Archive for Sell Your Books
I’ve found book giveaways on blogs to be a great way to get the word out about your books. When I got “Enjoy Your Money” out to top personal finance bloggers, many of them requested a second copy for a giveaway. In my opinion, it was well worth the expense (book cost plus mailing) on my part. Followers of the blogs often responded with increased comments. The blogger often provided incentives (“announce it on Facebook and we’ll put your name in twice for the drawing.”) to spread word of the giveaway to their Twitter, Facebook, etc. followings.
A book publicity acquaintance is doing a giveaway of The House on Mango Street, one of her favorite writers. It’s by Sandra Cisneros, “one of the first Latina American writers to achieve commercial success. Her voice is peculiarly childlike and unmistakable, and Sandra is one of my very favorite writers.”
If you’re interested in seeing how to use book giveaways, why not sign up for this one?
Have you had successes or failures with book giveaways that you’d like to share about? Please comment!
Filed under: Sell Your Books | book giveaways, book publicity, Sell Books|1 Comment
Danny Kofke doesn’t have a big platform, nor does he have a lot of time. He teaches full time in a public school (special education) and is raising two young children. Yet, he’s selling far more books than your typical author, largely through his own publicity efforts. On his media page, I find four radio shows and one book signing that are booked for the next couple of months. And it’s not a brand new book. It’s been out over two years. It’s called How to Survive (And Perhaps Thrive) on a Teacher’s Salary.
Here are some tips I picked up from him in a phone conversation this morning:
1) Face it, it takes time and effort to sell books. They don’t sell themselves.
2) Book marketing is fun! He’s been at this for over two years and still gets a charge out of doing radio interviews, TV and other media. He still fondly recalls the excitement of doing his first radio interview.
3) He takes advantage of both large and small opportunities. You never know what might pay off. He had one interview he did for Bank Rate that got picked up by the FOX site. Another went secondarily to AOL’s home page. The point? Just get out there and do something, even if it’s small. Do something enough and cool things start to happen.
4) His main method is to research viable media and send e-mails to them.
- He starts with a Google search for such topics as “radio stations about teachers”, “financial radio shows,” etc. Then, he finds them on the Web and studies the show. If it’s all about, for example, recommending stocks to buy, he doesn’t pursue it.
- Next, he finds the contact person on the site. E-mail them a pitch. The pitch must be powerful. Remember, it’s not about your book, it’s about their audience. With the first paragraph, share a startling statistic or something to grab them, demonstrating that their audience wants to hear what you have to say. If you’ve gotten publicity before, link them to your media page so that they can see or hear past interviews.
5) Follow-up and keep good records. Danny emphasized this over and over. He’ll pitch anyone and everyone, then write on the calendar to follow-up in a month or so if they haven’t responded. If they still don’t respond, he may e-mail again several months later, saying something like, “Hey, I just spoke on this station and was mentioned in this article. If you’d like to interview me….” And he keeps following up until someone says that don’t want to hear any more.
As you can imagine, good record-keeping is vital. He calendars items that he needs to do at a later time. He keeps a notebook as to who he’s e-mailed, how they responded, and when to follow-up. If someone declines and wants no further pitches, he notes that as well.
Example: He contacted the “700 Club” early in his marketing. They declined to interview him. But recently he e-mailed again, telling them what other events he’s done and linking them to his author site so that they can see his other interviews. This time, they booked him!
6) Interest can build over time. The media isn’t just interested in new books. Once you get one interview and put it on your media site, this can leverage more reviews. Now the media has something to judge whether or not you’re a fit for their program. The more interviews you get, the more impressive you look. It’s called building a platform from scratch. It’s called leveraging one opportunity to get other opportunities.
Danny sent 10 e-mails over time to CBS about getting on their early show. Finally, he could say in an e-mail, “Hey, I was just on CNN.” This time, they replied and asked to see his interview from CNN. That’s progress! Hopefully, he’ll let us know if it comes through!
7) Danny uses HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to give his expertise to journalists who need to interview experts, or regular people with specialized experiences. Responding to a HARO request got him into the Wall Street Journal.
Set up your media page. We’ve already mentioned how he’s using it. I like it for two reasons:
- It gives the media exactly what they want to know, all there on one page where they don’t have to waste time searching for information. They can click on both articles and interviews and see that Danny can handle himself well on interviews.
