According to Research and Markets, the global eLearning market is forecast to grow to USD $388.23 billion by 2026. That means there is a massive potential for published authors, who already have content to deliver derived from their book.
Taking the content from your book and turning it into digital learning assets provides you with a number of benefits including:
- Profitable revenue stream
- Greater impact with more accessible content
- Scalable business
Benefit #1 – Profitable revenue stream
The reality is that most authors will not make a profit from their book sales. If we assume that the editing and publishing costs of the book are between $5,000 and $10,000 then you would need to sell between 200 and 400 copies of a $25 book to break even. However, if you were to invest a further $10,000 to have a professional digital learning agency convert your book into an online course which you could sell at a higher cost you would need fewer course enrolments to recoup your investment in both the book and the course.
Let’s have a look at some numbers to see the impact of offering a course in addition to your book.
| You have 200 sales from your book launch, that you are selling at $20 per book | $4,000 |
| You sell 5 books per month in the first year | $1,200 |
| Total income from book sales in first year | $5,200 |
Now let’s look at if an online course was included with the book launch.
| Let’s assume that 10% of the people (20) that buy your book at launch also purchase your $500 course | $10,000 |
| You get an additional 5 course enrolments each month in the first year, with your course marketing program | $30,000 |
| Let’s assume that 1% of the course enrolments (80 in first year) take up your offer of the group coaching program selling for $3,000 | $24,000 |
| Total income from course sales in first year | $64,000 |
So we can see that the course provides a 12X better return than book sales alone.
Note, these numbers are used to illustrate the point and the volume of sales and percentages of people taking up the course offer may differ in your situation, but even if the course figures dropped by 50%, you would still have a 600% better return than the book alone.
Benefit #2 – Greater impact with more accessible content
While your book is full of valuable information, the reality is that a course will provide the opportunity for more transformation. A book will contain valuable information. It is usually filled with great stories that will help to plant ideas or motivate the user. But, it generally won’t provide the transformation that is needed to move a person from problem to prize. It’s not going to deliver the impact that comes from the transformational change. However, your course will be packed with actionable course lessons. A learner following these lessons should be able to deliver the transformation required. This, coupled with tools & templates, interactive activities, plus the potential to have coaching sessions with you (or someone from your team) personally is going to provide a much greater impact than the information found in a book. Plus, being in a digital format people will have greater access this transformational content, anytime anywhere.
Benefit #3 – Scalable business
Extracting the valuable information from your head and creating assets that others can access and use is essential to scaling. When delivering all the information and transformation personally, you can only scale as much as you’re physically able to deliver. Creating a book is a great to start to scale, however you will get greater leverage and scale by creating digital assets. Those digital assets are going to allow you to deliver your information and training to your clients in a way they can consume 24/7, anywhere, with or without you. This is going to mean you can reach more people with less effort.
With information packaged up into digital assets, and done in the right way, it also allows you to scale further by bringing on other people to help with delivering the transformation.
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