If you’re using your book to grow your business, you absolutely need calls to action (CTAs) throughout your book. That’s a hard steer that I give all our ghostwriting and publishing clients.

The reason is simple: It lets you know that someone who read your book is interested in something more.

When you give your book to a potential client and they act on one of the CTAs, you know that something in your book hit home and your offer was interesting. That information is gold dust: they are telling you that they’re a warm—potentially even a hot—lead.

Those are the people you need to be prioritizing for follow up.

Better yet, rather than saying to someone, “Here’s my book. I’ll call you in a couple of weeks to see what you thought,” you can give them the book and say, “Here’s my book. There are some additional resources that make it even more useful, and if you want them, there are instructions in the book for getting them.”

What’s the difference?

In the first scenario, you’re the one chasing. In the second, they’re coming to you. Which do you think gives you the better chance of closing a sale?

When someone buys your book on Amazon, CTAs are even more important.

if someone searched Amazon (or Barnes & Noble, or iBooks, or wherever), chose your book, and—most important of all—paid for it, they are a red-hot lead for you.  The problem is, retailers don’t tell you who those people are, so you can’t follow up.

You have to have a mechanism in place for finding out who bought your book, and that’s the CTAs.

That’s why I’m always surprised when a clients pushes back on the idea of putting CTAs in their book. I’ve heard every excuse under the sun, but the three most common are:

1. “My readers will be put off by calls to action.”
2. “My audience doesn’t respond to CTAs.”
3. “I don’t want to come across as salesy.”

These are all is nonsense. Readers are put off by CTAs that are irrelevant, unappealing (like “subscribe to my newsletter”), and don’t offer real value. I don’t care whether your audience is CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, expectant mothers, college students, or any other demographic: they won’t respond to worthless, dull, irrelevant CTAs, but they will respond if you offer them something that appeals to them, that is relevant, and has real value. If your audience doesn’t respond to your CTAs, it’s your fault, not theirs.

By the same token, if your CTAs are inherently self-serving (“Want to hire us? Call xxx”) then you’ll come across as salesy. You can put one or two direct actions like that in your book, but if it's in every chapter, you’ll put people off.

The answer to all three excuses is the same: you need to make interesting, appealing, valuable, relevant offers. When you do that, readers will be grateful for it, even if you have one in every single chapter.

The single most valuable technique I’ve discovered for doing that is “Chapter Upgrades”.

The idea of chapter upgrades is simple. You offer the reader a piece of bonus content in exchange for their contact details that will enhance what they’ve just read. Unlike newsletters and free reports, it’s specifically designed to help them apply the information in the chapter.

When you do that, you can put a CTA into every chapter if you want, and people won’t mind.

Great chapter upgrades include resource lists, quizzes and assessments, infographics, checklists, how-tos, videos, and expert interviews. But almost anything can be used as an offer: the main requirement is that it must be specific to what they've just read.

Another really interesting chapter upgrade is a video summary of the chapter. This appeals to people’s innate desire for instant consumption. If, at the start of each chapter, you offer readers the option of simply watching a short video that summarizes what they’re about to read, most people will jump at it.

Finally, ust like any other online offer, the landing page you send readers to has to convert, but if you can optimize your landing page (or landing pages) and the offers in your book to convert well, you could get as many as half of your readers to willingly hold up their hands and say, “I love what you said, and I want more.”

That’s a huge potential boost to your business.

Because they are seen as high-value and relevant, the conversion rate for chapter upgrades is very high. In a world where newsletters and free reports typically get 1-2% optin, chapter upgrades can get anything from 20-50% optin. And because of the variety of resources offered, even if a reader isn’t interested in the offer for one chapter, there’s a good chance one or more of the other offers will grab their attention.