Janine Bolon: Hello. This is Janine Bolon, with this week’s three-minute money tip and today we have a guest speaker. Her name is Teresa Funke and she knew three things when she was 10 years old. She would love to history, she desired to be a writer, and she wanted a job in which she was never bored. Guess what? For the past 30 years, Teresa has been running her own company and learning tips and tricks that will help you in your life with money. Believe it or not. She is also a community catalyst. She speaks widely and runs programs that support history, education, literacy, writing the arts and personal development. So, thank you so much for being with us today, Teresa.
Teresa Funke: Thank you Janine, and I’m going to hop right in and talk about one of my favorite subjects, which is bundling. So, I am an author and I’m going to be talking about books, but you can apply this towards any product that you have. So, as an author, I’ve written seven books about World War II, five for children, two for adults, and in the beginning I was mostly in the back of the room when I was speaking or when I was at a book fair, and I was selling them individually and doing pretty well.
When I landed on the concept of bundling, things really took off, and I was doubling my income at each of those events. And so, almost as many people as we’re buying single copies of the books were buying the bundles because they realize with just a little bit more money, they’d have more books to share. And so, the bundles became very popular. I have a five book bundle which is my children series, and a 7 book bundle which is the Teresa fun collection, all seven of my books including the two for adults. So, one of the fun things to think about when you’re bundling is how you talk about those bundles. So, we noticed that there were some people who responded better when we said, “it’s almost the equivalent of a 20% discount”. And, there were other people who responded better when we said, “it’s almost the equivalent of getting one book for free”. And so, just play around with how it lands on the ears of different people that you’re talking to and that can be a really fun way to handle your sales.
Now, what if you only have one book because bundling is easier if you have more than one book. So, I’m in that scenario. Now, where after writing World War II for a long time, I now have an inspirational book called “Burst of Brilliance for a Creative Life” and I’m bundling that one as a single book because it doesn’t go with the World War II books. So, that one the bundles are more like this. Buy three, get one free. Buy five, get two free. And, what I’m targeting there is book clubs or maybe a small business that wants to give a copy to each of its employees so they can become more creative. And so, that’s working really well for that single book.
Another thing you can do is single books is bundled with merchandise. So, if you have a cookbook, you might want to bundle it with some really fun cooking utensils and that’s fun, or you can create your own additional materials like right now, I have a journal and a group of note cards and we’re going to bundle those together with the book Burst of Brilliance.
Another thing you can do that this is more creative, I think, is to bundle with other authors or other people in your field. So, let’s say you create a Colorado Sci-fi bundle, and you have three or four authors who each have one book in that category. Now, this creates a little bit more logistics because you got to make sure everybody gets paid, but it’s a super fun way to market and promote your fellow people in your industry.
And then, the last tip I wanted to give, is about bundling for a niche within your market. So, for me, that would be the education niche because I work with a lot of teachers and I love teachers. And so, we created a school kit that has 30 copies of my books for the classroom set, along with teaching materials and a gift for the students.
We also have a reading group set, which is 10 books, teaching materials, and a gift for the students. Now, the teachers can buy these kits for themselves and they sometimes do, but far more often people buy these kits as a gift for their favorite teacher or say their grandchild’s school. This has been very effective for us, we’ve placed over a hundred of these kits in schools across the country. So, that’s a great revenue generator for me. We also have a single kit, which is just one copy of the book with the lesson plans and the postcard for the teachers. The teachers can buy individually for only $20, if they just want one of my books for a read-aloud. So, that’s kind of my best tips on bundling and have fun with it because it’s a really great way to increase your revenue.
Janine: And, this is this week’s three-minute money tip and I’m Janine Bolon saying, we broadcast every Friday. So definitely, stay tuned on Spotify, iTunes, whatever your favorite player is and be sure to look us up every Friday with the three-minute money tip. Have a great weekend.