve these course sales and also their book sales.
6. Your PD books are then up graded with Link Magnets that promote the course, a virtuous marketing cycle.
How to Create a Course with an Evergreen Launch:
a) Select a series of PD books and prep them for publishing. If you’re podcasting them also as a book-cast (each audio chapter as one episode) then get these done and pre-scheduled. Then link the episodes into their book chapter headings with a re-direct link for tracking.
b) Create a course which covers each book in that series, or the whole series (or both.)
c) Have the course go live as the books do, each book recommending the course, and the course recommending the books.
d) The course doesn’t have to be ready from the get-go, and will be better to invite people to it as a pilot, in order to get their suggested improvements. Build this course out as you go, and add additional ebooks derived from this course material.
e) All the material of the course is posted on their respective sites (YouTube, Slideshare, etc.) to become lead magnets for the course.
f) Your course is a direct list builder so that you can use regular book launches on every book.
About that point is where you put a lag into your book production so that your review group can keep up with your output and you’ll be able to profit from pre-sales and low first-week prices, etc.
While this has everything to do with some of the long podcasts I’ve done recently, it is pretty much a capstone to everything I’ve been researching and writing about self-publishing for the past four years.
With this strategy, you can create an infinitely deep backbench and improve all your sales by these launch and advertising tactics.
About this time, you’ll have to hire a full time marketing person to keep all those plates spinning…
What’s next?
A course is in your future. I’ve scraped my old site and reorganized those posts by categories. All that content will now be able to be reorganized into several courses. Every course will be podcast, and put into a repeating queue, since there will be at least 50 and perhaps 100 lessons total.
From this level, although I keep up with changes daily and post through my Flipboard feed, I don’t see many huge improvements that need to be explored. You can subscribe to these courses and get lifetime access for anything I come up with, though…
Well, luck to us all.
Do stay tuned for the first course lessons coming out.
Until later, then.
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