Ben Guttmann
About a year after our client’s blockbuster health book came out, the publisher hired us again to help promote the follow-up cookbook. The author was a neurologist, not a chef – but that’s just how the industry works. Flagship book begets cookbook, which sometimes begets a journal, a program, or something else.
Either way, the recipes in the book were treated as a sacred currency. A couple of them were being saved for magazines and talk shows. We did a video shoot for another handful. And we were lucky to pry a few off to use on the client’s website and social channels.
But beyond those samples, we were under strict orders to keep hush-hush about the other few dozen recipes for omelets and salads. After all, as the omniscient publisher said, if we gave away too many of them, nobody would buy the book!
That’s a bunch of baloney.
Maybe a generation or two ago, when information was scarce and expensive, this idea might have been the case. But today, if you want to know the secret to a delicious frittata, you don’t need to buy a book. Just tap a few little buttons, and ten thousand recipes for one will come up. You could spend the rest of your natural life watching free videos of people making frittatas on YouTube or TikTok.
People aren’t buying your book, your course, your tour, or whatever other knowledge offering because you have secret information. They buy it because you’re offering a more convenient, more compellingly presented, or just otherwise better experience.
There’s a guy here in New York named Scott Wiener who runs the very popular Scott’s Pizza Tours. It’s precisely what the name says: his team takes you on a tour across the city to learn about and sample the best pizza in town. I actually happen to know Scott a teeny-tiny bit; he officiated the wedding of our first clients (now friends!), who are also pizza scene pros. Great dude, and great business.
Check out Scott’s TikTok or Instagram. He has dozens and dozens of clips from his tours that explain the intricacies of mozzarella, dough trays, and folding slices. And some of them have millions of views! He’s giving away his hard-earned knowledge for free on these platforms – why should anybody pay for it now?
But do you think those millions of viewers are now more or less likely to book a tour when they next visit NYC? Go spend a few minutes watching them yourself. Are you now more or less interested in taking a tour with him?
Give it away! Give away chapters of your book. Give away recipes and how-to’s. Give away interviews and statistics. Barring your putting the whole thing up on the web with a giant $0 price tag, you really can’t give away too much of your stuff.
Even then, giving it away probably won’t hurt! In a 2010 paper in the Journal of Electronic Publishing, researchers analyzed sales data of books before and after they were made available for free download. In three out of the four categories they monitored, sales actually increased.
Here’s what they found:
With one exception, sales of the nonfiction titles increased after a free digital release, and when the sales of the books were combined, sales were up 5%. The majority of the fantasy/science fiction books that were not part of a group release also had increased sales, and as a group their sales increased 26%, largely as a result of “Title 12.” Four of the five Random House books saw sales gains after the free versions were released; in total, combined sales of those five books increased 9%. These three groups were in contrast to our initial hypothesis that book sales would decline. Although we cannot say that the free e-books caused sales to increase, a correlation exists between a free e-book and increased print sales.
Give it away! That’s how you bring them in.