- It’s free and takes minimal time to maintain. I can hear marketing experts saying, “You need to post a blog every day, or at least a few times a week. You need to get links from other prominent sites. You need to post on other people’s blogs.” To which I’d respond, “Danny doesn’t have time for all that crap. He’s got something that works for him. Why ruin it?”
Danny’s blog is free and functions well for his purpose. He set it up on blogspot.com and didn’t even bother to buy a distinct url. Apparently, he doesn’t need a url, so why pay $10 a year to get one? That goes along with his book on how to live on a teacher’s salary. You don’t buy things you neither want nor need.
9) It’s easily up-datable. You don’t have to use DreamWeaver or ExpressionWeb or have to hire a webmaster. Blogspot gives you all the basic tools you need.
10) You don’t have to do everything. If I understand Danny correctly (I’ll let him edit this), he isn’t putting his book in book fairs, sending it off extensively for review, going for book awards, writing articles for magazines, and traveling extensively. While he has his eye on other opportunities, like presentations to school faculty, he’s hung in there with something that’s working for him – doing radio shows. I’ve heard that one of the hardest things for entrepreneurs to do is to stick with a winning formula once they’ve found one. Danny’s making it work, and for that, I greatly admire him!
Follow-Up Interview
Steve: Out of 20 first contacts that you make, how many do you estimate end up actually booking you?
Danny: I would say maybe 4-5 even replied to my message and maybe 2 would book me.
Steve: Now that you’ve got interviews on your press page that they can look at and realize that you’ve been in major media, is it easier to book interviews? If so, how many out of 20 responded at first and how many out of 20 now?
Danny: Yes, it’s easier to book interviews now. Most producers want to see how you can fit into their show and help their listeners/viewers out. It is not about you or your book most of the time – it is about your message. Since I have been on numerous TV and radio shows, producers can take a look at these and see if I would be a good fit for them. They no longer have to guess what I would sound/look like since they can see first-hand. I would say I now get 5-6 responses (still not half) from the pitches I send out.
Steve: Is 90% of what you’re doing going after radio?
Danny: No, I would say about 60% radio, 30% television and the rest various print outlets. At first, before I had any television exposure, I was mainly going after radio but now, since I have had exposure in all three areas I mentioned, I pitch appropriate people in all of these areas.
Steve: How many contacts (new and followup) do you think you average each week?
Danny: I would estimate 100 or so. Some weeks it is more and some less but, overall, I would say that is the average.
Steve: How much time do you think you average marketing your book each week?
Danny: It is an endless job since there are so many ways to market. I have come up with a balance to be the best husband, father, teacher and marketer I can so I limit myself since I could probably work on marketing 10 hours a day! I would say I spend an average of 15-20 hours a week working on book related stuff.
Thanks Danny! That’s great information. Thanks for being so generous with us!
Filed under: Sell Your Books | book authors, Book Marketing, Book Sales, CNN, HARO, how to sell books, Media, Publishers, Teachers, Today Show|No Comments
Book marketing guru’s all speak highly of getting book reviews, even to the tune of sending out 500 or so books to get the word out
I’ve found the top 500 blogs in my subject area (I write nonfiction) and am spending a couple of months going to each one and asking if they’d like to do a review and a giveaway. Some don’t reply. Some say they’ve got too many books beside their bed, or they don’t do reviews. But about 1 in 6 request a copy for review. (I’ll tabulate later just how many come through. Some need reminders.)
Nobody acts like I’m bothering them. It’s a win/win and they’re grateful for getting a free book on a subject area they’re passionate about. And some of these blogs get major traffic. One that reviewed my book yesterday gets 80,000 visitors per month, has 250 incoming links, an Alexa rank of 94,000 and 900+ subscribed RSS readers.
Again, I’ll tabulate results later (like how many came through with reviews and how many of my books actually sold as a result), but it seems at this point to be a good campaign.
By the way, I do take the time to read some posts on each blog, and read the “About” section so that I can see if we’re indeed a match and I can personalize my request to each one. I think it’s better to take a slow, personal approach than just try to see how many blogs I can hit in a day. A couple of the bloggers mentioned how much they appreciated that I took the time to check out their blog before suggesting a review.
Has anyone else had success/failures in getting reviews from bloggers?
