WILL YOUR BOOK SELL ITSELF?

Not without Divine intervention, and even then it might be “iffy.” And of course, your book won’t sell itself. If the public is not aware of your book’s existence, it really does not exist. This means someone has to promote your book so it can be sold. That someone is you. To paraphrase Pogo, “I have met the publicist and it is me.”

Not too long ago, book publishers promoted books and authors. Today, only the big-name authors are promoted. And, we can’t blame the publishers. They’ve paid many ga-zillions of dollars in advances to these authors, and what dollars are available for promotion have to be spent to protect these advances and maximize their sales.

If you’re self-published, it’s even more important that you come to grips with the reality that promoting your book is even more important than writing it. Let’s assume you spent hundreds of hours, perhaps months or years completing your book. And let’s assume you’d like to sell it so you can pay the rent, or make a car payment, or your student loan. Maybe even alimony. Perhaps quit your day job.

If these things are important to you, then run – don’t walk – to the hat rack, and put on your marketing hat. If you are rich and famous, you can hire a publicist, but for most of us, that’s beyond our means.

BOOKS SALES STATISTICS
Let’s stoke the fires with a few facts. According to The Wall Street Journal and Nielsen’s BookScan, even books published by mainstream publishers can represent a dim sales outlook. In a recent survey, approximately 80% of the titles tracked by Nielsen sold only 99 copies, and fewer than two percent sold 5,000 copies or more.

The survey also determined the average title sells 500 copies, and fewer than ten percent of the 110,000 titles published in an average year reach the shelves of traditional bookstores. Just being on the shelf doesn’t mean thousands of people will pick up the book and buy it. The really sad news is that titles reaching bookstore shelves have about ninety days to be sold or they will be returned by the store to the wholesaler.

The public must be driven to the marketplace, whether the marketplace is a bookstore or a website. Do these numbers mean that 90% of these books were un-saleable? Of course not. Most of these unsold books weren’t promoted, either by the publisher or the author. You can avoid the “swamp of low sales” with effective promotion. Even if your book isn’t great and even if you’re not an experienced PR person, a decent promotional campaign will sell books.

BOOK PROMOTION
“The press release is the most widely used and effective means of communicating to the newspaper.” Mac Tully, Publisher, Kansas City Star News releases (called ‘press releases’ until recently), are the cheapest and probably the most effective means of book promotion. Good promotion is a numbers game. Throw enough news releases up on the wall and some of them will stick. Some will get published. One good news release can pull your book out of that “swamp of low sales” and turn your life around.

Obviously, there are many kinds of promotion. Book signings, articles, book reviews, radio and TV interviews, and public speaking appearances are all worthwhile projects. But we’re playing a numbers game. One has to make a lot of garden club guest appearances or host a lot of book signings to accomplish what a news release can do. Especially one that reaches several hundred thousand readers. And, in a major publication the numbers can get to the millions in a hurry.

NEWS RELEASE BASICS
There are so many things involved in the writing of releases, I can only cover a few points in a few paragraphs. In my book and software program, Promote Your Book in the Media, I devote many pages and examples to the subject. Here are a few things that are really important.
The headline. Most PR mavens believe a good headline represents a 90% chance for your release being published. And a poor headline represents a 90% chance of its being summarily rejected. I concur. The headline is critical. And remember, for purposes of your release, the editor is the customer, not your library group or the ladies in the garden club. The editor is the person who must be sold.

Consider limiting your release to a single, double spaced page. If the editor likes your story, there’s a chance you’ll be contacted to expand it into a longer article. Avoid fancy fonts and gimmicks. Stick with Times New Roman, black. The KISS principle is paramount. Editors are busy, overworked professionals who have no time for gimmicks, games, or cutesy gambits. These things will brand you as being un-professional.

If you are mailing, faxing, or e-mailing the release, it should be directed and personalized to a specific editor. The same principle applies to media editors as is applicable to sending out your queries and submissions. Personalization is critical.

If you mail your releases, envelope labels are an absolute no-no. For the editor to read your release, the envelope must be opened. A personalized envelope has a much greater chance of being opened than one that has been labeled or addressed to “Editor.” These envelopes will usually be trashed. You can’t afford a summary execution.

WRITING THE RELEASE
The old press release format was an announcement of a new product or service. They generally opened with a headline, and a first line that stated, “XYZ Publishing is pleased to announce the publication of Suzie Striver’s new book …” Editors will trash that release immediately. They won’t bother to re-write it, either. They don’t have the time.

Editors want a story, not a sales brochure. It is estimated that more than thirty percent of a paper’s news space (not advertising space) is populated and derived from news releases. Read your paper and count the number of articles that begin, “XYZ Company is pleased to announce …” Not even the automobile companies use these old hack formats, but they are still being recommended by some so-called PR experts.

Make your release a story and sell the story, not your book. This is easier said than done. It is critical that your release not appear to be a sales brochure – even though it is. I’m not a speed writer, nor do I represent myself as a PR expert. I only know what has worked for me, and I have spent as much as a week writing and re-writing a 400-word release. News releases pulled my first self-published book out of the “low sales swamp” into a book that sold 50,000 copies. Actually, my swamp was the “no sales swamp.”

SENDING OUT THE RELEASE
Since this is a numbers game, utilize every avenue possible. Post your releases on your website, and on the internet. Post to the professional services, such as PR Newswire. You can gather media data from the library (Bacon’s Directory), but many of the names are out of date. For my first self-published book I spent many hours transcribing data from library resources and keying the data into my computer. It worked, but it was laborious.

I have faxed and emailed releases, and posted them with the wire services, but the most effective were releases printed on good paper stock (not 20# copy paper) and addressed to specific editors. Email is the cheapest. However, the editors get so much junk and spam, unless they know you, your chances of getting an email to their desk is getting to be more remote every day.

