A-list copywriter Bob Bly just sent out an email about the National Emergency Library. I’d heard of this initiative but I didn’t bother to look it up until now.
Turns out, the Internet Archive is scanning books and making them freely available online during the corona situation. That’s the National Emergency Library. To which Mary Rasenberger, director of the Authors Guild, said (and I quote from Bob’s email):
“[It is] no different than any other piracy sites. If you can get anything that you want that’s on Internet Archives for free, why are you going to buy an ebook.”
I don’t know about you, but to me this sounds like the old argument about sex and marriage. Why buy the cow, when there’s an app that hooks you up with free milk, even at 3am.
And yet… plenty of people are still getting married these days. How come? Riddle me that, Mary.
But seriously, here’s a little-known fact about me:
For about a year of my life, I eked a meager living by writing ebooks and selling them through Amazon Kindle publishing. (Don’t search for the books because they were all published under pseudonyms.)
I actually sold thousands of copies of these books — but it didn’t mean much. Kindle ebooks sell for a couple of bucks each.
Thing is, had I known as much about marketing back then as I do now, I wouldn’t have failed or given up on my Kindle publishing dreams.
That’s because selling books on Amazon (or really, on any outside platform) is not a good way to make money. It is, however, a fantastic way to get highly qualified leads who have tried a glass of your milk, and who want more.
That means you can get these folks over to your site and sell them more milk — maybe at a higher price than what Amazon encourages you to charge.
Why stop there though?
If somebody likes you and knows you and trusts you, why limit your offer to a carton or two of milk?
Instead, take your new-found customer by the hand to the back of your property… open the barn door… and introduce her to your gorgeous cow. It might be just the bovine your customer has been looking for all her life.
In other words, if the National Emergency Library, the National Milk Authority, or any other pirate institution starts giving away samples of your money-maker for free, it might not be the end of the world. It might even be the start of something great. As multi-millionaire marketer Joe Sugarman once said:
“Each problem has hidden in it an opportunity so powerful that it literally dwarfs the problem. The greatest success stories were created by people who recognized a problem & turned it into an opportunity.”