Filed under: Sell Your Books | Blogs, Book Reviews, sell more books|No Comments
I recently listened to Steve Harrison interviewing Dr. John Gray, author of the best-selling (over 30,000,000 copies) Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. It’s worth a listen for any author. Here some of my takeaways:
1) There’s value in sharing your ideas in seminars before sharing them in books. Typically, authors think the other way around – “I’ll write this book and then sell it at my seminars.” But Dr. Gray started with counseling and seminars. For him, this was valuable in that over time he could observe the audience response and discover what connected and what didn’t. It also gave him time to develop key analogies, such as “Mars and Venus.”
Here’s how it happened:
He’d been teaching relationship seminars about how understanding gender differences can improve relationships. Another seminar leader used a striking analogy which compared the man-woman relationship to a cross-cultural experience. (Dr. Gray knows he’s hearing a great point when the hair on his arms stands up.)
But he knew he needed an analogy of his own. So one day he began to imagine what it would be like if men were Martians, but were unhappy, and contacted the inhabitants of Venus to try to find happiness. Then, they move together to earth. Since Martians and Venusians do things differently, they must come to understand those differences to get along and thrive
The point: Sometimes your seminal points and analogies can come out of years of working with people and leading seminars. “To be successful you need a perspective that has been honed and sanded down.” (None of my quotes may not be exact.)
2) Dream up a unique perspective. If it’s just another book on relationships, with chapters on each of the main points that everyone else lists, that’s not news. Why would radio stations want to interview you? But Mars and Venus presents a fresh perspective. The media is all about fresh perspectives.
3) Utilize your life experiences. For nine years, Dr. Gray lived as a celibate monk. There, he learned to be content and happy on his own. Thus, he could relate very differently than people who were hoping to find purpose and happiness through a mate.
“It’s your life experiences that give you the power to pull people in.”
4) If you’re wanting to educate and inspire others, don’t depend on selling books to them for your revenue. Support yourself in other ways, so that you can get out and share your ideas. Supporting himself as a computer programmer gave him the time to write and promote his book, without having to depend upon them for income.
5) Don’t be discouraged if your early books aren’t great successes. Publishers didn’t want his first book, so he self-published. His second book was with a small publisher, so small that it took him a year to get a distributor.
6) Smaller books can often communicate better than bigger books. After writing a large book on relationships that said everything he wanted to say, he honed it down to ten concepts for his Mars and Venus book. Most people read only the first two chapters of self-help books.
7) Make it fun and lighthearted. This was another change he made from the larger book.
It’s okay if it’s not an immediate success. Some authors feel that if their books are good enough, that reviewers will instantly rave and word of mouth will immediately take effect. Not for Venus and Mars. He went on a book tour, which indeed landed him on Oprah. Yet, he was relegated to the last three minutes of the program, and it didn’t produce sales. After that, his publisher gave up on publicity for his book, saying, “Well, that was our chance and it didn’t work out.
9) Keep pressing forward with your own marketing strategy. After his publisher quit publicizing, he took it upon himself to advertise in the Radio-Television Interview Report (RTIR) and did radio interview after radio interview. After doing those for a year, he got best-seller status. Then, he wrote Oprah again and she devoted an entire show to him. After that, his book stayed on the New York Times Bestseller List for seven years.
What struck you about this interview? Anything I missed? Anything you’d like to add from your own experience or knowledge to my nine takeaways?
Filed under: Get Published, Sell Your Books, Writing | Book Marketing, book publicity, Dr. John Gray, Men are from Mars, NY Times Bestseller, sell more books|No Comments
Brick and Mortar Bookstores vs. Amazon for Authors
An experience, a stat and a reflection on brick and mortar vs. Amazon:
An Experience
I write resources for those teaching character and life skills in public schools. When the two Superbowl contenders are decided, I immediately find out who the highest profile athletes are so that I can research them for character stories (what led them to such a high level of success.)
So Kurt Warner was quarterbacking in the Superbowl a few years ago and I decided to read his autobiography. He’d led his team to the Superbowl several years earlier in a spectacular bag-boy to Superbowl hero story and I thought, “This is as high a profile person as you can get. The Superbowl’s a week away, the most watched media event of the year; so I’m sure his autobiography will be in my local bookstores.”
I called Barnes & Noble, Borders and Books a Million. None carried it. One said they couldn’t even order it. I ordered from Amazon.
