Do you want to make more money? There are two ways to increase revenue in your business: You can sell to more customers, or you can sell more to your customers. At Admiral Road, for example, that means we can grow the company by selling blankets to more people, or we can sell more blankets to customers who have already purchased from us. Ideally, we’ll do both.
The business model is interesting in the publishing world because publishers have two different kinds of customers. The more books the publisher sells to bookstores, the more money it, and the author, will make. Here, the publisher has to sell books to one customer at a time. The other way the publisher can make money is to sell the rights of the properties it owns to other publishers. When we signed a publishing contract with HarperCollins Canada, they acquired the worldwide rights to our book.
After Mom Inc. was published in Canada we learned that HarperCollins had sold the Chinese language rights to our book. We have no clue what happened after that as we never heard anything about it, but we thought this was great. It was more money for something we had already written. We just had to let HarperCollins sell something that we had already sold to them. We were tickled, but we never thought about it again.
Last week we were egosurfing (doesn’t everybody Google themselves?), and we made a surprising discovery: Chinese Mom Inc.! What a thrill to see a Chinese language edition of our book! (And the hilariously subtitled, “Good mother will make money.” We’ll talk more about that next week.)
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