About Mike, And About You!
About Mike, And About You! I want this little document to be about you, not me. The only reason I've included a bunch of stuff about me here is that I want to show you how I got started and what I've done--but only because I want you to see that you could have done, or could do, any of these things yourself. I Was An Inner-City High School Teacher For 14 Years Two years before I quit teaching I wrote a little 40-page booklet titled 52 Ways To Liven Up The Chemistry Classroom ($14.95). It was a printand-ink type booklet and was just photocopied and GBC bound. It didn't look like much but I sold thousands of them in short order. I wrote about a dozen somewhat similar books over the next two years and they sold equally as well. They included titles such as…
The first book I wrote
Alchemy (35p/$14), Mathematics Preparation For Chemistry (60p/$27) While You Were Out (42p/$14.95--a book for substitute teachers) The Chemistry Power Booster (40p/$59.00) The Chemistry Cafeteria (240p/4 parts @ $79 each) My early teaching days
I Sold My Books In Two Ways... First, I rented mailing lists of high school chemistry teachers from a company called MDR (Market Data Retrieval). I would get names of these teachers on peel-and-stick labels in zip order so I could mail out my little catalogs with a 3rd class bulk mail permit. One of my book catalogs
My first mailing was to only 500 teachers. My second was to 5,000 teachers. I was soon mailing out 40,000 80-page catalogs to both chemistry and biology teachers twice a year. The second way was that I contacted the biggest school and science supply catalog companies in the U.S. and asked them if they would carry my books in their catalogs they sent out to science teachers. (This is a very, very big market for a couple of reasons.) Almost without exception they agreed. I got about a dozen huge catalog companies to put my books into their catalogs and I would give them a 50%
Here I am many years ago with my first 5,000 catalogs sorted and bundled on my floor.
discount off the normal price. Some of these companies would order a hundred copies of some of my books at a time and I was getting orders almost daily from them. How This Could Still Be Done Today I don't recommend creating catalogs and mailing them out to promote your books. However, there are ways to sell print-and-ink books offline. If I were going to get involved in this again I would first search to find catalogs or magazines that catered to the niche my books were in.
If you can find catalogs that promote books in your niche I would contact the "new product manager" at the company and send them a publicity kit. This would consist of a copy of your book, a bio page about you, a spec sheet on the book, and a business card with your contact info on it. I would offer them a 50% discount off the retail price of your book. The spec sheet would just give the main features of the book. I used to also make up the sales copy for an ad they could use in their catalog. This would usually be under 60 words or so. Find Magazines Related To The Topic Of Your Book An example from my past involved the homeschooling market. I had a number of books I was selling to science teachers. Some of these were workbooks which students would read and then solve problems I had inside. I went to a Barnes & Noble store and found three nationally distributed magazines devoted to homeschoolers. All had both classified and display ads in the back. I would take out a small classified ad offering a mini-catalog of my books parents could use with their kids. It worked well. Additionally, these magazines would all have ads from catalog companies selling homeschooling books and supplies in the back. I would contact these companies about including my books in their catalog like I discussed above. This worked well also. There is a handy publication titled, "The Catalog Of Catalogs" which you might be able to find at your public library, if not it is available on Amazon… http://www.amazon.com/The-Catalog-Catalogs-Mail-Order-Directory/dp/1890627089 You can also search online for "Directory of Mail Order Catalogs" and find many. many directories of mail order catalogs. You can look up almost any niche you can think of and they will have a listing of catalogs that cater to people interested in products in that niche. At the right is the warehouse/office building where I ran my business from for many years once I moved it out of my home. It was actually while I was still running this business
from my garage at home when I had my very first $10,000 day in sales. And note, this was not the result of any kind of product launch, it was just a $10,000 day. Actually, this represented $20,000 in sales not 10k. I gave my distributors a 50% discount when they bought quantities of my books. The 10k was net to me, after I gave them their discount.
This was my all time best This is a page from one of the school supply catalogs selling print and ink book. A that sold many of my books. Many of these catalogs 239-page book for $39.95 carried 2-3 dozen of my books.
My very first catalog was just one 11x17 inch sheet folded once and then again to make a mailing piece.
