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Topics include:
How To Write Your Book In Under 90 Days
How To Push Your Book Up The Amazon Bestseller Charts
How To Become A New York Times Bestselling Author in Six Months Or Less
How to Make $20K A Month Publishing Books On Kindle
How To Make Seven Figures With EBooks and Self-Publishing

The average reader spends less than eight seconds looking at the front cover of a book. An agent or publisher spends even less time on the front cover of a manuscript.

Your title has to grab them by the collar, so that they’re compelled to keep reading.

Be provocative

Provocative statements jolt our attention like electric shocks. They make us curious. They make us angry. Most of all, they make us want to read on.
Eg. So You Don’t Want To Go To Church? / So You Think You’re A Great Mom?

Use ‘key words’

Key words grab reader’s attention. However, in the Internet age, here’s another good reason why they’re important. If you’re planning to sell your book online, it’ll help readers to locate your book via subject searches on sites like Amazon.
Eg. Secrets of the Millionaire Mind / Bend It Like Beckham.

Be outrageous

Take a risk. Write without fear of judgment or prejudice. Break boundaries. Challenge taboos. Make people sit up and take notice.
Eg. Sex in a Tent / The Nigger Factory.

Use words that intrigue or arouse curiosity

Books and films offer escapism and fantasy. They provide a chance to experience larger-than-life characters and experiences. A title that hints at a life less ordinary is bound to arouse curiosity and interest.
Eg. The Life & Loves of a She Devil / The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.

Use pictures or strong visual images to provoke your audience

Use the strong words, colours, or sensory images to stir your audience’s imagination. Use a picture or metaphor to get started.
Eg. The Color Purple / Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow / Chocolat.

Use alliteration, rhyme or repetition

People respond to words or phrases that are catchy and memorable. This is why pensioners can still recite the nursery rhymes they learned when they were toddlers! It’s why you can find yourself singing along to jingles, TV ads or pop music even though they irritate you! Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they stick in your head.
Eg. Rich Dad, Poor Dad / What To Expect When You’re Expecting.

Try testing titles on your friends and family, then pick from the ones that are most popular. You’ll be a lot closer to sales success than by just guessing.

It’s worth devoting considerable time and energy to getting this right. Remember that many authors and publishers have used this knowledge before you, to turn sales disasters into phenomenal success stories! Your efforts may be rewarded in the same way too.

Writers are often taken by surprise when they’re asked for a “detailed marketing plan” before a publisher has even taken them on.

It’s a skill worth developing – as many successful authors write their marketing plans before they even set pen to paper.

In Part 1 of my article, you learned how to get started with a marketing plan for your book. Today, you’ll be finding out how to complete it.

Add this extra information to the plan you’ve already created:

Target Readers

List the people most likely to buy your book. (eg. women aged 18-25).
List the types of organizations, associations and clubs that might be interested in your book.
List schools, colleges, universities, charities and specialist libraries, etc.

Potential buyers:

List the types of organizations, clubs and associations that might bulk-buy your book.
List business websites; membership sites; clubs.
List retail outlets (such as Waterstones or Barnes & Noble) and book clubs.
List schools, colleges, universities, charities and specialist libraries.

Reaching target readers:

Suggest ideas for bookshop promotion. (eg. End-of-shelf posters).
Suggest a targeted PR campaign. (eg. a press release for local and national media.)
Suggest a public event you could hold to tie in with your book. (eg. a quiz, a seminar, an awareness day.)
Suggest promotion via social media. (eg. YouTube; Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.)

PR/Awareness Raising:

Offer a free incentive to promote your book. (eg. An MP3; an online interview with the author, etc).
List seasonal events or anniversaries that could tie in with your book. (eg. Halloween; Mother’s Day; Remembrance Day, etc.)

Offer audio extracts or free books for the many sites that offer services and content to your target readers – in return for a link to publisher’s shopping cart.

List some of the organizations, clubs or magazines that may be interested in your book.

Brainstorm ideas for publicizing and promoting your book with a couple of friends. Write down anything and everything you can think of. Try not to censor the ideas or rule anything out. When you’ve finished, set your list to one side for a couple of days before going back to it. You’ll be surprised at the number of great ideas you can come up with when you combine creative energy.

Increasingly, agents and publishers are asking authors to help with the marketing of their books.

Many writers are taken by surprise when they receive a request for a “detailed marketing plan” – often before an agent has even taken them on.

Don’t be daunted. Treat this as an opportunity rather than a hurdle. Many successful authors draw up a marketing plan before they even start work on their book.

Your Marketing Plan requires research and creative energy – skills you already possess in abundance!

To get started, list your Marketing Plan under the following headings:

Book Category:

What genre/s does your book fall under? Choose books similar to yours at Amazon and see which category they are listed under.

Sub Categories:

What are its sub-categories? Again, use Amazon for this.

Market Summary:

Provide a convincing argument that there is room for a new entrant in the market.
If you can, obtain sales figures for your particular genre or subject area. (eg. 10 million romance novels were sold in the UK last year).

Is there a book similar to yours that has sold well? (eg. My book is aimed at the same market as xxx by yyy which sold zzz copies last year). Often, you can find this information using Google, as well as authors’ and publishers’ websites.

Closest competitors:

List your ‘competitors’ (in terms of content, focus & title) giving title, author, publisher, year, price.

Unique selling points:

Identify what is unique and different about your book.

In Part 2, I’ll show you how to add more detail to your marketing plan. Don’t be daunted. Break down the plan into simple steps and you’ll find it much easier than you expected.

Want to increase your chances of writing a bestselling book right from the get-go? Here are some tips used by the top 5% of authors.

