The Hidden Force Behind Publishing Profits

How To Identify, Find And Capture Your Customers 24 Hours A Day, Seven Days A Week.

Why do some authors, self-publishers, and small publishers get incredibly greater results from the same level of effort than you do? Here's how you can make small, cheap, daily marketing changes to your business to ignite large, continuing, compounding and perpetual profit generation.

The answer to using the actions of your own customers to secretly direct you to the biggest sales and profits lies in book fulfillment. Not tracking where customers are coming from keeps most companies small because they simply cannot identify the specific marketing efforts which produce the greatest results for them.

What is fulfillment? Fulfillment is the process of capturing customer transactions by telephone or e-mail, determining how the customer heard about the book, uncovering new customer needs, up selling and cross selling more products to the climate that meet those needs, and then shipping the product.

When executed properly fulfillment guides marketing decision making in the most precise way possible because marketing methods that don't work as well can quickly be discarded. Which means that the dollars previously spent on less productive methods can be shifted into the most productive marketing methods to sell more books.

It's true. Great marketing has the backbone of rock-solid fulfillment that supports it. It's actually a very scientific process supported by statistics, regression analysis and a host of other fancy technical support services that must be performed for better than superior marketing decision-making. To us that means that you have a cash flow enhanced system in place that continually takes you beyond past performance.

Let's say you sell two different book titles. Some of your customers buy Title A, some buy Title B and some purchase both. Which of these customer groups is more valuable to you in the form of future business? Fulfillment analysis is the simple procedure of going back in determining which of these three sets of customers buys more of all your products and therefore contributes the most to your bottom line.

Oftentimes the differences are amazing and often counterintuitive.

One Ringy Dingy... Two Ringy Dingy... Three Ringy Dingy

Are most of your orders coming in by accident, happenstance, or sheer luck? If you don't have professionals available to take orders 24 hours per day and 7 days per week you're probably missing 25% or more of the cash flow you should be pocketing.

In addition, if your receptionist answers the phone, will she have the selling skills necessary to take the order and expand the clients' vision of how to use your books? Most people don't realize it but 20% to 75% of first-time callers inquiring about a book drop the call before the order is taken. Unless you're sitting on the telephones yourself taking the orders, you'll never know about it.

Now, if you're not convinced that you need a fulfillment Service, ask yourself the following questions:

• Will your present system allow you to capture all the names and addresses, credit card information, order information--and keep it all in one place, or is there a high chance information may not be stored in a data base?
• Will you have the time, human-resources, in excess capital required to process credit card orders, as well as handle charge backs, disputes and other time-consuming details?
• Are you prepared to invoice each client, send confirming invoices by e-mail if necessary and handle a 30% increase in accounting workload?
• Are you ready to handle the packing, shipping, and distribution of books to each client placing an order with you?
• Can you handle the time, effort, and resources needed to collect unpaid invoices?

Here's the biggest. Actually, I think you'll consider this to be great news. This is what you can expect from fulfillment:

• You ship books to your fulfillment house's location once in bulk.
• At the end of the month, you receive a check for all the books sold by your fulfillment house.
• You'll enjoy writing more books, lecturing, doing radio interviews and spending your time the way you like.

So what's good about fulfillment? While you're on the golf course, playing tennis, writing more books, or asleep at night you feel content to to know that someone is selling your books for you while you're doing something else. I think they call that a "money machine".

Please don't get me wrong. Fulfillment will not solve your biggest marketing challenge, which is to continually bring in a flow of new potential customers demanding your books. But once you have even a trickle of orders coming in, fulfillment becomes your lifeline--and the lifeblood of your business is cash flow.

The best fulfillment services pay for themselves through the sales that they generate. Buyer beware. The Deliver Your Books Fulfillment Program charges a small monthly fee of about $90. Publishers who are in the program then receive their full retail price for direct sales to end users.

So when someone calls up your 800 number the DYB staff takes the order and pays you the full retail price of your book. If your book cost $20 in a bookstore the book is sold for $20 to the customer and you, the publisher, pockets $20 per book. Sound too good to be true? It isn't. The fulfillment company earns its keep from the small monthly fee it charges each publisher. Because DYB handles hundreds of publishers and has an exceptionally efficient staff, everybody wins.