Marketing Is Real Story Behind Self-Publisher’s Smash ‘Beneficiary Book’

The trick in turning a loose-leaf binder book on death, done in loopy, comic-book script, into a $6-million business was not in the writing--it was in the marketing.

“In its original form, ‘The Beneficiary Book’ looked like a 1040 [form] from the IRS,” said self-publisher Martin Kuritz.

His overhauled but still very simple loose-leaf book--a highly detailed, personal log of property, investments and final wishes often left out of wills--has sold more than 225,000 copies at $30 apiece, plus shipping, in just over two years.

A software version is also out, and Kuritz and two co-authors are working on a Spanish edition and spinoff books following “The Beneficiary Book’s” question-and-answer style. Sales so far total more than $6 million, Kuritz said.

“The Beneficiary Book” has proved so popular in mail order that Viking/Penguin has contracted to distribute it to bookstores and back a national author tour this winter.

“What really lit Viking’s fuse was that we had sold 100,000 copies,” Kuritz said of sales at the time the big publisher approached him last year.

All of which adds up to quite a record for a first book by a 53-year-old estate planner and insurance agent.

But the deal is just the latest for a select few of the estimated 7,000 authors who each year publish their own novels, self-help books, weapons manuals and political tracts to the general disdain of mainstream book companies.

“The Celestine Prophecy,” a spiritual novel published by an Alabama children’s therapist with $13,000 of life savings, was bought by Warner Books, part of the Time Warner Inc. media conglomerate, for $800,000.

A couple that self-published a guide to small inns eight years ago has now sold 1.2 million copies of the guide and related books.

“The profitability has been very, very high,” Kuritz said in a telephone interview regarding his own book. “That’s a benefit of self-publishing. The profit with Viking won’t be so good.”

An estate planner for 30 years, Kuritz wrote the book after watching widowed clients scramble for deeds or monies found missing after a death.

After six months of work with his co-authors on a book he imagined would appeal mostly to clients of Active Insights, his Carlsbad financial services firm, Kuritz tested a wider market in late 1992 with a mailing of press releases to several dozen journalists. He culled the names from reference books at a local library.

“I really wasn’t looking for a bestseller,” he said.