Booklets - What Your Readers See

While this blog tends to lean more often toward marketing than production or admin or other crucial parts of the booklet business, today is definitely about the production side.

What font and what point size is the copy in your booklet? Is your audience over the age of 50 or otherwise contending with limited vision? It may not have occurred to you to even consider this if you're under 50 and/or have 20/20 eyesight.

A business coach in the mid-40's age range handed me a business card the other day. While the color of the card and the photo of the coach on the card were each quite attractive, and the font style was a simple one, the print on the card was impossible for me to read because it was so small. I am well beyond the age of 50 (she said quite proudly). Although my vision is effectively corrected by contact lenses, this print was too small.

Think about who your audience is. Does your next booklet printing need to be with a different and/or larger font?

Until next time,

Paulette - mentioning something you may have had no reason to consider

www.tipsbooklets.com

www.CollectionOfExperts.com

Booklets – Fame Not Required

So you are not a household name anyplace other than in your mastermind group and among your nearest and dearest? That has zero influence on your ability to sell zillions of copies of your tips booklet.

The ONLY thing that matters to a booklet buyer, whether they are buying a single copy of a million copies, is how the booklet can make his or her life more, better, or different. Can it help them sell more of their product by using he booklet as a gift when someone purchases something from them or for signing up for their newsletter? Can it provide a better experience for a person when they join an association or attend a conference of that association? Can it cast a different, improved light on how your buyer is perceived in the marketplace because they are generously giving a gift to express customer appreciation?

While your booklet certainly needs to be well written and well produced, who you are is really of minimal consequence in the whole process and in the decision to buy from you. Yes, you do need some bit of credibility that supports why you have the right to put your expertise out there. Beyond that, it doesn’t matter.

So in case you’re hiding out in the belief that you are not well known and that no one will buy from you until you are, you may want to consider getting over that limiting belief as fast as you can so you can give the world something it wants.

Until next time,

Paulette – who found lots of individuals and companies that didn’t care one bit who I was when they bought the million copies of my booklet

www.tipsbooklets.com

www.CollectionOfExperts.com

Booklets - Magazines Still Worth Approaching

When I started my booklet journey in 1991, the first thing I did was send a copy of my booklet to MAGAZINE editors, inviting them to excerpt my booklet into articles they wrote, as long as they included full contact info so people could order their own copy of the complete booklet. That brought over 50,000 single-copy orders of my booklet. Later I also realized there were other doors to go into magazines to make bulk sales and licensing deals.

With the conversation getting louder and louder about how web-centric publishing has become, I found the following mention in a newsletter I receive to be very encouraging if not affirming of what I thought to be true.

"There is some good news for print media fans. Deloitte suggests [from a survey they did] that print magazines may be "surviving the digital tsunami." Two-thirds of U.S. consumers have read a print copy of a magazine in the past six months, higher than newspaper and other forms of print media. Interestingly, 87% of U.S. consumers say that they prefer the print copy of magazines over the digital version. In fact, 55% of U.S. households still subscribe to at least one print magazine, up by 1% from 2009."

So before you take on a global opinion about print being so "yesterday," give some thought to approaching magazines. You can find direct guidance about that in our learning tools.

Until next time,

Paulette - who has fond memories of the early booklet orders that came from magazine readers

www.tipsbooklets.com

www.CollectionOfExperts.com

Booklets - Pricing

The following article came today from Mary Cantando who publishes The Woman's Advantage Calendar in which I've been included during the past few years. She suggests pricing strategies that can work well for booklets and for other products and services in your business.

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Use Pricing to Close a Deal

Many of us use hard and fast formulas to provide pricing for our products or services, while others consider pricing a variable that we adjust on the fly. Regardless of which school you fall into, here are five ways you can use pricing to close a deal.

5 Ways to Use Pricing to

Close a Deal

1. Offer a smaller, more inexpensive offering to build initial trust. This can be a subset of one of your products or services, or a completely new, but smaller offering.

2. Offer a name-your-own-price offer. The customer provides the price they are willing to pay and you provide the product or service quantity/quality based on their dollars.

3. Offer a special price as an opportunity to test the market. You might offer this price only to the first five or ten customers.

4. Offer a lower price with the reason of pushing excess inventory. You might want to get rid of inventory that will become obsolete, or maybe you're just pushing it so you can restock.

5. Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they sign to become a repeat customer. But be sure that you've got an agreement as to what the ongoing sales level will be.

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Until next time,

Paulette - who realized a long time ago that pricing is a combination of art and science

www.tipsbooklets.com

www.CollectionOfExperts.com

Booklets - Doing Is Often Easier Than Thinking About Doing

Have you been thinking about doing a booklet? And thinking, and thinking, and thinking some more? You may be among the people who are most comfortable making a plan, doing research, anticipating possibilities, and laying as much groundwork as you can before you start something. While that can give you a certain result, it can also keep you from starting at all.

