Use Ancillary Products to Promote Your Book (and Earn More Money)

Are you earning as much as you want to from your indie published books? Many authors aren’t happy with their sluggish sales. And when they come to me with marketing questions hoping to improve their situation, I often ask two questions:

• What does your marketing plan include?
• What other revenue streams have you set up around your book’s brand?

Today I want to focus on the second question–tying other revenue streams to your book in the form of ancillary products. In other words, let’s talk about making more money from your books whether or not you increase book sales directly.

What are Ancillary Products?

An ancillary product is an add-on or complementary product related to your primary product or service.

In this case, your primary product is your book.

Ancillary products might include shorter premium e-books associated with your book’s brand. You’ll see this here with The Deluxe Well-Fed Tool Box and Well-Fed Writer Timeline, ancillary products tied to The Well-Fed Writer. Another ancillary product tied to this book is the Well-Fed Craft course.

Your book helps sell these ancillary products which often serve as an extension of the content in your main book. But the ancillary products might also be found by customers first, meaning they can lead to future book sales as well.

Premium ancillary products can help you earn more from existing fans of your books. And low-cost ancillary products can be used as upselling tools and loss leaders to help you earn more from your books without having to give them away or price the first book in a series at a very low rate. The best part for readers is they can find new things related to the books they love even in between new editions or the next entry in a series.

Why You Should Consider Releasing Ancillary Products

There are two main reasons to consider releasing ancillary products:

• They can increase your income and help you get more mileage out of your book or author brand.
• They can promote sales of your existing book or future books by keeping your name or your book or series names fresh in the minds of your target audience.

The financial incentive is pretty obvious. But think about that second point. You market your book. And you get paid to do so. It’s similar to me telling freelance writers they should incorporate revenue streams into their marketing plans and platform-building (like niche blogs and e-books).

If you can get more out of your marketing time, why wouldn’t you want to do that?

Examples of Ancillary Products for Your Books

Here are a few examples of ancillary products you might release under your book’s brand:

Short E-books and Reports

If you write nonfiction books, these might take a topic you touched on in the book and expand upon them (like a more in-depth tutorial).

If you write fiction you might release short stories or novellas between novels. They might explore a subplot in more depth, they could be prequel stories about new characters you’ve introduced who sounded like they had an interesting past. You could also release shorter stories about what your characters are up to between the times Novel A and Novel B take place.

You might even come up with nonfiction downloads related to your novels. For example, if you write a series that revolves heavily around cooking and you feature recipes in the book, you might release a cookbook e-book with those compiled recipes and photos.

Workbooks and Tools

If you write actionable books, you can also sell tools to make the process easier — a workbook, access to specialized online tools and calculators, or something else along those lines. For example, if you write a book about planning weddings (or even a novel revolving around the topic), you could release your own wedding planner.

Games

This is a type of ancillary product I intend to release along with a mystery series that involves a type of party game. But you could create anything from a board game or card game to a mobile game if it makes sense for your book. For nonfiction, you might consider software or an app as well.

Courses

You might think of e-courses as services, but you can release them in product form too. For example, create a members-only website for a self-paced course. Then put your course material on that site. Only paying logged-in members can access it. You can also set up autoresponder email courses, or use a learning management system like LearnDash (for WordPress sites) or Moodle.

The idea is to give buyers something they can access on their own time rather than a service-based approach where you have to physically be available and schedule each event for a more limited number of participants.

Traditional merchandise

You could also rely on good old fashioned merch to serve as ancillary products. This could be especially good if you write inspirational books. Coffee mugs, pens, t-shirts, and calendars are just a few examples. Think about any relevant product that could sport your logo or other brand elements, and ask yourself if it might appeal to readers.

The idea is to look within your own book first. Do you mention a specific product a lot? Could you create something similar to promote and sell? Does your book have a message that people would pay for? Is there an educational angle you could use to sell information products? There is no one size fits all list here. Your books dictate the types of ancillary products that would work best for you.

Note: This is a revised and updated post, originally published at All Freelance Writing on June 22, 2011.