What are incentives and why do they matter to authors?

An incentive is merchandise, travel or cash that organizations use to motivate some target audience to take a desired action. Marketing departments use incentives with prospects, customers, dealers, partners, etc. Human Resource departments use incentives with employes.

The incentives industry is $46 billion per year, and books are upwards of a $1 billion portion of it. Consumer promotions are one of the biggest parts of marketing incentive programs. Here are a few examples:

• As a incentive for joining their condensed book club, Reader's Digest gave away 750,000 copies of Judith King's Greatest Gift Guide Ever.

• Grosset & Dunlap offered Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books as a self-liquidating (break-even) incentive on 20 million boxes of Post Raisin Bran cereal, resulting in the sale of over one million books
  

• R.J. Reynolds distributed 1.5 million copies of the Great Trails Road Atlas as an on-pack (attached to the package) incentive offer on cartons of Marlboros to promote the image of the Marlboro Man.
  

• U.S. West purchased 2,000 copies of Talking with Your Customers to demonstrate appreciation to their Yellow Pages advertisers
  

• Before its publish date, Kenneth Blanchard sent copies of Who Moved My Cheese to the CEOs of corporations. The Bank of Hawaii bought 4000, Mercedes Benz 7000, and Southwest Airlines 27,000.

• Judy Dugan sold 5,000 copies of her self-published book, Santa Barbara Highlights and History, to a Santa Barbara bank who gave a copy to every customer who came in to a new branch opening

What are the benefits to the author of selling to the books-as-incentives market?

• It's likely to be the best thing you've ever done to promote your practice and other products and services. Success provides you greater exposure, credibility, pride and self-confidence.
  

• Unlike bookstore channels, you have little or no competition!Because authors and independent publishers don't understand this market, organizations receive very few, if any, proposals. Present yourself professionally and persuasively (with the tools I'll give you) and you have a great chance at getting noticed and considered.

• Selling to the incentives market is totally compatible with any other marketing or distribution program you’re doing. And it doesn’t matter if you self-published, used a traditional publisher or a POD publisher (more below).

• By building a track record of book sales, you open the door to other opportunities- traditional publishers, literary agents, other sales channels, partners, clients. It only opens other doors for you, while closing none.