One of the secrets used by authors who bypass the normal way of doing business of selling their books is to give them away by self publishing them at first, which eventually leads to huge sales and great profits.

Now before you think the obvious thing, no not all books will do this, so you need to know the market you're serving and the real potential of sales you have.

For example, if you're a college professor type who is used to writing papers and zipping them off to your fellow professors about some obscure topic, obviously you're not going to make a lot of money no matter what you do, as your topic defines the size of your audience.

But assuming you've done your homework, you should have a decent idea of the potential of your book, and as a result be able to fairly accurately project book sales.

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves though, you need to understand that when talking about self publishing a book and giving it away, we're not talking about a physical copy, as very few people have the money to underwrite the costs.

What were talking about is getting a digital copy to give away to potential readers, who have no cost or risk other than their time to try out the book to see if it's interesting to them. 

And since Amazon's Kindle has become a pretty good hit, you can even sell it through that means if you choose to, although that would take away from what we're trying to do here. That's just an additional idea and option you can think about separately. 

So what's the secret in giving away a book and making money? If you think about giving away a book, you know you don't have the type of sustainable readership to justify a book contract from publisher, and you must build up your reputation by getting your work in the hands of potential readers.

In other words, giving your work away is a marketing tool and strategy. If you know your target audience and understand their wants and needs, you should be able to entice them to download a free copy of your book to their computer. 

Ok. That's the marketing side of the self publishing equation. What's the other secret, as obviously there's another step to take in giving something away for free.

Here's the other secret: people will want to buy a physical copy of your book if they like the digital copy. The reason this can work with publishers now is you can boast a built-in audience ready to read and own a physical copy of your book.

The key here is to have the downloaded book information available when pitching your book to a company or you could have it made available through a print-on-demand publisher, which you share the profits with. 

How do you market a book to an existing reader base that has already read it? You market it as something like a upgraded version of the original, or classic version etc., including a great cover and some type of added material.

Think of DVDs which people enjoy buying of movies they've already seen because of the added features. People would eat this up in a book as well, depending on the genre.

But even if it was a novel, you could have some type of short story or preface, or anything like that which would draw your reader base to get it.

If you really have touched your readers with your work, a percentage will buy it anyway, but this helps drive sales for those you may be on the fence line with it. 

There you have it. This is a secret many writers and other creative people are employing to drive sales of their works. Now you can go out and give your work away, and make a fortune by creating a secondary work based upon which includes the types of additions whereby you can charge a higher price.

This is what self-publishing and digital tools can do to further your career as an author. It's one of the creative strategies successfully employed by writers and authors to generate publicity and book sales; and it works!

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