Here is my dad and I after loading 40,000 catalogs onto a truck for delivery to the bulk mail dock at the post office.
I'm showing you these pics for two reasons. First, I want you to see how I got started in the business of selling my info products. And second, I want to stress upon you the importance of taking pictures of everything you do. You never know if you'll need them some day! If you're an affiliate marketer and you make a leader board for a big product launch--take a screen shot of it. If you speak at a live event, get a snapshot of it. If you meet a guru type at an event, get a picture of that. If you have a product that makes the front page of any Clickbank category, make sure to capture an image of that. If you do a radio or TV author interview, yes-make sure you capture that image too. If you ever do a book signing, by all means have someone get a pic of that for you!
I Wrote My First Book Outside Of The Science Education Market I decided to take what I had learned from selling my science books and put together a really great book detailing how I created and marketed my science books successfully. This came to be a 437 page book titled, You Can Make Big Money Writing Little Books. I began selling the book online as a physical product. The package consisted of the printed book along with 12 audio cassette tapes. The book was GBC bound and I bought a Sony high-speed tape duplicating machine which could turn out hundreds of copies an hour. The tapes went into...
an attractive cassette tape binder with a color slip sheet cover that slid into the front cover. I started selling these for $97 each, but soon learn that at a $197 price point I sold just about the same number of copies. I did really well with this book so I decided I'd try to step it up a level by using some other ways to market it.
I went to a local Barnes & Noble store and asked the store manager how one would go about doing a book signing in their store. She told me I would need to contact the "Community Relations Manager" and pitch my book. Typically a CRM will service a number of stores in a region and they are on the road a bit. I got her contact info and gave her a call. She offered to meet me at the store in a few days. We got together and she liked what she saw. She got me set up on the computer and set me up to do a signing about a month down the road. They required you to have an ISBN number for your book, which I had. I had the barcode printed on labels which I then just stuck on the back cover of my books. (ISBN Numbers--International Standard Book Numbers are available through Bowker Co. in the U.S.-- http://isbn.org/) The CRM made up posters to display in the store as well as handouts promoting my signing to place near the front door and on the counters. I simply needed to bring books with me and I would sign them and talk to people stopping my my table. It worked pretty well and was a ton of fun to do, but I wanted to try to upscale the thing a bit.
After my first book signing I began not only signing books, but putting on a 30 minute presentation before my signing as well. I drew good crowds and most of the people listening
to my pitch ended up buying my book. I gave Barnes & Noble a 50% discount on the $39 price of the book. I had a lot of fun doing these things and I learned how to work a crowd to convince them to want my book. It was profitable to do these signings and I did about a dozen or so, but it is not a scalable thing. You can only do them so often and travel is required to sell at different stores.
My wife, Carolyn, had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis about eight years earlier had her condition had deteriorated rapidly around this time. In 2002 she passed away at age 51. This was a tough time for me. During the past couple years I had struggled taking care of her needs at home and running my business so I decided to sell the rights to all 60 or so science books I had written as well as a couple dozen student activity kits I had created for the science education market. I went about two years without writing anything and without a business of my own. I finally got myself to a point where I could begin working again and I took my Big Money Writing Little Books book and used it as the basis for live presentations I began doing. I began doing this by offering a 3-hour, one evening workshop for people interested in writing their own books. I ran my workshops through community education programs set up by local school districts. And yes, a lot of the courses offered through such programs charge only 5-10 dollars for people to take them. But I knew some people who were making a killing doing such programs as well. I contacted dozens of community education programs in a three state area. They would promote my program through their catalogs. and I actually took out 30 second radio spots and run them 5-6 times a day a couple days before the program would run in a city. No one else was doing this. I would offer my program for 39-59 dollars and split the registration fees with the school. On a good night I would have 40 people show up, an average night would have 25 people show up. So on average I would make about $500 in registration fees for my 3 hour presentation. However, I would also bring about 50 copies of my book with me. I sold these the night of the presentation for $39 and about 80% of the attendees would end up buying one. They cost about $7 to have printed so that would bring in another $800 or so. All in all I could bring in a thousand dollars an evening. I would schedule these at districts in nearby counties and for about two years I was doing these events four nights a week M-Th. I was away from home a lot but the money was good. However, the time and travel factors wore me down a bit after a while.
