9 Ideas for Making Extra Income at Your Speaking Events

There is a way for authors to keep your product sales as a major part of your income. How?

Here are some tips:

Your books are the obvious income generator. Don’t overlook making sure you have all of your titles and they are well displayed or merchandised.
Create a “special edition” of your latest book. Put it in a gift box and autograph it. You can almost double the selling price.
Create at least one new product a year as well as revise or update older products.
Make sure you gather emails of the audience (if it’s manageable) or at least buyers of your products. Every prior satisfied customer of your products becomes a prospect for new and updated releases.
Sell products (non book) that carry through your topic. Speak on time management? Sell a unique calendar. Speak on leadership? Offer inspirational quotes in a frame or a unique daily leather journal.
Many books lend themselves to ancillary workbooks. These types of “guide books” generally go deeper, or ask the person questions to help them inductively learn your material.
Audio and video of your current and other talks. Yes, I know we live in an iTunes world, however, I’ve found that people like physical copies when they’ve heard someone live or they like to give your talk to someone “who needs to hear it.” iTunes is still hard to give as a gift to many people. Don’t leave them out.
Special reports are a nice way to gather email addresses and make people aware of the other topics you may speak or write on. Free ones are a bonus and an inexpensive way to gather names.
Sets of quotes. Take some of your best quotes and put them on cards or have a printer make you a quote book that is spiral bound. An inexpensive way to have your brand in front of your reader.

Couple of warnings—do not offer products as part of your speaker’s fee. Run your own store, make your own margin and let the selling time be a rich time of engaging your readers. Also, be careful to allow filming or recording of your event. It’s best to record it yourself (professionally) and retain the distribution rights. You want to try and be in the driver’s seat of your content and your event’s output. You can negotiate distribution with the venue or promoter of your recordings.

Let me know if you’ve found other ways to generate revenue when you speak. I’d love to hear them.