A Stat
A few experiences like this one and people begin defaulting to Amazon. Here are the stats from 2008:
Barnes and Noble.com = $466 million
Borders/ Waldenbooks = $3.11 billion
Barnes & Nobel/ B. Dalton = $4.52 billion
Amazon.com = $5.35 billion (book sales only)
More importantly in 2008, Amazon’s sales grew by 16% while each of the other bookstore chains lost money. If this trend continues, Amazon will rapidly become a bigger and bigger player for authors, and bookstores will become less and less – particularly for small-time authors who can’t be guaranteed to get into bookstores and be continually stocked there.
A Reflection
Don’t get me wrong; I love bookstores! But after a couple of experiences like that, I began defaulting to Amazon. I support bookstores. I hang out at bookstores. But I depend on Amazon. It’s a time issue. A local bookstore can carry only a small percentage of the millions of books in print, even of books that are recognized classics in their fields – like a Psychology text on “Persuasion” I couldn’t find locally. After signing up for Amazon Prime, we never pay postage. And books come quickly to our door.
If you’re a major selling author like Sue Grafton for novels or David McCullough for biographies, traditional brick and mortar bookstores, Walmart, etc. are wonderful sales outlets. For the rest of us, they are a useful outlet that people can order from, but not likely to carry us long-term.
If a person with as high a profile as Kurt Warner’s (incredibly “high platform”, which all publishers are looking to publish) can’t keep his autobiography in the bookstores several years after it was written (and it was truly a well-written, inspiring book), then what chance do us low-profile authors have of keeping our books in bookstores over the years? At best, for low-profile authors, I’d suggest that brick and mortar bookstores are typically a short-term rather than long-term strategy.
I have a book on church music, published 17 years ago with a traditional publisher, with no marketing done for it in the past 15 years, that still sells steadily on Amazon. It probably lasted only a couple of years in bookstores.
Filed under: Sell Your Books | Amazon.com, Book Marketing, Book Publcity, book publicity, Book Sales|No Comments
The first three agents I pitched my current book to turned me down flat, saying, “Publishers of financial books usually want only people with strong platforms, like a radio show.”
Recently, on a professional publisher’s discussion group, someone asked,
“Which part of a formal book proposal do you feel is the absolute “clincher” to make the sale to a major book publisher?”
A literary agent responded, “For non-fiction, it’s the marketing section. This is assuming that the author is a legitimate expert, the subject is newsworthy and unique, and the writing is well-crafted. The compelling description of a national platform from which an author can promote the book is hands down the (dare I say?) obsession of the major trade publishers.”
You’ll also see it on publisher’s sites. Example: Rick Frishman, the book-marketing guru who wrote Book Marketing 101 and publishes a popular newsletter, was just hired by Morgan James to be their publisher. In his blog announcing the event, he states: “We focus primarily on publishing non-fiction books and are looking for authors with a ‘platform’ (isn’t everyone!).” »» Getting Published Without A Platform
Filed under: Get Published, Sell Your Books, Writing | Get Published, Nonfiction, Publish, Self-Publishing|2 Comments
The recent New York Times article on James Patterson (James Patterson, Inc.), was instructive regarding how publishers, and thus bookstores, cater to the big-time authors. A couple of paragraphs told about how the big publishers now put most of their marketing efforts behind their best selling authors, much more so now than the past. The result is that best-selling authors sell even more books, but the mid-list authors get very little marketing dollars. Publisher pay thousands of dollars to reserve top-placement sections of bookstores for their best-selling authors. Thus, the best-selling authors keep selling more copies while the rest of us may initially get into a bookstore, but will soon be sent back to publisher if we fail to sell, never to return.
Thus, even if the smaller authors get into the bookstores, if there isn’t a strong marketing campaign (either by the author or the publisher), then people won’t come to the bookstore looking for the book, and it will get returned.
I’m a small-time author, and am glad that my books are offered through Baker & Taylor and Ingram, but the bulk of my sales come through Amazon. And yes, in a sense, Amazon is just passive, but isn’t that the current revolution in marketing – from “interruption marketing” to “I’ll help you find me marketing”?
By optimizing my Amazon pages, posting articles on popular sites and blogs, getting reviews on popular sites and newspapers, and by having all these linked back to my Amazon page, I get regular sales. And I get 35% of each sale on Amazon – much, much better than the percentage of my sales to bookstores through the big wholesalers.
So for me it’s both/and, but Amazon is becoming the bigger and bigger player.
