How Giving Led to $1,500,000

Lots of authors take custody of the "best-seller" claim for their book. Yeah, well... it may be a best-seller at the 'Ain’t Words Cool' book store in their own home town, but.... It’s a whole other thing to be able to say that a book has sold a million copies!

That’s just what John Milton Fogg can claim for his book "The Greatest Networker in the World". How did he do that? John’s answer is...

I gave the book away.

I wrote The Greatest Networker... in 1992. At the time I was the owner/editor of a publication named Upline, that served men and women in the network marketing profession. At that time, we probably had a couple of thousand subscribers at most.

I didn’t have the money for the first-print run. A friend and mentor of mine in the business, Tom "Big Al" Schreiter, suggested I "pre-sell" the books to people who could sell them to others: book wholesalers, vendors to network marketers, people who had magazines or catalogs which sold books, tapes and tools. Tom told me to make a great low-price deal to these folks so they could make more money. That would pay for the printing, make a profit for myself and generate the money to print more books. Tom bought 1000 copies at $3 each.

I asked him how he was going to sell those books. He told me he wasn’t. He was going to give them away.

That got my attention, so I asked, "Why?"

Tom explained he was going to "seed" the market. He figured people would like or love the book, and they’d come back and buy more to give or sell to other people. And, it would create word-ofmouth advertising for the book, which meant more sales for him (and me).

Tom also explained the idea of a "value-added" premium to me:

He’d make an offer of one of his products to his people and give The Greatest Networker... away free as an incentive to buy. People would get a $10 value, which Tom only paid $3 for.

Good deal for him- helped him sell more of his products.

Good deal for them- they got a free gift, felt great and were more inclined to buy his offer.

I don’t know how many of my books Tom sold over the years. I do know he made his investment back and them some - lots of some.

I knew a great idea when I saw one, so I started giving The Greatest Networker... away with every single subscription to Upline.

My subscribers got a free gift and were more likely to buy the magazine to begin with. I got my book being read by the best possible people who could spread the word and help me sell more.

When the Internet came along, I put The Greatest Networker... up on our website and gave it away there, too.

Over the years I probably gave away 40,000-plus copies of my book. The cost of that was, say, $50,000. So one way to look at it was I gave away $50,000.

But I earned a buck a book royalty on all the copies of The Greatest Networker in the World that were sold. That doesn’t include any "extra" money I earned from the wholesale or retail sales when
people bought the book.

Do the math.

My guess would be all-in-all that’s $1.5 million of net profit to me.

All because I gave my book away.

Here's yet another true story about the power of giving:

Do you know who Seth Godin is? (He’s the other Internet Marketing guru besides Joe.) :-) Seth wrote The Idea Virus. That book started a revolution. Seth gave it away on-line. People told him
he was crazy. More than a million and a-half of Seth’s e-books are out there. AND, after he gave it away for free, he printed up a hardcover edition for $45 and made a fortune selling that! Go figure.

I had the fascinating privilege of interviewing Seth Godin for Networking Times magazine. He told me the following "Giving-Marketing" story and it just blew me away. This is utterly brilliant!

Seth knows a great folksinger who does music for kids. She has five CDs and she sells them on her own. Now, Seth doesn’t do consulting any more, but this lady is a personal friend, so when she asked if he had any ideas on how she could sell more of her CDs, Mr. Permission Marketing (he wrote that book, too) complied.

Seth asked how much she sold her CDs for. She told him $15.

Seth asked how much one cost her to produce and package. She told him 80 cents. So Seth said...

"Look, every time someone buys one CD, send them two. Nobody has any use for a second CD, because it’s the same music. What are they going to do? They’re going to give it away, probably
as a present. One of these kids gives one of these CDs to another kid as a birthday present and they’re likely to buy two, three or four more, because the parents get tired of hearing the same songs over and over again."

Like I said, "Brilliant." Each one of those give-away CDs that results in just one additional sale nets the folksinger $14.20. And as Seth pointed out, parents will probably buy two or three more, perhaps all five. And each time they do, they get an extra one free, that they turn around and give to a friend saying, "This is great. Little Harry will really love this."

Oh, that lady folksinger doubled, then tripled her business with that CD she gave away.


John Milton Fogg's website is at:
http://www.GreatestNetworker.com/is/jmf