Marketing, Promoting and Selling your Book

Many writers and aspiring authors are under the mistaken belief if their book is published by a publishing house they can sit back and watch sales miraculously happen. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fact is, competition to have your manuscript noticed and published by a large house is extremely fierce. Additionally, no matter who publishes your book, you absolutely must take an active roll in marketing, promoting and selling your book.

Moreover, profit margins are not extremely good when you go through a publisher. Sure, if you sell tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of books, you make substantial amounts of money. In reality only a small percentage of writers achieve this level of success.

A great model for achieving success is to self-publish and actively promote your book. Self-publishing is one of the best ways to get your manuscript to market quickly is to. Another great benefit of self-publishing is you have complete control of the creative process. You make the decisions on content, editing, cover design, title and you reap the profits.

A primary downside with self publishing are costs involved. Depending on whether or not you hire an editor, designer, layout person and cost of printing, the initial outlay for self-publishing a book can be several thousands of dollars for the first run. Besides there are no guarantees your book will sell. However, you can lessen your risk of costs and increase your level of sales with a simple formula.

Imagine if you could self publish with no out of pocket money. Additionally, imagine gaining lots of free publicity and visibility in your market at the same time. 

The following formula is one that can be used by virtually anyone to raise funds to publish a book. In addition, you can gain great visibility, do the initial run with no out of pocket money and position yourself for volume sales.

Although the formula is rather simple in concept, it is not necessarily easy to do as it takes planning, time, effort, consistency and great follow up to make it work as well as possible.

You can write, publish and market a book with no out of pocket expenses by hosting a seminar with a topic that is linked to the book. In order to keep costs down in the rollout host the seminar in your local market. You can further offset costs by securing sponsors for the seminar. Event sponsors provide funding necessary to the costs of an event. They can either contribute in actual dollars or with in-kind offerings. Sponsors underwrite various aspects of an event.

Besides writing content for the book each author can have a very specific role marketing and promotions of the book. 

Prior to beginning the writing of the book,  you'll have to have a very detailed project plan. The plan would include hosting an event to introduce the book to your local market.

Knowing the costs to an event such as you are planning would be beneficial to secure sponsors. You must develop a very solid proposal for sponsorship of the seminar. Because of very detailed information and showing the sponsors how they would gain from being involved.

Your newspaper might be willing to do some advertising for the event in exchange for some great visibility and additional subscribers. Your organization can offset the costs of the room and audio-visual equipment in exchange for mentions in the advertising and all pre-event promotions. Sponsors can be given the opportunity to do a 5 minute presentation at the seminar and distribute promotional information to everyone in attendance. It is a win/win all the way around.

You must have a clear-cut proposal for the potential sponsors chances to secure their sponsor support. It is easier to gain support from businesses who know you rather than trying to get sponsorship from an organization who has no idea who you are.

With day of event expenses covered, you could now focus on generating revenue for publishing the book. This can be done by pre-selling the book. 

With initial revenues from pre-seminar sales designed to offset book production costs you will be able to write, market and publish your book with no out of pocket money. By utilizing the databases of all your authors, press releases, pre-event radio interviews and presentations at Chambers and local organizations, word of mouth promotions, and other low-cost/no-cost forms of promotions, you should be able to sell many copies of your book.

The key to your success will be having a functional website were the book is available.  Utilize online credit card purchasing options for buyers. 

Pre-selling is important to let people know that the cost of a seat into the seminar was the book. Also, if they didn’t make it to the seminar we would mail them the book for addiotional shipping costs or they could pick it up. 

Make sure you are letting people know they are buying the book, not the seat into the seminar. The only way into the seminar should be to buy the book.

To gain even more value from the event and increase day of event revenues each author may sell other products in the back of the room.

Your program can be sold as an E-book. This can help you to generate several thousand in additional revenue. Knowing audience members are interested in your material, you can put together a special day event package with three or four of your e-products bundled together. Everyone would receive one of your order forms upon registering.

At the end of your session you can do a short sales presentation. All folks have to do is fill out the order form. With each sale, all you have to do is process their credit cards and email them the PDF document. No mailing costs or printing costs. This is nearly a 100% profit margin.

Many self published authors shy away from doing presentations claiming to be an author and not a speaker. Fact is, if you get in front of a target audience who is interested in your topic and you present your ideas well the amount of books you can sell is incredible.

 A book complimented by a well delivered presentation allows you to get in front of meeting planners who may be in a position to utilize your services and your book at a later date. You may also have representatives from companies who want to buy large quantities of your book.

If you have a book on nutrition, find a health food store who wants more foot traffic and visibility. They may be a perfect fit as a sponsor. Not only can they help you to offset costs they can help to promote the event. At the seminar you can promote their products with coupons, mentions and information provided. It’s a win/win.

If you have a book on real estate sales there’s bound to be a mortgage company who may be interested in sponsoring you. Perhaps they would be willing to buy a book for every real estate agent who does business with them. Or, they could give a book to each of their mortgage brokers.

If you have a book on childhood development, what about a baby clothing store? Perhaps the store would cross promote and give a book to each customer who buys a minimum amount of product in their store. This adds value from them to their customers and creates a win/win for you and the store.

In today’s world of writing, marketing and publishing a book, the possibilities are only limited by imagination.