I Began Doing Media Interviews I can't say for sure how I met this guy, Alex Carroll, but he may have been a friend of Dan Poynter the author of The Self Publishing Manual and about 70 other books. They both live out in Santa Barbara so that may have been the connection. Anyway, Alex was a young guy, who at the time I met him, had sold over 100,000 copies of his little book titled Beat The Cops. And the thing was that Alex's book had never appeared in a book store or Amazon (it's now available on Amazon however) every sale had come from him doing phone in author interviews on top radio and television stations across the county. He had the process down pat! His book was about how to get out of traffic tickets. Anyway, Alex had a product called his Radio Publicity Kit http://www.radiopublicity.com/ which showed how to get booked on radio and television stations for author interviews. I got the product and it was great. In fact, down the road when I was doing some live events Alex would actually call in to my event and discuss his techniques for getting free media publicity. I would pipe his call in through a sound system and my attendees loved it. He's a good guy. So I followed his advice ad I started getting booked myself. I would do a call in interview that might last from 10 minutes to half an hour or more. During the interview the talk show host would take calls from listeners and I would answer their questions. I would get to give ordering information a couple times during the interview so I could make some sales. One day I got an email from a producer at ABC World News in Manhattan asking if I could call her about coming to New York and doing a live interview with their then anchor, Alison Stewart. Hell yes! So I flew out there and ABC picked me up in a big limo and took me to their downtown studios. I got to meet some of the people there and they put me through make up and bang-I was on live TV and my interview was airing on all 400+ of their affiliate stations all across the U.S. What a gas. I had orders coming in for my book even before the interview was over!
I will tell you that in addition to using Alex's materials I also used a service called the Radio & TV Interview Report, from Steve Harrison in PA. The RTIR used to put out a weekly print publication that was sent out to radio and television statin producers across the U.S. in which you could take out a full or quarter page ad describing your book, telling about you and giving contact info so producers could contact you. It was a truly great service and it worked very well. Unfortunately, sometime in the past couple years the print version of this fine little publication was phased out and replaced with a digital version. I consider the digital version far inferior to the old print version and they don't even take new advertisers unless you a member of one of their high-end programs. Their entire platform seems very confusing and not very user friendly. I no longer recommend the RTIR services.
I Also Created An Online Course For Teachers Just about ten years ago I created an online course for teachers. It was called Developing Instructional Aids For The Classroom. I got hooked up with a place called Education To Go (http://www.ed2go.com). They are a leading distributor of online courses with over 300 courses they offer the public on all kinds of topics. The good thing is you don't need a college degree in a topic to develop a course with them. They actually only accept a small number of applications to develop a course, but all you really need is to be an expert in your field. In my case I had previously developed a 300 page book called Big Ideas In Little Books which showed teachers how to create learning materials for their students. I used that as the basis for my online course. My course sold for from $99 to $149 depending on the college that offered it. It was an 8 week course that had tutorials, a pre-test, quizzes, and a final exam. If registrants passed the final exam with a score of 70% or better they got continuing education credits which they needed to keep their teaching certificates. After the first couple years I had over 2,200 colleges, community colleges and universities offering my class. I even got a couple of awards for the largest increase in enrollments for the past 12 months. It was a great course and I enjoyed doing it. However, I dissolved the course in late 2014 after a 10 year run. I had other interests I wanted to pursue--but it was a great adventure for me.
Since doing the things I have mentioned I have gone to selling only digital info products. I have created over 30 more info products in various niches. But one thing that has kept coming back to me has been input from people who have bought some of my products related to creating and marketing info products. People who bought these products form me would call or email and ask if I did consulting work or if they could hire me personally to help them with their projects. And I love doing this kind of thing. I think it's exciting and I've helped thousands of good people turn their ideas into products they have marketed themselves. This brings us to today. It brings us to the membership site you are now in. I currently spend most of my time providing services to aspiring info product developers and marketers. I bring my 20+ years experience in this business to bear in doing so. This is what I am doing here with you here today. It is my sincerest hope that with my guidance here you will find the joy and satisfaction I have found in this business yourself! I don't know if anyone made it through reading this entire little eight page expose of myself or not. Many of you may have dozed off before reaching the end. That's okay if you did. But it is my hope that you can see how I started in this business and also that any of the things I have done are also doable by any of you as well.
