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What are incentives and why do they matter to independent publishers?
An incentive is merchandise, travel or cash that organizations use to motivate some target audience to take a desired action. Marketing departments use incentives wit h prospects, customers, dealers, partners, etc. Human Resource departments use incentives with employees.
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
Are all the deals that big?
No...
- 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
Incentive Books – Your Outsourced Incentives Sales Department
Whatever else you're doing to market and distribute your books, you should also be getting exposure to incentive buyers. One sale through IncentiveBooks.com could easily eclipse your sales from all other sources combined. Our business model is to build a large catalog of quality, relevant books and expose IncentiveBooks.com to an ever-growing and widening universe of potential buyers with diverse audiences and interests.
There is an annual fee of $197.00 per book per year for a Basic Listing in our catalog to help offset administrative costs such as database management, hosting and technical support costs. (Note: this is a "charter-client" fee which we anticipate will increase significantly in the future; charter clients will be grandfathered into renewing at the above price, so now is the time to get on board.)
For a detailed description of how our program works, download our PDF overview here. Once you're ready to proceed, here's the process for getting your book(s) into our program:
Step One: Getting Your Book Accepted - Alert Us That You're Interested (no obligation involved)
It is very important to IncentiveBook's credibility with buyers to represent only books that we have screened for quality and relevance to incentive programs. So the process starts with having us review your book and determine if it meets the desired criteria. Here's how to proceed:
If you've registered on our site before, simply log into the site and click on the "Submit Book for Consideration" link on the left side of the page. Complete the form and submit it to us.
If you have never registered on our site before, go to our Submit Your Books page and read the instructions. Here's a summary of the very straight-forward process:
- Write down the mailing address provided for mailing the book
- Click the "Submit" button towards the bottom of the page.
- On the registration page, click "New User" at the bottom of the registration box
- Create a user registration and submit it (Note: please record the email address, username and password you use for your registration. You'll need it to log into our site in the future)
- On the next page, click on "Submit Book for Consideration" in the "My Account" box on the left
- Complete and submit the "Submit Book for Consideration" form
At any time in the future that you would like to submit additional books, simply log into our site and click the "Submit Book for Consideration" link on the left side of your account management page. If you have a significant quantity of books that you would like to submit, please contact us and we'll provide an expedited way to submit the books.
Step Two: Getting Your Book Accepted - Sending Us a Review Copy of the Book
Send us a copy of each of your submitted book(s) for review. (Books will not be returned.) Once we've reviewed the book(s), we'll let you know at the e-mail address provided when you registered which ones we believe are a good fit for our catalog and provide you easy-to-follow instructions on how to publish your book listing(s) to our catalog.
Step Three - Matching Your Book with the Right Prospects
When a buyer submits an inquiry to us about your book, we will contact them to answer their questions, advise them on making the best use of your book as an incentive and discuss how our optional services can improve the ROI of their incentive program.
Step Four - Closing Deals
When a buyer decides to purchase your book, we'll negotiate the deal in keeping with the terms of our Publishers Agreement, get your approval and execute a Purchase Agreement with the Buyer. We then coordinate payments and delivery of books to the Buyer. There are more details about the sales process in our downloadable PDF overview.
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