The Book Deal Was Never The Finish Line.

There's a particular kind of pride that comes with holding your own book for the first time, and it's entirely deserved. Years of thinking condensed into something with weight and a spine, your name on the cover where anyone can see it. What nobody tells you at that moment, however, is that you've also just arrived at the point where the financial return on all that work begins to taper off rather sharply.

Royalties on a published book generally land somewhere between seven and twenty-five per cent of the cover price, depending on the publisher, the format, and how the contract happened to be negotiated. On a book retailing for ten or twenty pounds, that percentage translates into a sum that has very little relationship to the years of expertise it took to write it. What it actually reflects is the economics of a format designed for wide distribution at a low price point, which was never really built to carry the full weight of what you know.

What The Book Was Actually Doing

A book is a superb piece of evidence. It proves, convincingly, that you understand your subject. Where it tends to fall short is in the business of actually getting that understanding into someone else's hands in a form they can use. There's a meaningful difference between reading about a framework and being walked through applying it, and most authors already sense this, if only because they wrote the book hoping readers would go and do something with it rather than simply finish it and put it on a shelf.

A course, done properly, isn't competing with the book at all. It picks up where the book left off, turning explanation that sits still on a page into something structured, sequenced and supported, with the kind of accountability that no amount of good writing can provide on its own.

A Real Example

We transformed the bestselling book Voice-Over Voice Actor into a comprehensive online training programme, working closely with acclaimed voice actors Tara Platt and Yuri Lowenthal to adapt their expertise into an engaging, self-paced learning experience. The project involved instructional design, restructuring the book's content into seventeen logical learning modules, scripting and organising video lessons, developing practical exercises and downloadable workbooks, and building the complete online course experience from the ground up.

The result is a premium educational product that captures the full depth of the original book while leaning on video, interactive resources and guided learning to help aspiring voice actors build genuinely successful careers, rather than simply finishing a good read and wondering where to go next. 

"We have been really pleased with the Kajabi class that Mark and Cheryl at The Customer's Shoes helped us set up and build on the platform. We knew nothing about the ins and outs of the platform and their work and guidance was indispensable. We had our own concepts for the course but wouldn't have been able to bring it to life without their skills and creative input. They are very communicative and were willing to work with both our timeline and adjustments as we went. And we appreciated that they guided us through the complexities with kindness and patience."

 - Yuri Lowenthal & Tara Platt, Voice-Over Voice Actor: The Course

The Question We'd Ask You

Think about your book's most devoted reader, the one who underlined half the pages and sent you a message afterwards to say how much it meant. What, in practical terms, did they actually go and do differently once they'd finished it? If the honest answer is not a great deal, that isn't a mark against the book. Books were never designed to hold anyone's hand through implementation. That particular job belongs to a different format entirely.

Where To Start

Our service to Turn Your Book Into a Course exists for precisely that handoff, taking everything you've already proven in print and building the structure that finally lets someone put it into practice.

Related Service: How to Turn Your Book into a Course

Source: Voice-Over Voice Actor Online Course