Selling Your Book: The No-Nonsense, Step-by-Step Marketing & Promotion Workbook

Selling Your Book: The No Nonsense Step-by-Step Marketing & Promotion Workbook - A 200 page workbook that walks authors through the steps to sell their book with a marketing plan.

[excerpt]

Introduction

John Kremer, the author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books, makes a strong statement when he says, “Don’t expect anyone to do your selling for you. That’s your job.” Those authors who enjoy marketing are fine with that. Those authors who would prefer to leave the selling to the publishers will cringe. No matter what your comfortable level, the success of your book will ride largely on your marketing and promotional efforts. 

When it comes to selling books, we are in paradoxical times. On the one hand, it has never been harder to market and promote a book than it is today, but the opposite is equally true: It's never been easier to promote a book than right now. It’s hard because so many people are doing it. It’s easy because there's never been so many ways to go about it.

Mark Victor Hansen has said publishers are basically printers and you’re the one that makes it happen. He tells his audiences they have to think at levels they’ve never thought of and think outside the box. Much of how we market books in this paradoxical time has to do with thinking outside the box.

Not to long ago, authors sold their books to a publisher and the books were put into bookstores. Ads may have been run in magazines and papers, but the marketing was pretty basic. Times have changed. It’s both easy and hard. There are many creative opportunities to market your book.

Books that are not continually promoted usually wither and die on the vine. Selling books requires us to try like crazy to reach critical mass—that magical point where power takes over. To get to that point, you must use imagination, creativity, resourcefulness, and persistence. With hard work you can make the big time (however you define that term), so that buzz about your book and word of mouth becomes a self-sustaining process for long periods of time.

This workbook grew out of a series of workshops I taught at writers’ conferences. Almost everyone I talked to struggled with how to best market their books. There is without a doubt a host of books on marketing. Many of them are well known titles and have been written by people with great expertise. This book does not seek to duplicate them. Selling Your Book presents the best ways you can market your book in an easy-to-read, no nonsense, step-by-step style. It starts at the beginning of your book’s life and ends when sales die off and the book goes out of print. After each section is a series of questions designed to make you think and apply what you have read. These questions will help you build a marketing strategy to sell books.

It is my hope and prayer that you will enjoy selling your book as much as you enjoyed writing it.

How to Use This Workbook

Selling Your Book is written for book authors, whether your book has been published by a large traditional publishing house, a small press, or has been self-published. The material presented can be used regardless of who published your book, even if your publisher has a publicist working on your book’s promotion, and regardless of the size of your marketing budget.

As you read through the book, when the book refers to “your publisher,” it means whoever has published your book. If you are the author and publisher, that’s you. If your book has been published by a small press, it may be one person. If it has been published by a large publishing house, it may mean several people.

You can get the most value out of the book by first skimming it to get a brief overview of its contents. Then take time and read each chapter in-depth and answer the questions. If you have some knowledge of the marketing process, you can easily skip back and forth to chapters that are relevant to your book and experience level. This workbook is meant to be written in. Make notes in the margins. Answer the questions. Highlight specific parts of the text that you can apply.

This workbook will help you design an action marketing plan to get your book into the hands of readers. Working through the questions, you'll gain the no-nonsense tips and tools needed to make your book a success. The last chapter of book is an Action Marketing Plan.

Selling Your Book will be released as an e-book, 2nd edition, early in 2009 at FootworkPub.com.