Authorpreneur: How to Build a Business around Your Book

by Nina Amir

You’re happiest when you’re writing. It’s what you’ve been put on this Earth to do, and you hope to one day make a living from your books. But you've probably realized how difficult it is to earn enough from book sales alone. In fact, most authors, even some New York Times bestsellers, end up having to take on outside work in order to make ends meet. If you must do other work, why not have it be work that supports and relates to what you love—your books? If you want to earn a living as an author, you have to think beyond your book. Not only that, think like someone who is more than an author. Think like an entrepreneur. Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, just the fact that you’re writing books means you have what it takes to become an authorpreneur.

Genres: Writing, Business

84 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 22, 2014

About the author

Nina Amir is an Amazon bestselling author of such books as How to Blog a Book, The Author Training Manual and Creative Visualization for Writers (October 2016). She is known as the Inspiration to Creation Coach because she helps writers, bloggers and other creative people combine their passion and purpose so they move from idea to inspired action and Achieve More Inspired Results. This helps them positively and meaningfully impact the world—with their words or other creations.

Nina is a hybrid author who has self-published 18 books and had as many as nine books on Amazon Top 100 lists and six on the same bestseller list (Authorship) at the same time.

As an Author Coach, Nina supports writers on the journey to successful authorship. Some of her clients have sold 300,000+ copies of their books, landed deals with major publishing houses and created thriving businesses around their books. She is the creator of a proprietary Author Training curriculum for writers and other coaches.

Nina is an international speaker and award-winning journalist and blogger as well as the founder of National Nonfiction Writing Month and the Nonfiction Writers’ University.

She also is one of 300 elite Certified High Performance Coaches working around the world and she specializes in helping writers increase their clarity, courage, energy, influence, and productivity.

For more information, visit www.ninaamir.com.

Reviews

[Ed Barton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful Info

This takes the ‘How to become an online author’ to a whole new level. Focusing on the business of authorship rather than writing, you will get good tips and tricks on making yourself an entrepreneur. Tangential business lines and courses, blogs, websites, speaking, there’s a lot to be done and they are touched on here.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very helpful resource to make a business around the books that you write. The author discusses many of the aspects of different ways to monetize your book other than just book sales.

[Sue Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

First things first, Amir emphasizes that you need a plan. Income isn’t going to happen by accident. You, the author, have to make it happen. Instead of going with the first idea or two that comes to mind, Amir encourages readers to brainstorm.

Not sure what to brainstorm about? Amir has suggestions ranging from free ebooks to telesiminars and more. Follow her steps to come up with your list. Once you have a list, figure out when each item needs to be finished. With that date in mind, you can figure out when you need to start this piece of the puzzle.

Individual chapters cover various possibilities for salable content including:

Short e-books. Based on my Ancient Maya book, I could write short e-books on how to research an ancient culture, what 5 experts have to say about the Maya, and more. Amir encourages readers to go beyond a simple e-book to include videos and transcriptions of videos and worksheets as additional content on your website.
Talks based on your book. For nonfiction, Amir suggests that you look at each chapter and see if it could be the subject of a talk. For fiction, use themes and topics as subjects or speak on the writing process.
Workshops and classes. These can be built from the topics of your talks.
Do you see how Amir takes you from one idea to another? Don’t take the time to develop 6 vaguely related items. Instead, use your book to create e-books and lectures. Take these lectures and turn them into classes and workshops. Lecture or classes can be used to create videos. These become transcriptions. One piece leads to the next.

Not that you have to create them all. Amir knows that no single writer will be comfortable with the full range but she still shows you all of the possibilities.

In the first several chapters, I sometimes found myself wanting a bit more content. How do I do this? What steps should I take? What do you mean? I should have been a bit more patient — this material was all in the book, in the later more detailed chapters. Although Amir doesn’t take you step by step on how to create an e-book or a webinar, she does take you through the process of deciding what to cover, some of your options, and what tools you need to get the job done.

Amir is definitely the one to lead the way and she definitely practices what she preaches. She is author of How to Blog a Book, The Author Training Manual, and 10 Days and 10 Ways to Return to Your Best Self, transforms writers into inspired, successful authors, authorpreneurs and blogpreneurs as an Inspiration to Creation Coach. She moves her clients from ideas to finished books as well as to careers as authors by helping them combine their passion and purpose so they create products that positively and meaningfully impact the world. She writes four blogs, self-published 12 books and founded National Nonfiction Writing Month, aka the Write Nonfiction in November Challenge.

[Renee Roberson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like most of us, Nina Amir says she started out with the dream of just being an author. It didn't take long for her to realize she could capitalize on the information she had already researched and created by building a business tied to her books.

I personally am focused write now on finishing revisions on two YA and one MG novels, but when the times comes, I am well aware I'll have to create products and services related to those books in order to bring in extra money. While reading Authorpreneur, my mind kept wandering back to a non-fiction book proposal I wrote several years ago and pitched to exactly one agent before getting a polite rejection letter and putting in a drawer. At the time, I wasn't aware of all the self-publishing options out there. Now I realize I could produce the idea into an e-book, especially since I've already put together a mock syllabus for a related online class.

After reading Authorpreneur, I soon realized the sky's the limit--it all depends on how passionate and organized you are about you book's topic. An author has the ability to create e-books, workbooks, templates, spreadsheets, bonus material, podcasts, videos, workshops, classes, telesiminars, webinars, speaking engagements, and so much more.

For example, I've often wondered how some writing coaches and consultants create websites with "members only" subscriptions, and this is one of Nina's areas of expertise. She guides the reader on the best services to use and how to set up the sites based on your particular needs/wants, as well as creating mailing lists.

While the information in this book is mostly geared toward those who write non-fiction, I did find a few gems that fiction writers can also use wisely, such as this one:

"If you write fiction, you have to be creative," says Nina. "Think about crossing over into nonfiction and creating an area of expertise related to the themes and subjects in your novel."

Thanks to Authorpreneur, when my publishing dream becomes a reality, I'll be well-prepared to make the most out of my expertise and content. That's a beautiful thing.

[Susan Barton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subtitle of this book is “How to Build a Business around Your Book”, so that’s the primary focus. From the start, the author addresses the cold hard facts of being an author – most authors do not get rich from selling their books. Then she goes on to state that authors need to view their books as entrepreneurs view their products. This is an excellent point to make and one that many authors ignore.

Authorpreneur is for both fiction and non-fiction authors. Building a business around fiction and non-fiction books is broken down at the beginning of the book. There are suggestions for using a book as a jumping off point for other business ideas.

The author also gives some great information on ways to write more books – this is probably the best way to build a fan base and I was happy to see Ms. Amir discuss this concept clearly and succinctly.

There’s a certain amount of repetition here and there, however, but perhaps the author really wanted to drive the point home for authors – come up with more book ideas, properly brainstorm them, and you’ll begin to build a business. Using mini-books to sell books is an excellent way to proceed and Ms. Amir addresses these valuable selling tools. Webinars, seminars, teleseminars and online courses are also discussed in detail.

Overall, I’d say this book has a lot of valuable information for authors who want to take their book-writing skills to the next level.

[Vickie Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very informative book, I will definitely be using some of the good tips in this book. Will be keeping it handy to reference later.

[Nancy Mure · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was very happy to find this well written book. I found it to be helpful as well as an enlightening source for marketing your own book! I still reference it!