Selling to Corporate America

by Don Bacue

There are several ways of getting a book published and milking the dickens out of sales.  The first and most obvious is to get picked up by a major publishing house that has decided to throw several hundred dollars worth of promotional dollars into your campaign.  Full-page ads in the New York Times Review of Books, television and radio commercial spots, magazine and newspaper advertisements, college campus tours, television and radio appearances--they all add up in a hurry.

But for those of us less fortunate, there is another way that can be nearly as profitable, even with the smallest of publishing houses behind us.

Yes, it's true.  The quickest and easiest way for any author to sell thousands or even hundreds of thousands of books a year isn't through bookstores but rather through one single outlet: corporate America.

Find a single corporation that can benefit from purchasing your book in droves, and you'll watch your sales figures shoot through the Amazonian roof.

Why, you ask, would a Fortune 500 company be interested in buying 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 copies of your book or more?  Simple.

Promotion.

Imagine for a minute that you've written a book on the history of the venerable Ford Mustang.  Can you picture any company in America wanting to buy your book for redistribution to the public?  Of course you can.  Ford could give copies away to anyone who took a test drive in a Mustang, use them as incentives for sales quotas, pitch them at car shows, even include one in the glove box of every new Mustang purchased before year's end.

(Hmmm...I think I really like this one.  Dibs on right of first refusal!)

But you don't have to write about Mustangs and don't have to market your book to Ford to be successful.  Are you turning out a tome on the latest medical cures for cancer?  Corporate America is standing in the wings, salivating.  Putting the finishing touches on a new book on eating light?  Corporate America just can't wait.  Pitching a publisher an idea for a book on the history of fossil fuels in the United States?  Corporate America is ready to drill for a gusher.

Companies buy and redistribute books all the time and for many reasons.  Promotion, incentives, name recognition, customer good will...in short, if there's a buck to be made from a book you've written, you can bet corporate America will be the first in line to cash in on it.  And you'll soon find yourself wondering why you didn't think of it before!

Best of all, it's easier than you might think to land these kinds of high-dollar, high-stakes super-lucrative deals, if you understand who your book targets and who can stand to gain from its publication.  Companies are used to purchasing mega quantities of books in virtually every genre.  If you can think of a potential market for your book, there's a company nearby that will be willing to spring for a few thousand copies--and perhaps more...much more.

When you think of the vast number and array of companies on the Fortune 500 list alone, not to mention on the New York Stock Exchange, you begin to see how selling your book to corporate America can really pay off.

The only question now is: what are you waiting for?

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