--Mike McMillan
The first book I wrote
Alchemy (35p/$14), Mathematics Preparation For Chemistry (60p/$27) While You Were Out (42p/$14.95--a book for substitute teachers) The Chemistry Power Booster (40p/$59.00) The Chemistry Cafeteria (240p/4 parts @ $79 each) My early teaching days
I Sold My Books In Two Ways... First, I rented mailing lists of high school chemistry teachers from a company called MDR (Market Data Retrieval). I would get names of these teachers on peel-and-stick labels in zip order so I could mail out my little catalogs with a 3rd class bulk mail permit. One of my book catalogs
My first mailing was to only 500 teachers. My second was to 5,000 teachers. I was soon mailing out 40,000 80-page catalogs to both chemistry and biology teachers twice a year. The second way was that I contacted the biggest school and science supply catalog companies in the U.S. and asked them if they would carry my books in their catalogs they sent out to science teachers. (This is a very, very big market for a couple of reasons.) Almost without exception they agreed. I got about a dozen huge catalog companies to put my books into their catalogs and I would give them a 50%
Here I am many years ago with my first 5,000 catalogs sorted and bundled on my floor.
discount off the normal price. Some of these companies would order a hundred copies of some of my books at a time and I was getting orders almost daily from them. How This Could Still Be Done Today I don't recommend creating catalogs and mailing them out to promote your books. However, there are ways to sell print-and-ink books offline. If I were going to get involved in this again I would first search to find catalogs or magazines that catered to the niche my books were in.
If you can find catalogs that promote books in your niche I would contact the "new product manager" at the company and send them a publicity kit. This would consist of a copy of your book, a bio page about you, a spec sheet on the book, and a business card with your contact info on it. I would offer them a 50% discount off the retail price of your book. The spec sheet would just give the main features of the book. I used to also make up the sales copy for an ad they could use in their catalog. This would usually be under 60 words or so. Find Magazines Related To The Topic Of Your Book An example from my past involved the homeschooling market. I had a number of books I was selling to science teachers. Some of these were workbooks which students would read and then solve problems I had inside. I went to a Barnes & Noble store and found three nationally distributed magazines devoted to homeschoolers. All had both classified and display ads in the back. I would take out a small classified ad offering a mini-catalog of my books parents could use with their kids. It worked well. Additionally, these magazines would all have ads from catalog companies selling homeschooling books and supplies in the back. I would contact these companies about including my books in their catalog like I discussed above. This worked well also. There is a handy publication titled, "The Catalog Of Catalogs" which you might be able to find at your public library, if not it is available on Amazon… http://www.amazon.com/The-Catalog-Catalogs-Mail-Order-Directory/dp/1890627089 You can also search online for "Directory of Mail Order Catalogs" and find many. many directories of mail order catalogs. You can look up almost any niche you can think of and they will have a listing of catalogs that cater to people interested in products in that niche. At the right is the warehouse/office building where I ran my business from for many years once I moved it out of my home. It was actually while I was still running this business
from my garage at home when I had my very first $10,000 day in sales. And note, this was not the result of any kind of product launch, it was just a $10,000 day. Actually, this represented $20,000 in sales not 10k. I gave my distributors a 50% discount when they bought quantities of my books. The 10k was net to me, after I gave them their discount.
This was my all time best This is a page from one of the school supply catalogs selling print and ink book. A that sold many of my books. Many of these catalogs 239-page book for $39.95 carried 2-3 dozen of my books.
My very first catalog was just one 11x17 inch sheet folded once and then again to make a mailing piece.
Here is my dad and I after loading 40,000 catalogs onto a truck for delivery to the bulk mail dock at the post office.