Filed under: Sell Your Books | Amazon.com, book publicity, james patterson, Marketing, sell more books|No Comments
Some people look at struggling bookstores and the woes of traditional newspapers and magazines and conclude that nobody reads anymore and it’s a bad time to write and sell books. If that’s the way you think, think again. The publishing industry is certainly shifting and people are purchasing books in different ways and from different places, but sales seem pretty healthy, and in some ways, astounding.
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) reported that e-book sales ( coming from 13 publishers that report to them) were up 252% in the first quarter of this year. Downloadable audio increased 23.5% and trade paperback increased 23.5%.
[E-books still have a long way to go to overtake paper books. While people bought 23,855,000 total books in 2009, they bought only 313,000 e-books.]
Even during the onset of the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, while people were losing jobs and afraid to make many purchases, total book sales were only down 2.6% (2008) and 1.8% (2009).
Sounds like a great time to be publishing!
Filed under: Sell Your Books | book publishing, Book Sales|No Comments
I’m writing here about the day my personal money management book, Enjoy Your Money! How to Make It, Save It, Invest It and Give It went live on Amazon. Yippy!
What are my first acts of publicity? This and a few former blogs detail my steps – a helpful reminder for my future books, as well as for other writers who are close to publication.
1. Upload your image on your Amazon page. Having published through BookSurge, the front cover image was already up. If yours isn’t there, upload it. (See the links under the place for the image for instructions on how to do this.) A book with no image appears rinky dink.
2. Allow customers to “flip through” your book. Below the image is a link called “Publisher: learn how customers can search inside this book.” Click on it and follow the instructions to allow searching. It took less than five minutes to request this service.
Why allow searching your book?
First, in brick and mortar bookstores, we find an interesting book, look at the cover, then the back cover, and finally flip through to get a feel for the book. Amazon gives customers the same experience online. Don’t worry, they can’t read the entire book there. They just get enough of a taste to decide if the book’s for them.
Second, it helps people to discover your book when searching for the topic your book covers. Example: You’ve written a book about losing weight and have a chapter on using vitamins to enhance your weight loss. Yet, neither your title, subtitle, nor publisher review says anything about vitamins. If you allow Amazon to search your book, those searching Amazon for “weight loss and vitamins” just might be able to find your book, since those words in your book would be considered in a search.
3. Link all your sites and blogs and social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Delicious, etc.) to your Amazon page. Not only will people who visit your social networking sites find your book, but search engines such as Google (and, I assume, Amazon’s own search engine) rank pages higher that have more incoming links. In this way, people searching for information that your book contains will find your Amazon page ranked higher than those pages with less incoming links.
4. E-mail all those people who were kind enough to preview your manuscript and give suggestions and blurbs. Thank them for giving their early input on your manuscript. Tell them that the book’s now out and you want to confirm their address to send them a free, signed copy. Ask them, if they liked the book, would they be willing to write a review on Amazon. Copy the web address of your book on Amazon and put it in the e-mail so that they can click on it to find your book.
Getting these reviews is critical. As Solomon recommended three thousand years ago, “Let another praise you, and not your own mouth.” People believe what others say about your book more than what you say in your title, subtitle and publisher description. So before I start announcing my book to the world (radio, newspapers, magazine articles, etc.) I want to make sure that when each of these go to Amazon, they see many enthusiastic reviews.
They’ve already read your book. They told you they loved it. You’re sending them a free copy. So now they’d love to help you out once more by writing a review.
5. As I mentioned in a past blog, in collaboration with my publicist, Stephanie Richards, I’m collecting the names of syndicated columnists and magazine editors and radio show hosts who might be interested in my book.
Filed under: Sell Your Books | Amazon, Book Marketing, book publicity, distribution, Selling Books|No Comments
There are more ways to assimilate information than reading dead tree editions. Why not get your book out to people who prefer to listen to books in the cars or on their i-pods? Why not offer it to people who like to download books onto their computers or Kindles?
You’ve spent all that time researching and writing your book. Ultimately, your vision wasn’t just to publish a traditional book. Your vision was to offer the world vital information or a compelling story. Think outside of your book!
- Here’s some information on one company that offers spoken books: audible.com .
- Here’s some information on Kindle, which currently offers about 1/4 million books.
As I keep learning options, I’ll keep you informed.
Filed under: Get Published, Sell Your Books | audible books, digital books, e-books, kindle, spoken books|No Comments
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