I don’t want to be on Oprah

I really don’t.  Don’t get me wrong, if Oprah calls and wants me on her show, I’m going to camp out in her parking lot the day of the taping.  I know a lot of writers fantasize about being on that show, but not me.  All things being equal, I would just as soon be anonymous.  I am actually a pretty reserved person.  I have a tremendous cadre of friends and a wonderful family in my life, and I do not seek, nor do I enjoy, a lot of attention. 

There is no doubt that being on Oprah would get me my 15 minutes of fame and probably make the sales of my book skyrocket, but only for a brief moment, and that’s the kicker.  I do not want to be a writer for a moment; I want to be a writer for the rest of my life.  I want to make a living at it.  I want to share what I have with the rest of the world for as long as I have left here.  That is why I spend all of my free, non-writing time, studying the art/science of turning my writing into a business.

I’ll let you in on a little secret.  Unless you are John Grisham, you do not make a lot of money off the book itself.  Let me give you an example.  My first book, The Essential Guide to RF and Wireless sells for about $40 retail.  That is a relatively high price for a book.  My forthcoming book, So Why Have You Never Been Married, will sell for around $15.  For non-John Grisham-type writers (e.g., me), royalties probably average about 7%.  (I say average because royalty rates often depend on who the retailer is and how many copies they buy.)  The bad news, if you aren’t already aware of it, is that writers get paid on wholesale.  And what is wholesale?  That depends, but at most it is 50% of retail and for books purchased by the large retailers like Barnes and Noble and Amazon, it is closer to 40%.  So, on my $40 book, I make 7% of 40-50% of $40 or a whopping $1.25 on average.  You already know that book sold approximately 25,000 copies.  Continuing with the math I have netted on that book, from start to finish, somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000.  And that’s over six years!   It’s good money and I love opening the royalty check envelope twice a year, but it is certainly not a career. 

Permit me to fantasize a moment that my forthcoming book sells 100,000 copies over a couple of years.  (The shelf life for relationship books is much less than for science or technology books.)   Allow me to do the math (I already have a thousand times in my dreams).  Seven percent of seven bucks times 100,000 is roughly 50 grand.  Great money, but still not a career, even if the book is a blockbuster.  There has got to be something else.

Back when I was in the wireless industry (after my book came out, but before I went back and got a real job), I conducted wireless seminars.  They were essentially seminars based on my book.  In fact everyone who attended got a signed copy of my book as an incentive to attend.  You already know who I targeted to attend the seminar: non-technical sales and marketing people in the wireless industry.

It was a good time in the wireless industry and my niche market was a pretty nice size.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have a clue how to run a seminar, nor did I understand how to cost effectively market a seminar, but I did know a lot of people in the industry.  So, I smiled and dialed and busted my hump for two to three months to convince 25 people to pay $400 for a two-day seminar.  I’m sure you have already done the math.  If you ignore the time and money it took to get those people to the seminar (and the cost of the room), I made about $10,000 in two days.  Imagine if could do a seminar like that once a month.  Now, that is the start of a career.

The best news of all is that with the evolution of the Internet and other technologies such as eZines, teleseminars and webinars, it is much easier and cheaper to reach infinitely more, geographically-dispersed people.  That is what occupies my mind as I wait for one book to hit the shelves and I continue to write two more: how can I use the Internet and other technologies to turn my writing into a business?  Stay tuned and find out.

Would you want to be on Oprah if you had a book coming out in a few months?  Let me hear from you.
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