Rather than doing all that thinking, what about carrying around a notebook or other recording device and capturing the seed of ideas that represent what you'd say to someone about your expertise if you were in a casual conversation with them? Transfer those unpolished ideas into a word processing file on your computer. Keep adding to them. The pace may be quick (as in days or weeks) or it might be months.

When you think you've got a good chunk of entries (that's a highly official measure -- "a good chunk"), refine and organize what you've got. You are likely to be happily surprised by how you got your booklet written and done, by DOING it rather than THINKING about doing it.

Until next time,

Paulette - who believes done is better than perfect

www.tipsbooklets.com

www.CollectionOfExperts.com

Booklets -Same Ole, Same Ole -- Not

A friend glanced through someone's tips booklet the other day thinking the topic had already been done and overdone. That was right up to the moment she saw a tip that was something she didn't know and thought was an excellent suggestion. That could have been the only thing new to her in that booklet. I don't know for sure since she did not have the chance to read through the whole thing.

It's not uncommon for booklet authors to be concerned about the idea that there is nothing new for them to say, that it has already been said before. Keep this in mind:

1. Given the billions of quasi-intelligent people there are in just the English-speaking world, there is no way any of us can ever reach everyone who would be our client.

2. One new piece of information is, well, one new piece of information.

3. A reminder can be as useful as a new piece of information.

4. Confirmation can be valuable to the reader, allowing them to feel they are "on the right track."

Bottom line - write yours anyway, and do it today.

Until next time,

Paulette - whose booklet still sells 20 years after it was written, has nothing in it about technology, and helps people organize their business life

www.tipsbooklets.com

www.CollectionOfExperts.com

Booklets – Simple and Timely Replies

You send your booklet sample to a corporate decision maker who previously indicated interest in obtaining thousands of copies of your booklet.

And then you hear nothing.

You send a follow-up email, wait a week, leave a friendly follow-up voicemail, wait another week, and still nothing.

The ever-creative Committee in Your Head develops a laundry list of reasons why you are hearing nothing from the corporate decision maker. No matter what reasons you believe, the fact (and all you really know for sure) is that you got no reply.

Maddening, isn’t it? After all, the person said they were interested. It looked like a good match, and certainly a substantial sale. What happened??

Well, think about your track record when it comes to responding to people, even when you’re interested in what they have and what they’re about and how they can help your business. Do you let someone know with a simple “got it” when they email you some information you discussed with them? After all, email delivery is sometimes unreliable or can accidentally be deleted or overlooked. Do you confirm an appointment when someone sets a time for a meeting you wanted to have with them, or do you just figure they understand it’s confirmed, leaving them wondering? What do YOU do to complete the communication cycle?

It can take just a couple seconds to let the sender know you’re still in the conversation or that the time is available in your schedule, or that you want another detail to clarify something.

Do your part and see what happens. Setting that tone of good, clear, concise communication often raises the bar for those around you, who you want to know if they received what you sent.

Until next time,

Paulette – eager to receive “got it” from you

www.tipsbooklets.com

www.CollectionOfExperts.com

Booklets – Pistachios and Other Nuts

Do you have a food you like that you haven’t had in awhile? You used to eat it all the time, and, for whatever reason, you haven’t even thought about it in awhile. It’s not that you’re allergic to it or that the price went up or that it’s inconvenient to obtain it. You just simply forgot. It fell off your radar and got replaced by other foods you grew to like maybe more or maybe equally.

In the past few months, the Powers that Be in the pistachio industry (yes, pistachio nuts!) apparently realized they needed to remind people about the existence of their product. All of a sudden it seemed their promotions were everywhere. They were in the media. The in-store displays and sale offers were prominent. Quite honestly, they got me. I was one of those people who was reminded that I always liked pistachios, hadn’t had them in awhile, and bought a few bags over a period of weeks. Okay, I confess I decided I needed to stop buying them because one portion, maybe two, equaled a whole bag, regardless of what the data said on the bag. It wasn’t a good thing for me on a long term basis. However, I digress.

So did you make the connection here with the pistachio experience and your booklets? You may have fallen off the radar of a company who loved your booklet. Something else attracted their attention and they tested that out. You may have let up on your promotion and publicity since you got distracted with other things. They probably liked your booklet enough to consider buying more from you if only they remembered how good your booklet was, how easy you were to deal with, how well-priced your booklet was, and the outstanding business results they had by using your booklet promotionally to sell more of their product.

It would not be the first time someone said something like “I’m so glad you reached out. I lost your contact information. We love your booklet and want thousands of copies of it. How fast can you deliver them?”

Until next time,

Paulette – focusing on the value of always being “out there”

www.tipsbooklets.com

www.CollectionOfExperts.com