Passive Income from Booklets and Special Reports

by Marcia Yudkin

"Booklets." "Special reports." These words sound pretty 
insignificant, don't they? But the results you achieve with 
these little collections of useful information can be 
anything but small and limited.

They don't cost much energy or money to produce, but 
booklets and special reports can bring you the following 
kinds of results:

* A big burst of extra money, or a steady stream of revenue 
for years, as you prefer - some items have earned as much as 
half a million to a million dollars for their authors!

* A valuable list of people interested in your topic, to 
rent out or use yourself for sales of more expensive 
products and services

* Possibilities for translations and bulk sales - i.e., 
greater exposure and income

* Content that you can resell in other formats, such as 
audio or video tapes, articles, books, subscription Web 
sites

* An inexpensive means of testing the waters for bigger 
products

* A method of making an end run around the editorial 
gatekeepers at magazines and book publishers

* An easy, inexpensive entry into the highly profitable 
information business

* Additional opportunities such as speaking engagements, 
consulting, audiotape possibilities, magazine articles, book 
contracts and business partnerships

Compared with some other vehicles for selling information, 
booklets and special reports have these advantages:

* So long as you have a computer and either a high-end word-
processing program or a desktop design program, you don't 
need additional equipment to create these products.

* Most people will not need to hire a producer or designer 
in order to create a salable product.

* You don't need the space or advance investment to stock 
inventory, but can instead create booklets and special 
reports on demand, as people send in money. Hence you can 
get started with an outlay of less than $10. Truly!

* You can change or update the contents of your booklets and 
special reports immediately, as circumstances warrant. This 
enables you to scoop monthly magazines and books, which have 
lead times of three months to one year.

* Although your information must be up-to-date, useful and 
valid, it needn't offer content that no one else has. 
Buyers pay for booklets and special reports primarily to 
have information in a handy, easily digestible form.

* You don't need high-level communication skills to produce 
salable booklets, although I do recommend that you take 
steps to ensure proper spelling, punctuation and grammar.

* Unlike newsletters, you don't commit yourself to future 
issues on into the future.

* You don't need to convince editors that you and your idea 
merit space in their publishing program. Buyers deal with 
you directly.

* Your profit margin is high - a booklet selling for $5.00 
might cost you $.10 to produce, while a special report 
selling for $95 might cost nothing other than the labor that 
went into it.

To be fair, let me list some disadvantages of booklets and 
special reports, compared with other information products:

* They don't last anywhere as long as books, audios or 
videos and don't look impressive on a buyer's bookshelf.

* They can't contain as much of your personality as an 
audiotape or video.

* As one-shots, they have less impact over time with each 
buyer than a newsletter.

* Since they're self-produced, they don't serve as much of a 
credential, although they can do an excellent job of proving 
that you know your stuff.

* They don't make it into public libraries very often, 
compared to information in other formats.

* Since they need to be practical and snappy, they can't 
provide an outlet for the full range of your creative 
talents.

All in all, however, booklets and special reports are easy 
to write and can easily generate a stream of extra revenue 
not requiring your time and attention once everything's set 
up. This passive income can become plentiful indeed!

The above is excerpted from "Profiting from Booklets and 
Special Reports" by Marcia Yudkin, available from 
http://www.yudkin.com/bookletsreports.htm . Marcia Yudkin 
<marcia@yudkin.com> is the author of 11 books, including 
Persuading on Paper and Poor Richard's Web Site Marketing 
Makeover.