Do You Have Book Insurance?

I will guess that you have all or many of the following:

·         Car insurance

·         Health and eye care insurance

·         Home insurance

·         Life insurance

·         Workers compensation insurance

·         Dental insurance

You may get travel insurance, cell phone insurance, boat insurance, malpractice insurance, pet insurance and other types of insurance.  Things break, get lost, or get stolen and you want to protect your investments.  Maybe everything should have insurance, including books.

Insurance usually implies something could go wrong and you want a backup plan in case you get sick, die, or become hurt.  Or you want protection for expensive objects.  But if we had book insurance it would be used differently.

The insurance could work as follows:

If a book turns out to not be so good, you can get a new one.  That’s right, you can replace the book you bought (not by return or refund), simply by having insurance, against bad books.

The insurance protects both the publisher/author and the consumer.

In order to get readers to take a chance on investing in a book by an unknown author, they would be compensated with another book if they don’t like the one that they bought.  This allows the publishers to sell more books without people being tentative to experiment and the reader feels more secure knowing he or she gets a second shot if the first one is a dud.

Further, the replacement book, which otherwise may not have been purchased, now gets more exposure than it otherwise would have.

How do we avoid abuse of the system, of people claiming they didn’t like a book when in fact they use the insurance to get a second book for free?  Don’t worry about it.  We want people to be exposed to more authors, so it’s worth the risk of abuse.  Obviously if it gets out of hand, adjustment can be made.

The insurance can be purchased per book purchase or done on an annual basis.  The insurance would create vendor loyalty and would inspire people to read more.  I would love it if there were movie insurance or restaurant insurance.  Hey, maybe I’m on to something here.

Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer, Media Connect, the nation’s largest book promoter. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2014