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If you’re a nonfiction author, you’ve written a book to teach something to someone. Oftentimes nonfiction authors have the idea to turn their book into a high-ticket offer but don’t know how to do so. This blog post will help you turn your book into a high ticket offer that can help bring stability to your brand and business.

What is a High-Ticket Offer?

Let’s get the obvious out of the way and define a high-ticket offer. This can look different for every entrepreneur both in terms of price and the actual offer. Common high-ticket offers include:

• Coaching
• Consulting
• Courses
• Masterminds
• Retreats
• VIP days
• Physical products
• Software
• ‘Done With You‘ and ‘Done For You‘ services

Pricing

The term “high-ticket” applies to any service or product that is sold for over $1,000. Actually, $1,000 is still on the low end for most of the offers listed above. For instance, some mastermind groups are well in the five-figure range. In my personal opinion, my definition is anything $5,000 or above. Once again, this definition is going to be different for different businesses.

The price of your offer is going to depend on a lot of things, like whether or not you’re marketing to the B2B (business-to-business) sector or to the B2C (business-to-consumer) sector. For example, if you wrote the ultimate guide to dog walking and your end customer was dog owners, you’re likely not going to be able to charge as much for your course on training dogs on leash training.

If your focus was on the B2B side and your business targeted pet store owners so you could host in-store workshops, you’d be able to charge much higher fees.

Choosing Your High-Ticket Offer

Determining what your high-ticket offer depends on a few factors; your personality type, experience, and resources mainly. An introvert may not like hosting retreats where they will be actively engaged with people for a long period of time. Solopreneurs are limited to delivering all the services or products for a high-end offer themselves and may not be able to handle a project with many moving parts.

You have to determine what is best for your business and the end goal you have in mind for both your business and yourself. Do you want to have a business that involves you delivering all the products or services yourself? Do you want to have the freedom to work when and where you want? Do you only want to “work” a few days a month doing VIP days for clients?

Envision your life one year from now. If that sounds too soon in the future, try three years. Where do you see yourself and the type of business you’ve created for yourself?

Make sure the high-ticket program you choose aligns with your future goals.

Your Book

We also have to take into consideration the type of book that can lead readers into your high-ticket program. There are certain features a book needs to have in order to do this with the least resistance possible.

Your book needs to ascend readers into buyers of your supplemental products and services related to your high-ticket offer through the ascension model. Readers can jump from book buyer directly into a high-ticket program, but it’s not likely and may take more time. (We’ll get into supplemental products for your high-ticket offer a little later.)

The ascension model is based on your book creating a problem that the reader now needs to be solved after reading it. For example, in Write a Book, Build a Brand readers may want to quickly implement the method for their own business, but don’t know how to put all the pieces together. My book has caused a problem – people want to be able to achieve what they’ve learned in the book faster, with less hassle and fewer mistakes made along the way.

Here are the features your book needs to lead people into your high-ticket offers:

• Non-fiction

• Teaches your complete signature method, framework or system

• Leaves the reader with a new problem after finishing your book

That’s it! It’s not as complicated as some people try to make it.

Let’s go over the features a bit more in detail.

Non-fiction: The reason your book should be non-fiction is obvious. We’re selling reality and not fantasy.

Teaches your complete signature method, framework, or system: This is a biggie and in my opinion the most important component of turning a book into a high-ticket program. People who buy your book look to have a particular problem solved after reading your book. If your book doesn’t solve that problem, they won’t be very happy with you and a less likely to purchase anything from you in the future.

An example of a book that doesn’t solve a problem is one that gives partial information and then at the end, the author pitches their course that has ALL the information the reader thought they would get in the book. This is a common technique I’ve seen used over the years in books, webinars, and other pieces of training.

This is a slimy and sleazy technique that some marketer came up with to “trick” people into purchasing their more expensive offer.

I don’t condone this type of marketing at all.

If you’ve read Write a Book, Build a Brand you’d know that I’m an advocate of “giving it all away” in terms of my system and knowledge. Some people may take offense to this method and be scared of “someone stealing” their process, but there are many reasons to be upfront in providing knowledge to your readers.

First off, there’s really nothing new under the sun. You may approach things in a unique matter, but you yourself learned that technique, framework, or system from other people, no?

Secondly, I believe that when you give it all away, it makes people more inclined to purchase more from you. Here’s a great example I recently read in the book Five Figure Funnels by Michale Killen he has the same beliefs as myself and mentions that famous cooks write cookbooks all the time. Who in their right mind is going to say, “I’m not going to visit chef Ramsey’s restaurant because I have his cookbook and I know how to cook like him already?” Absolutely no one.

Thirdly, we all experience this world in different ways. Even if someone did carry out everything step-by-step, they likely wouldn’t get the same results as you because they have different perspectives, tools, life experiences, and determination.

When you give out half-a$$ed information, don’t expect people to come to you for the full picture.

Leaves the reader with a new problem after finishing your book: Your book needs to create a new problem after people have read your book. Let’s not confuse this with not having complete information. There is a difference.

The problem your book needs to leave someone with is the need to implement your method faster, with less effort, or with fewer mistakes. Just like high-ticket offers, there are many supplemental products you can offer in order to solve the problems of your readers.

The one caveat of supplemental offers is that you don’t want them to cannibalize any of your other offers including your book and high-ticket offer. For example, you wouldn’t want to have a course teaching the exact same things you covered in your book. People who end up buying your book and course will likely ask for refunds on either of the products because they covered the exact same material in different formats.

Supplemental Products

I briefly made reference to supplemental products in the previous section so I’m going to elaborate a bit more here. It’s hard to make the leap from a $27 dollar product immediately to a $5k+ product. It’s possible, but not without a long turnaround time.

When you offer supplemental products that further help your readers you are demonstrating your expertise on another level besides your book. This in turn instills more trust in you and that you know what you’re doing. This trust leads to people buying your high-ticket program because they know, like, and trust you more than just an author of a book.

The supplemental products that you can use to ascend people up your value ladder include, but aren’t limited to:

• Courses
• Software
• Templates
• Guides
• Supplements (dietary)

Pretty much anything you can think of can be used as a supplemental product to include in your funnel as long as you are ascending book buyers up your ladder to your high-ticket program.

I hope this post has given you some ideas on how to turn your nonfiction book into a high-ticket program and the components needed to do so. Stay tuned to the Studio 8 Twenty-Two blog for more information on how to bring more stability to your brand and business through a book.