I'm showing you these pics for two reasons. First, I want you to see how I got started in the business of selling my info products. And second, I want to stress upon you the importance of taking pictures of everything you do. You never know if you'll need them some day! If you're an affiliate marketer and you make a leader board for a big product launch--take a screen shot of it. If you speak at a live event, get a snapshot of it. If you meet a guru type at an event, get a picture of that. If you have a product that makes the front page of any Clickbank category, make sure to capture an image of that. If you do a radio or TV author interview, yes-make sure you capture that image too. If you ever do a book signing, by all means have someone get a pic of that for you!
I Wrote My First Book Outside Of The Science Education Market I decided to take what I had learned from selling my science books and put together a really great book detailing how I created and marketed my science books successfully. This came to be a 437 page book titled, You Can Make Big Money Writing Little Books. I began selling the book online as a physical product. The package consisted of the printed book along with 12 audio cassette tapes. The book was GBC bound and I bought a Sony high-speed tape duplicating machine which could turn out hundreds of copies an hour. The tapes went into...
an attractive cassette tape binder with a color slip sheet cover that slid into the front cover. I started selling these for $97 each, but soon learn that at a $197 price point I sold just about the same number of copies. I did really well with this book so I decided I'd try to step it up a level by using some other ways to market it.
I went to a local Barnes & Noble store and asked the store manager how one would go about doing a book signing in their store. She told me I would need to contact the "Community Relations Manager" and pitch my book. Typically a CRM will service a number of stores in a region and they are on the road a bit. I got her contact info and gave her a call. She offered to meet me at the store in a few days. We got together and she liked what she saw. She got me set up on the computer and set me up to do a signing about a month down the road. They required you to have an ISBN number for your book, which I had. I had the barcode printed on labels which I then just stuck on the back cover of my books. (ISBN Numbers--International Standard Book Numbers are available through Bowker Co. in the U.S.-- http://isbn.org/) The CRM made up posters to display in the store as well as handouts promoting my signing to place near the front door and on the counters. I simply needed to bring books with me and I would sign them and talk to people stopping my my table. It worked pretty well and was a ton of fun to do, but I wanted to try to upscale the thing a bit.
After my first book signing I began not only signing books, but putting on a 30 minute presentation before my signing as well. I drew good crowds and most of the people listening
to my pitch ended up buying my book. I gave Barnes & Noble a 50% discount on the $39 price of the book. I had a lot of fun doing these things and I learned how to work a crowd to convince them to want my book. It was profitable to do these signings and I did about a dozen or so, but it is not a scalable thing. You can only do them so often and travel is required to sell at different stores.
My wife, Carolyn, had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis about eight years earlier had her condition had deteriorated rapidly around this time. In 2002 she passed away at age 51. This was a tough time for me. During the past couple years I had struggled taking care of her needs at home and running my business so I decided to sell the rights to all 60 or so science books I had written as well as a couple dozen student activity kits I had created for the science education market. I went about two years without writing anything and without a business of my own. I finally got myself to a point where I could begin working again and I took my Big Money Writing Little Books book and used it as the basis for live presentations I began doing. I began doing this by offering a 3-hour, one evening workshop for people interested in writing their own books. I ran my workshops through community education programs set up by local school districts. And yes, a lot of the courses offered through such programs charge only 5-10 dollars for people to take them. But I knew some people who were making a killing doing such programs as well. I contacted dozens of community education programs in a three state area. They would promote my program through their catalogs. and I actually took out 30 second radio spots and run them 5-6 times a day a couple days before the program would run in a city. No one else was doing this. I would offer my program for 39-59 dollars and split the registration fees with the school. On a good night I would have 40 people show up, an average night would have 25 people show up. So on average I would make about $500 in registration fees for my 3 hour presentation. However, I would also bring about 50 copies of my book with me. I sold these the night of the presentation for $39 and about 80% of the attendees would end up buying one. They cost about $7 to have printed so that would bring in another $800 or so. All in all I could bring in a thousand dollars an evening. I would schedule these at districts in nearby counties and for about two years I was doing these events four nights a week M-Th. I was away from home a lot but the money was good. However, the time and travel factors wore me down a bit after a while.
