[T709]The Road Less Traveled By

More people than you realize dream about writing a best-selling business book. They think that surely the world is waiting for their unique wisdom. The reality is far different. The average business book offered by a major publisher sells about 5,000 copies. Even if everyone who gets a copy reads it, that's not a lot of influence.

Let's consider how creating 2,000 percent solutions (ways of accomplishing 20 times as much with the same time, effort, and resources) can change the result.

When both usage and delivery effectiveness improve, stakeholders can gain 20 times more benefits than from either improvement alone. When that combination happens, these two complementary 2,000 percent solutions acquire the power of 20 or more individual 2,000 percent solutions. That's what a 2,000 percent squared solution is. You can also think of this concept as developing a 40,000 percent solution, or a 400 times increase in benefits.

To some, that goal may seem remote. Keep an open mind while I share an example of creating 2,000 percent squared solutions for inexpensively attracting more readers to my books.

In 1998, a best-selling author friend told us that it was important to distribute tens of thousands of free copies of business books either just before the book is published or right after publication. Tom Peters, coauthor of In Search of Excellence (reissue edition, Warner Books, 1988), tells the same story about one aspect of how that book became a blockbuster. When I was writing my first book, I heeded that advice. Before publication, I mailed out thousands of draft copies for advance reading. After publication, I sent out thousands more free copies of the completed book to influential readers. In addition, I provided a Web site for the book and put all but two chapters online there for free. The cost to do this sampling was over $40,000. I estimate that these activities have directly yielded 20,000 people who have read some part of that book. That means our cost per reader for just this activity was about $2.00. Since royalties on books like ours are usually around $2.00, this was a money-losing proposition unless this distribution yielded sales of at least 20,000 additional books. In the case of our friend, this was no concern because his company had paid this sampling expense. My costs, however, came out of my personal pocket. I needed to do better.

For my third book, I decided to create a 2,000 percent squared solution for expanding readership. For that book, I only provided free advance copies to those who helped us create the book. The cost for those copies was about $1,200. I also wrote brief articles based on the book and arranged to have them published in prestigious journals and magazines. I next condensed the articles and turned them into brief guides that Amazon.com publishes for free. In the first two years, I estimate that over 30,000 people read some part of that book through these efforts. I estimate that eventual readership through this approach will swell to 100,000 people by the time the third book has been in print as long as the first book has been. If that occurs, I will have attracted 100,000 readers at a cost of $1,200. That means the cost per reader will be $0.012. The first book's campaign cost 166 times as much per reader as what the the third book's campaign did, and I will draw far more readers with the new, less expensive effort. These estimated results will provide me with a 66,000 percent solution compared to our first approach (16,500 percent lower cost per reader multiplied by 400 percent more readers).

For a forthcoming book I am developing, that sampling solution has been further enhanced. The pre-launch involves a blog in which the material is tested for reader reaction. I forecast that over 200,000 people will have read some part of the book through the blog before the book is published, and the cost is only the electricity to post the blog entries. I will also reuse the Amazon.com guides that worked well for the third book to add another 100,000 readers at limited cost. Publicity at the time of publication will probably draw another few hundred thousand people to the blog samples. I also plan to send millions of free excerpts by e-mail to people who subscribe to various complementary newsletters. We should be able to increase our total readers by several hundred more percent. Since I carry advertising on the blog, I have a revenue offset to our costs. If enough clicks occur from the blog to advertisers' sites, this sampling program may well turn out to be free. As you can see, repeating such a process on the same or a similar problem can be profoundly valuable in making further improvements.

To put these 2,000 percent squared solutions into perspective, you need to know what Peter Drucker taught me: Surveys show that only about 10 percent of all business books that are purchased are actually read by anyone. Even more surprisingly, only one in a hundred business books sold is read cover to cover. As a result, a massive business best seller may have only 20,000 readers, and almost all of those have read just part of the book. The 2,000 percent squared solution activities allow me to easily and effortlessly share our message with far more people than business best sellers do at a minimal cost that almost anyone can afford. If some people buy the books based on these low-cost previews, I will definitely have an economic gain.

Now you know how you can reach best-selling reader levels for your next business book. What are you waiting for?

Copyright 2007 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved