How to market a book
Beyond writing your book, you want it to be successful. Success is
measured many ways and perhaps the most widely accepted measure is that
of sales. While most writers do want to make some income from their
hard work, most find the greatest satisfaction from positive customer
feedback, but you cannot even get this if you do not have customers, so
you need to get out there and promote your book to get sales,
customers, and feedback.
There are a number of ways you can
promote and sell your book, but reliance on your publisher to market or
sell it is usually a sure fire way to failure. Most publishers do not
take any active role in either promoting or selling books, they are for
the most part only interested in collecting revenues when a book sells
and promoting their publishing services so more authors will sign up
with them.
Personally, I have found that promoting and marketing
through my own website as well as Amazon.com, Alibris.com,
Abebooks.com, and other online marketplaces to be quite effective while
simultaneously securing a majority of the profits for myself rather
than paying someone else with a canned marketing program and no
investment in terms of either money or time. Many authors choose to
participate in the Amazon.com Advantage Program and pay Amazon over
half of the selling price for the privilege of selling on Amazon.
To
participate, they also have to pay an annual subscription fee which is
not very much, but to me it seems absurd. Why should you or I put all
our time and effort into writing a book, having it printed at our own
expense, pay to have the books shipped to us, and then pay again to
ship them to Amazon.com (when they choose to order them), pay
Amazon.com to sell them, give them over half of the sales proceeds, and
end up with only 10% of the sales proceeds for all our work and risk?
The printer is guaranteed a profit when you order copies, Amazon is
guaranteed a profit from your subscription fees and over half of the
sales proceeds, they also require that you buy back any copies that do
not sell. The only person at financial risk in this whole scenario is
the author, i.e., you or I. It seems to me that when a financial risk
is taken, the person taking the risk should be the one with the
greatest potential for gain, but this is not how the publishers or
marketplaces have set up the game. You do have alternatives.
How to sell a book
Open
your own bookstore on Amazon.com and sell your book through it.
Amazon.com will still charge you a monthly merchant fee and 15% of the
sales proceeds, but that is a whole lot better than giving up over half
the proceeds. They will even add to your sales proceeds a shipping
reimbursement to cover the cost of packaging and postage for most
books. If you have to buy your books yourself anyway, why not sell and
ship them to your customers yourself too?
Having been an online
bookseller for several years before writing a book, I learned the ins
and outs of online bookselling and was able to make use of this
knowledge to market my own book. It is not hard to learn, heck, there
are thousands of people doing it, I just hate to see the authors taken
advantage of by a system they could easily master themselves.
Setting
up your own bookstore on Amazon only takes a few minutes, and listing
you book only takes a few more. You can also join the Amazon Connect
program which allows you as the author to write relevant articles that
appear when a customer is browsing the product detail pages of your
book, and joining the Connect program is free.
If you are already
a bestselling author and you are selling 100,000+ copies of your books
already, this option is probably not of much interest to you, but if
you are an independent author using a print on demand, POD, printer to
make your books for you, this is a viable option for getting your work
promoted. Not all books sold by third-party sellers are used books,
some of us sell our own books too.
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