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Turn Your Book Into Clients (And Not Just Book Sales) with Profitable Publishing®


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Think writing a book means chasing royalties and hoping for bestseller status? Think again. In this episode, you'll discover why traditional publishing advice fails business owners and what to do instead.


Ashley D. Shepard breaks down the Profitable Publishing® framework: a strategy that positions your book as a client-attraction tool, not just another product to sell. You'll learn how one author made $4,000 in her first four weeks, why book sales are the wrong metric for coaches and consultants, and how to align your book with your brand to generate qualified leads.


If you're a coach, consultant, speaker, or service provider considering writing a book (or you have one that's not working hard enough for you), this episode reveals the strategic shift that turns authors into sought-after experts.


In This Episode:

00:00 Introduction to Profitable Publishing®

03:02 Understanding Profitable Publishing® and Why it Matters 

05:41 The Shift from Traditional Publishing to Profitable Publishing®

08:24 Leveraging Your Book for Client Attraction

11:42 Creating a Profitable Book

14:30 Aligning Your Book with Your Brand

17:45 Building Credibility and Visibility

20:28 Conclusion and Resources


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Raw Transcript: 

Welcome to another episode of Profitable Publishing®. This is the podcast for coaches, consultants, speakers, and service providers who want to package their expertise into a profitable book to build their brands. Today, we're gonna be talking about profitable publishing. And so what does that actually mean? What does that look like? And what are the things you wanna avoid if your goal is to use your book as a point of leverage for your brand?


Now, profitable publishing is not just about selling more books or being able to say, ⁓ I've had this many page reads on Amazon or other sites. It's about using your book to strategically support your brand, to help your clients, whether they're existing clients or to attract new clients, and of course, to help your bottom line revenue. And in business, if you're writing a book that's tied to your business or your brand, you want your book to work.


for you. You want it to be something that's not just like a vanity metric of, I wrote a book, I'm an author, just another box to check. You want your book to be able to use something, to be something you can leverage to be able to help you to attract those clients, to support them as an extension of you, and also to be an additional stream of income. So this is not something that you are publishing just to say you've published. It's something where


you're gonna be able to use this as another asset to show your intellectual property and to help build your expertise and attract those who may not already know you as well as support those who do. Now, let's take a step back. Profitable Publishing® goes against pretty much everything that you'll hear about traditional publishing in the sense that if you are in author spaces or if you've heard or said to someone, hey, I wanna become an author, oftentimes you'll hear a couple different things.


that honestly just don't mesh with you as a business owner if your goal is to use your book in this way. And so one that you hear often is really this idea that you really need to focus on books sold and you'll see these bestseller statuses and the, I won't call any out, I won't name names, but you'll see these bestseller statuses whether it's on online platforms or other platforms. And when it comes down to it, you really have to take a look and see, okay.


Are you trying to compare yourself to someone who might have gotten a book deal, who they got their money up front, so they're making their money on the front end, but then on the back end, they're typically not getting a ton in royalties, especially traditionally published authors, these bigger names or even smaller names. ⁓ They may just be getting a few pennies per individual book copy, or maybe they're getting a few dollars per copy of their book.


Whereas if you are focusing on Profitable Publishing®, you are either creating your own advance through preorders, like I teach in my Preorder Profits™ framework, it's more so you're getting money on the front end and money on the back end, as opposed to just choosing one or the other. And then another thing that's something that is


quite often to author spaces is that you have to wait until your second book or your fifth book or even I've heard your 20th book which is bananas before you can see a profit and I just am not a believer of that for multiple reasons. One, in the sense that each of the books that I've released have made a profit before they were finished and before they released and so...


I don't subscribe or ascribe to the idea that you have to wait until you sell an additional book in order to be able to generate that income. This is also something that I teach authors how to do. And so when you have a system in place so that you are able to develop a path for your readers that goes beyond just selling your book, then you can almost predict to some degree.


⁓ or project, I'll say project. You can kind of project the ways in which you can have your income happen beyond just your book. And so your book shifts from being the most important thing from the book launch perspective to a secondary thing because you're also focusing on other items that we'll talk about in just a bit. And then also you're throwing out the mantra, the idea that you have to wait years and years and years to make money as an author or that you will never be profitable.


you probably have heard the stat that most authors don't sell more than X number of books or they don't make more than X number of money in their lifetime. And typically it's the 250 books. in all honesty, you can do that within your first month. You can do that within your first week. I have a client, well not even a client, I have a customer. She used a copy of my book, Profitable Publishing® with Preorders.


and she was able to generate $4,000 within her first four weeks as an author. And two to three of those weeks were during the preorder period and then she did the rest of the time after her book was out. And that sales on her website and also on Amazon. And so it doesn't have to look the same way as it does for you as others because you don't have to follow that same path that traditionally published authors follow. Now you wanna also be mindful that Profitable Publishing® doesn't


It doesn't just serve those who are self-published authors. You can be an independently published author. There are traditionally published authors who can also use these strategies because typically, depending upon your book deal, you are still having to do your marketing. It's not something where unless you are a really, really big name that the publishing company that you're working with is going to do your marketing for you. And so don't think that just because you are going through either a hybrid



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