Tip of the Day

Lean Publishing Tip of the Day: Selling Your Book to Conferences

Keeping a list of conferences relevant to your book - and keeping it up-to-date by being on the lookout for new conferences - is a potentially enormously profitable tactic for marketing your book.

One of the most-overlooked audiences for self-published non-fiction ebooks are conferences.

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Keeping a list of conferences relevant to your book - and keeping it up-to-date by being on the lookout for new conferences - is a potentially enormously profitable tactic for marketing your book.

The key thing to keep in mind when sell your ebook to conferences is that you are going to offer them a special discount.

The Easiest Way to Promote Your Ebook to Conferences

The easiest way to promote your ebook to people attending a conference is to create a discount coupon link with a special code like “ConferenceNameYear”, and to pitch the coupon link to conference-goers on social media using their hashtag, e.g. #ConferenceNameYear, or whatever they’re using.

Make a note in your calendar for the conference day or days, and on those days, you can go and social media and promote the coupon link.

Yes, in this approach, anyone who sees the coupon link for the conference can use it - which is great news! It means anyone following the conference online, who couldn’t attend for some reason, but is still interested in the conference, can buy your book and become one of your new readers.

A Harder (But Potentially More Profitable) Way to Promote Your Ebook to Conferences

Another way to sell your book to people attending a conference is to make a promotional arrangement with the conference organizers.

This will involve contacting the conference organizers and essentially pitching them something of value to them, and to their attendees.

The opportunities here are as wide as your imagination, but here are a couple of ideas:

  • Offer some number of copies of your book as free swag. You would then create a coupon with a use limit and tell the organizers, “Please let everyone know the first 100 people who use this coupon link will get my book for free.”

That kind of thing will encourage the organizers to promote your book to their attendees - it’s like you’ve become a kind of sponsor, giving them something of value to give away, in exchange for bringing some attention to your book.

  • You could also try to negotiate a bulk sale at a discount with the conference organizers. For example, if a conference is going to have 1,000 attendees, you could say, “If you buy my $20-per-copy book for $10,000, I’ll give you 1,000 unique coupons links, each redeemable for a free copy of my book, essentially giving you a 50% discount, where you’re only paying $10 per copy.”

(Yes, someone can choose to pay $10,000 dollars for your book on Leanpub, by typing that amount into the “You Pay” box on the book’s landing page.)

(And yes, you can make batches of coupon links.)

Here are a couple of articles from our Author Help Center that may help you make a big sale to a conference:

Create a Book Now!
Publish Early, Publish Often

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