SAMPLE OPENING PAGES
of
Gordon Burgett's
"How to Profitably Self-Publish and Sell
Your Own Book(s) to
Your Educational Colleagues"
Almost everybody in the education field has
book material (and probably a book) in them, and the higher they rise and the longer they survive and share, the more they
know things that others would benefit from reading.
Oddly, though, others won’t pay much or often to
read about the funny things that happened in the classroom (or office) or how
the author as a person learned while teaching. It’s the nuts-and-bolts,
how-to stuff that others who are serious about
education most need and will buy.
Those are the “niche” core
elements that make profitable self-publishing doable for administrators. It’s a
book about precisely what makes fifth-grade teachers excel, in minute detail; it’s how
to set up a transportation system, with contracts and schedules; it’s how
to create the ideal communication environment in a school system so clarity
reigns and the local “school” newspaper reporter is more than 40% right more than
40% of the time. Not “My 40 Years
Teaching at Tucker High.”
Nor do most new authors think of
self-publishing. It takes too much work, sounds too vain, implies that “real”
publishers rejected them, and conjures up images of ink-splattered, misspelled,
stapled rags cranked out on aging mimeograph machines!
They look to
If it were anything like that everybody
would be a book-selling guest on Oprah and nobody would be teaching
multiplication or coaching soccer! The big houses buy about one-tenth of 1% of
the submissions, take 18 months to put finished drafts to print, pay authors at
most 10% of the book’s
listed price (with payday twice a year), and almost never want something as
narrow as a book for teachers only.
Don’t despair.
That’s good news. They aren’t interested in you. Most
of America’s
published writers pay little attention to the standard publishing route because
it’s
so selective, slow, and cheap. Worse yet, it does a fitful job of marketing!
Instead, knowing writers quietly define a niche, write tightly to it, keep 100%
of the income, test before they write a word, and proceed only if the test
shows that they will earn $50,000 or $100,000 when their book is in print. Then
they carefully write that book and publish it themselves, mostly following two
books from the inception of the idea to the sale of the very last copy.
I wrote one of those books, Publishing to Niche Markets,
which has an educational example in it. Dan Poynter,
the guru of self-publishing, wrote the other: The Self-Publishing Manual.
In 25 pages I can’t tell you everything that
those combined 636 pages explain, but I can show you how the single most
important element, the market test, is done, using an actual case study of a
book for school superintendents and principals that is less than a year old.
Then I can provide a list of the step-by-step tools needed to finish the task.
You needn’t be a superintendent nor
a principal to write for the education market, although being either speaks
highly for your having lived on the front line elbow-deep in how-to knowledge—the
kind of stuff that, as I said, sells best by niche publishing. To succeed in
niche publishing is to have accurate, needed information that is highly valued
by all educators (or by a specific number of them), a way to send a testing
(and later selling) flyer to them, a computer to put your words into digitally-sendable format to a printer, a marketing plan,
persistence, patience, and a bit of starting capital. How much capital? None,
if the test doesn’t
work out!
Let’s take
a close look at the case study. It’s the only mountain you’ll have to scale. Once you
are victorious there, the rest is simply a matter of making the tested promises
come true on paper, then getting the end product into the eager buyers’ hands. (Easily said, huh? I know that writing a book
isn’t
that easy. I wrote 27 of them. But it’s five times easier when you have a tested
blueprint, you’re
writing to peers, and you know your stuff.) The best thing
about testing? If the test says no, you never have to write another word—and
you save a ton of money. You also have a lot of new free time to become a
skier, preacher, yodeler, or a mystic instead.
A DETAILED CASE STUDY
The title of the book in question is What
Every Superintendent and Principal Needs to Know: School Leadership for the
Real World, by Jim Rosborg, Max McGee, and
Jim Burgett. (I’m the book’s publisher and also the
oldest brother of one of the book’s authors, lest the odd-name similarity
confuse you.)
That the book is directed to K-12 school
administrators needn’t
worry you either if you fear that the process to be described works only in
education. It works just as well for books for whalers, life coaches, or banjo
players. Almost all niche-marketed books follow a path very similar to that
described here, with only the content of the selling tools (and the book
itself) differing substantially.
About a decade back, I wrote the only book
about this topic, Publishing to Niche Markets. More important, I’ve
owned and directed a publishing company since 1982. Our most profitable books
(and related products), by far, have been for dentists and doctors, all tightly
niched. We followed an almost identical procedure to
that described below.
These are the first 2 1/2 pages of the report.
For more, see a summary of
its contents plus more information about other reports.
Want to look at the Introduction
or Chapter
1 of
What Every Superintendent and Principal Needs to Know?
Or read
sample pages of other reports...
Then if you want to order the book or a
report...
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