I Began Doing Media Interviews I can't say for sure how I met this guy, Alex Carroll, but he may have been a friend of Dan Poynter the author of The Self Publishing Manual and about 70 other books. They both live out in Santa Barbara so that may have been the connection. Anyway, Alex was a young guy, who at the time I met him, had sold over 100,000 copies of his little book titled Beat The Cops. And the thing was that Alex's book had never appeared in a book store or Amazon (it's now available on Amazon however) every sale had come from him doing phone in author interviews on top radio and television stations across the county. He had the process down pat! His book was about how to get out of traffic tickets. Anyway, Alex had a product called his Radio Publicity Kit http://www.radiopublicity.com/ which showed how to get booked on radio and television stations for author interviews. I got the product and it was great. In fact, down the road when I was doing some live events Alex would actually call in to my event and discuss his techniques for getting free media publicity. I would pipe his call in through a sound system and my attendees loved it. He's a good guy. So I followed his advice ad I started getting booked myself. I would do a call in interview that might last from 10 minutes to half an hour or more. During the interview the talk show host would take calls from listeners and I would answer their questions. I would get to give ordering information a couple times during the interview so I could make some sales. One day I got an email from a producer at ABC World News in Manhattan asking if I could call her about coming to New York and doing a live interview with their then anchor, Alison Stewart. Hell yes! So I flew out there and ABC picked me up in a big limo and took me to their downtown studios. I got to meet some of the people there and they put me through make up and bang-I was on live TV and my interview was airing on all 400+ of their affiliate stations all across the U.S. What a gas. I had orders coming in for my book even before the interview was over!
I will tell you that in addition to using Alex's materials I also used a service called the Radio & TV Interview Report, from Steve Harrison in PA. The RTIR used to put out a weekly print publication that was sent out to radio and television statin producers across the U.S. in which you could take out a full or quarter page ad describing your book, telling about you and giving contact info so producers could contact you. It was a truly great service and it worked very well. Unfortunately, sometime in the past couple years the print version of this fine little publication was phased out and replaced with a digital version. I consider the digital version far inferior to the old print version and they don't even take new advertisers unless you a member of one of their high-end programs. Their entire platform seems very confusing and not very user friendly. I no longer recommend the RTIR services.
I Also Created An Online Course For Teachers Just about ten years ago I created an online course for teachers. It was called Developing Instructional Aids For The Classroom. I got hooked up with a place called Education To Go (http://www.ed2go.com). They are a leading distributor of online courses with over 300 courses they offer the public on all kinds of topics. The good thing is you don't need a college degree in a topic to develop a course with them. They actually only accept a small number of applications to develop a course, but all you really need is to be an expert in your field. In my case I had previously developed a 300 page book called Big Ideas In Little Books which showed teachers how to create learning materials for their students. I used that as the basis for my online course. My course sold for from $99 to $149 depending on the college that offered it. It was an 8 week course that had tutorials, a pre-test, quizzes, and a final exam. If registrants passed the final exam with a score of 70% or better they got continuing education credits which they needed to keep their teaching certificates. After the first couple years I had over 2,200 colleges, community colleges and universities offering my class. I even got a couple of awards for the largest increase in enrollments for the past 12 months. It was a great course and I enjoyed doing it. However, I dissolved the course in late 2014 after a 10 year run. I had other interests I wanted to pursue--but it was a great adventure for me.
Since doing the things I have mentioned I have gone to selling only digital info products. I have created over 30 more info products in various niches. But one thing that has kept coming back to me has been input from people who have bought some of my products related to creating and marketing info products. People who bought these products form me would call or email and ask if I did consulting work or if they could hire me personally to help them with their projects. And I love doing this kind of thing. I think it's exciting and I've helped thousands of good people turn their ideas into products they have marketed themselves. This brings us to today. It brings us to the membership site you are now in. I currently spend most of my time providing services to aspiring info product developers and marketers. I bring my 20+ years experience in this business to bear in doing so. This is what I am doing here with you here today. It is my sincerest hope that with my guidance here you will find the joy and satisfaction I have found in this business yourself! I don't know if anyone made it through reading this entire little eight page expose of myself or not. Many of you may have dozed off before reaching the end. That's okay if you did. But it is my hope that you can see how I started in this business and also that any of the things I have done are also doable by any of you as well.
--Mike McMillan