Services such as PR Newswire can be good, but they can also be very hit and miss. If an editor or reporter picks up your release, that’s great. However, I subscribe to being pro-active. There’s nothing more effective than a release sent to a specific editor in a personalized envelope. Most of the time, the editor will open that envelope, and that’s the biggest hurdle in getting a majority of your releases read.

MEDIA INFORMATION
Regardless of the medium used, your job can be made hundreds of times easier with a simple database populated with current media data. In Promote Your Book in the Media, I use My DataBase, an uncomplicated program that is simple-simon easy. I can contact specific editors at almost 500 of the nation’s largest newspapers by email, fax, phone, or U.S. mail. Data is current as of January 2007, since it was gathered over the last four months by contacting each of the papers in the database. Circulation of the listed papers exceeds 70,000,000. That kind of circulation allows you to play a true ‘numbers game.’

With this information and system, all one has to do is compose the releases, print them, and print your personalized envelopes. My DataBase interfaces seamlessly with Word, but will also print your envelopes if you don’t want to use a word processor. It’s not necessary to try and send out 500 releases in one day. When I first started, I found that sending out twenty releases a day brought a lot of success. And it was easy to do.

Remember, you must promote your book because your book won’t sell itself. Pogo was right.

William Hutchins

From Publishing Basics, 13 June 2007
http://blog.selfpublishing.com/?p=196

SELL YOUR BOOK WITHOUT BOOKSTORES

Recently, an author sold over 10,000 books, without ever hassling with bookstores. Here’s how your book can generate this kind of quantity sales this quickly:

BACKGROUND
According to a Harvard Business School report, 84% of books in large US bookstores sell 2 copies or fewer each year; only 2% sell 10 or more copies in a year. In addition to these dismal statistics, our author, whose name is Stuart, was stymied by another complication: He lives in Israel, rather than the US, so marketing books in the US was sure to be more complicated for him. So Stuart decided, with my encouragement, to temporarily ignore US bookstores for his children’s book, “Who Invented Vegetables?”

PUT THE BOOKS INTO A NON-BOOKSTORE VENUE
Stuart was intrigued by anecdotes of selling books in coffee shops and movie theatres. Non-bookstore venues have several key advantages: They pay better (60% and up, instead of 45%), they pay upon receipt (rather than 60-90 days later), and they don’t return books. Most importantly, however, there is no competition—because unlike a bookstore with hundreds of thousands of titles, coffeeshops, movie theatres, and other non-traditional venues generally don’t sell books. Once the decision was made to ignore bookstores, the question became, where would Stuart’s vegetable book sell in quantity?

FOCUS ON THE META-CUSTOMER
Rather than trying to sell to millions of end-customers, Stuart decided to focus on those who had the most to gain by selling the subject of his book: Vegetable exporters and retailers. The largest retailers of vegetables, he realized, are the major supermarket chains. And the chains are much easier to focus on than the thousands of individual vegetable stands.

GIVE THEM A REASON TO BUY NOW
Not only did Stuart want the chains to consider stocking the book in their grocery stores, he wanted to give the chains an impetus to buy the book immediately. Since the Jewish holiday of Shavuot is associated with vegetables, he presented it to the chains as a timely item, that would sell best if in the stores in the last few weeks of May, just before the holiday.

THE RESULTS
Stuart approached the largest supermarket chain in Israel. Within a week, his book was available in over 150 supermarkets across the country. Not content to rest on his laurels, Stuart then approached the major vegetable growers and exporters, and offered the books as a holiday gift item for children of employees and clients. For orders over a certain quantity, he would even put logos and personalized messages on the inside cover.

Results? Over 10,000 copies sold in a matter of weeks. Proportional to population size, that would be the equivalent of over 500,000 book sales in the US.

And because of the tremendous sales records, Stuart was then able to approach a US supermarket chain with his idea.

So think quantity sales, think outside the box venues, and think creative.

By Fern Reiss
From http://blog.selfpublishing.com/?p=197

10 MODERN-DAY SELF-PUBLISHED SUCCESSES

Many works now considered classic were originally self-published, including the original writings of William Blake, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, William Morris, and James Joyce.

Here are 10 modern-day self publishing success stories:

1. The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
2. The Book With No Name by Anonymous
3. The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer
4. What Color is Your Parachute by Richard Nelson Bolles
5. In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters
6. The Christmas Box by Richard Paul Evans
7. Invisible Life by E. Lynn Harris
8. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte
9. Contest by Matthew Reilly
10. Eragon by Christopher Paolini

From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-publishing

JOHN MILTON ON SELF-PUBLISHING

The first systematic defense of one’s right to publish, John Milton’s self-published Areopagitica of 1644, identified three areas of tension, political, business, and academic, that render self-publishing highly controversial.

Survival of an ideology-based state hinges on its tight control of ideas, which is impossible to affect if self-publishing is allowed: “it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men … I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.”

Business-wise, a viable option of self-publishing undermines the entire business model used by publishers, “publicans that have the tunaging and the poundaging (i.e., taxing) of all free spoken truth,” in which publisher wedges himself between the author and the public, and uses his position as marketplace’s gatekeeper to take most of the profits generated by sales of a book.

And finally, self-publishing flies in the face of the notion of professionalism, which acknowledges only the credentialed authorities in a given subject-matter as permissible contributors to the public debate and public instruction. As to the non-professionals, “What need they torture their heads with that which others have taken so strictly, and so unalterably into their own purveying”?

Three and half centuries later, those attitudes still define government, industry, and public perception of self-publishing.

From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-publishing