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Booklet Tips From Paulette

Writing, producing, and promoting tips booklets for marketing, motivating, and making money.

Friday, February 18, 2005

Can I Really Make Any Money with a Booklet?

Every week I do my best to physically get out from behind my computer at least once or twice for lunch with some other human being. It's important for lots of mental, physical, and emotional reasons, which you've probably already figured out.

Anyway, this week I joined someone I'd recently met at a professional group's meeting. I found her to be an interesting mix of quiet powerhouse, although we did still seem to have some similarities in spite of some obvious differences stylistically. She was new to the whole idea of booklets, and like many of us, has already experienced several very successful careers in her life. While enjoying being outdoors at a Japanese restaurant on a delightful winter day in San Diego, THE question hit my ears as my chopsticks were headed toward my mouth:

"Can I really make any money with a booklet?" You know, I've heard this question many times during the dozen years I've been in the booklet business. As blythely and low-keyed as I could, and with great efforts to omit any of my sometimes-natural-tendency toward sarcasm, I said "Yes, you can. WILL you make any real money with a booklet is a whole different story. That will be totally and completely up to you."

Over the years, I've seen people (including myself) make tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, both directly from booklet sales, and as a result of what else their booklet brought them. The results have been limited only by the willingness of the booklet author to personally get out there with their booklet, to give it to valuable referral sources, and/or to sell it in very large volumes to corporations, associations, and publications.

The booklet can look so inocuous, can't it? Who would ever imagine it could be such a huge money maker? Well, the ones who are doing very well with it not only imagined it. They're doing something about it.

Find out how you can get started on your own booklet journey by visiting our site, http://www.tipsbooklets.com for a range of products and services to best suit your purposes.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Booklet Author Uses Tips to Promote Booklet

Hi Paulette,

The idea I had while reading a recent article of yours was to create a series of new e-mail signatures, each featuring one tip and leading the reader to the booklet page on my website. Check out the one on this message. What do you think?
Cheers,
Helen

Tip #65—Meetings: "For regular meetings, rotate the leadership role. Everyone will have an opportunity to develop effective meeting skills."

For 98 more useful communication tips, check out http://www.mhwcom.com/pages/99tipstoimprove.html
Helen Wilkie, speaker and author
416-966-5023, hwilkie@mhwcom.com

Monday, February 14, 2005

How Many Ways Can You License Your Tips Booklet?

You've been thinking about writing a tips booklet. After all, it's shorter, faster, and easier than writing an entire book. A single tips booklet manuscript can be recycled over and over again, developing a new income stream with each deal you make. The booklet can be distilled from a book you've already written, a newsletter you distribute, or from sound bites you continually share with clients, audiences and anyone who will listen.

When that booklet is done is when the fun really begins. You can sell it as single copies or as large quantities that you produce for your clients. Or, you can sell the rights to the contents, on a non-exclusive basis, in many ways. Think about all the languages in the world. That can be a starting point. Find someone who is interested in licensing the right to your material to translate into another language, reaching a non-English speaking population in your own country or in a different country.

They get to do the translating, editing, production, marketing and distribution, and pay you for that right! You could also license the rights to your information to a company who wants to purchase 10,000 or more copies of your booklet. They can generally buy print less expensively than you can sell it to them. You will once again license them the right to do all the work, and pay you for it.

You may also find other venues interested in your manuscript. What about an audio CD publishing company? You can hire yourself out to record the program as part of the licensing deal or the audio publisher can bring in their own speaking talent.

What about licensing the use of your content to a catalog company to pepper their catalog pages with your tips? Or a public relations firm can bring your booklet manuscript to a client of theirs to use as a radio, television or print commercial: 'This organizing moment has been brought to you by XYZ Office Supply Company.' Do your tips work individually on posters, coffee mugs, tee shirts, screen savers, or computer mouse pads as advertising specialty items? What about a tip a day on a calendar or as a CD or even as the premise of a board game? Would some tips work as a needlepoint design?

These are just some of the many ways one single tips booklet manuscript in your area of expertise can be recycled over and over again, reaching a larger audience and generating thousands of dollars for you, with your client doing all the production. Think of what other ways you can license your booklet content. The possibilities are endless!


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Paulette Ensign has personally sold over a million copies of her 16-page tips booklet, '110 Ideas for Organizing Your Business Life,' in four languages, without spending a penny on advertising. That includes several licenses. Her company, Tips Products International, has products and services to assist you in writing and marketing your own booklet on any topic. www.tipsbooklets.com or Paulette@tipsbooklets.com

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

A blog, too? - quick intro

It took me awhile to start publishing an ezine. Years and years, in fact. Since I relish my freedom, and have made a point of creating my life to be incredibly flexible, I decided the ezine would be published monthly. No sense becoming a slave to it on a weekly basis, even though I'm rarely at a loss for words. The discussion board that's been on my site for many years has been very quiet in recent months. Then this blog phenom showed up. Seems like it's the perfect mid-point solution between the monthly ezine and some ongoing, somewhat random commentary about life related to tips booklets. And I'm jumping into this much sooner than I did with publishing an ezine.

There will probably be at least a weekly entry here, maybe more frequently. We'll see how life goes and what I feel compelled to address at any given moment. My clients do provide lots of grist for commentary, even after my being in this business since 1991. The situations range from the poignant to the wonderfully funny, and everything in between. Stay tuned.