Part six of a six part series on selling your books to organizations. See the rest of this series and other articles by Shel Horowitz.
This article concludes our series on partnering with nonprofits to sell more books. Take what you’ve learned in the previous five installments in this series and apply it to for-profit corporations.
You can approach corporations with two very different strategies.
First, approaching them directly to buy in quantity for their own uses. Thus, a friend of mine sold 15,000 copies of a grits cookbook to Quaker, the largest seller of grits in the U.S. The company did a “self-liquidating offer,” which means customers had to send in a few bucks to cover the cost–and printed tens of thousands of grits boxes with labels offering the cookbook.
Quaker benefits because, firstly, when more people know all the ways to use grits, they sell more grits–and secondly, because they establish themselves in the customer’s mind as a pre-eminent company that has its customers’ interests at heart, and wants to make it easier to figure out new and different ways to use those grits sitting in the pantry.
Similarly, you can do deals with pharmaceutical companies, cookware manufacturers, travel and tourism boards, banks, service providers…the list is infinite. I have personally done deals with Southwest Airlines for 1000 copies of Principled Profit, with two foreign publishers for the same book, and with several meeting planners who bought copies of various marketing books to distribute to attenders.
Even better is the second approach, popularized by Brendan Burchard: look for nonprofits who could really use your book. Ask these potential partners what corporations like to partner with them. Then go to the corporations and suggest they sponsor and subsidize a quantity of your book for their preferred nonprofit partner. This way, everyone wins.
For more on forming win-win partnerships with other entities, I strongly recommend my award-wining sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First (www.principledprofit.com); for more on creative book marketing, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers (www.grassrootsmarketingforauthors.com). Use this link to get the paperback editions at the discounted price of $41.95, combined (plus shipping).
Book publishing/marketing consultant and copywriter Shel Horowitz is the author of six marketing books. His three most recently published books, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, and Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World have all won awards. Visit http://www.frugalmarketing.com to order his books or learn about his services.