Many successful writers do considerable research before they even get started writing their books. Much of this relies on having a basic understanding of marketing.

What Sells Books?

So Let’s go back to the fundamentals of what sells. Why do people buy books? Usually, it’s the ‘what’s in it for me’ factor. They buy because:

• they can learn something;
• it helps improve their life in some way;
• it saves them money;
• it solves a problem in their life.

To put it another way, people buy for ‘pain or gain’. In other words, there is a pain in their life that needs solving. Or they think they will gain in some way – either emotionally or financially.

It is worth noting that one of the most powerful motivations in marketing is financial gain. In other words, a reader can justify ‘investing’ in a book if they think it will either save them time or money. The trick is to think how you can apply these principles to your own book. This is particularly helpful for non-fiction, though perhaps less so for novels or poetry.

Your Book Title

A book title is one of the most powerful tools for selling a book. It gives the reader a succinct and clear reason for buying your book. Your title can make all the difference between a bestselling book and a book that ends up on the slush pile. The important thing to remember is to put the benefit for the reader in the title.

Examples might be:

• A book targeted at would-be lawyers – ‘Top Tips For Wannabe Lawyers’ or ‘Want To Be Lawyer? – How To Get There Faster’ (WIFM: training)
• A book targeted at the general public – ‘Top Tips To Cut Your Lawyer’s Fees in Half’ or ‘How To Choose The Best Lawyer’ (WIFM: saving money, problem solving).
• A book targeted at a specific niche – ‘How To Sue The Person Who Injured You’, “The Idiot’s Guide to Getting Divorced’, ‘How To Write Your Own Will’.
• A book targeted at other lawyers – ‘What You Don”t Know About Rival Law Firms’ or ‘How To Become A Partner In Your Law Firm In Less Than A Year’ (WIFM: entertainment/competitive edge.)

These titles are off the cuff and imperfect. But hopefully you can see the ‘what’s in it for me’ principle at work and see why a target audience would want to buy them.

This doesn’t mean that a book has to be solely about the subject matter in the title. This just provides a convenient marketing ‘angle’ for a book so that readers (and publishers, in the first instance) can see the benefits and understand why people would buy them.

Looking at the aforementioned titles, I hope that you can see that some books provide a more powerful motivation for buying than others. Saving money, making money, and problem solving are stronger emotional motivations than entertainment or curiosity, for example.

Market Research

Thanks to the Internet, you can now do comprehensive research into what your readers are likely to be looking for. You can check amazon.com to see if there are any comparative books on the subject. This will help you to identify your unique selling points. Why, for example, would a reader choose to buy your book over theirs? What do you offer that other authors don’t?

Don’t be put off if there are similar books to yours. This shows that there is a market for your subject matter. However, you do need to identify what is special and different about your book to make it stand out.

Getting a celebrity endorsement for your book is one of the easiest ways to promote it.

Readers are much more likely to listen to a well-known expert or media personality saying they can’t put your book down. Not only this but a little ‘celebrity’ magic tends to rub off on you.

I’m not saying that you should write to every celebrity or expert you can think of willy-nilly. However, if there is a tie-in with your book, however tenuous, then go for it.

Many authors are reluctant to approach celebrities for testimonials. Don’t make the same mistake!

Celebrities have egos the same as everyone else. And if your book is getting publicity and media attention, this is also going to benefit them.

You may have to approach 100, even 500, celebrities. But you only need ONE to make a massive difference to your book sales. Does it really matter if 499 tell you to get lost, if you get the one testimonial you’re after? What do you stand to lose? Hurt pride and the time it took to write the letter or email!

It’s never been easier to access celebrities via the Internet. Not only can you use search engines like Google to track them down. Many of them also have Facebook and Twitter accounts. Make it easy for them by writing 5 of your own testimonials. When you contact them, point out that they can choose one of your templates if they wish. Anything that saves them time or having to wade through loads of material, will persuade them of your professionalism.

If you’re feeling daunted, then focus on the positive benefits for you and your book. Quotes will boost your book sales and credibility. And think how great you’ll feel when you see those endorsements printed on your book cover.

I always advise author who work with me to think about building their author platform in parallel with the writing of the book.

Your platform comes in two forms – between which there may be some crossover.

Firstly, your offline platform and network – this could consist of professional bodies you might belong to or groups and associations.

Say for example you were writing a book on team building in sports, you would want to connect with all the various sports’ controlling bodies and be working from the grass roots up to professional levels.

Within these bodies you will also find brilliant contacts to validate your book with endorsements and even content.

Secondly, in this wired world, you can now connect instantly with anyone anywhere on the globe with an Internet connection. At the central core of your strategy you need a blog site and/or to be able to publish as a guest on another blog site as  am doing here.

Content is king and is a magnet for both potential readers, publishers and of course search enginess. Many a book has started off as a blog and I always think of my blogs as seeds for potential chapters in a book or even a whole book itself.

A new author called Sarah Lamb came to me with her blog only in July and i just publishing her book based on it next month – that’s 4 months – see www.appreciatingangels.com for more details.

On top of your blog sits your social media strategy which can be fuelled directly from your blog content. For example, each time I blog, it updates my Twitter and Facebook profiles and appears on at least ten other site automatically.

This all in turn leads to increased visibility which then leads to speaking engagements and full workshops from where, of course, you sell your books and associated wares.

The diagram below shows how this all fits together …

“The nicest thing about NOT planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise and is not preceded by a period of worry and depression”

We’ve all heard that if we fail to plan, we plan to fail and this is never more-true than when you are creating a book that you want to sell and earn plenty of money from!

Let’s start with the end in mind here and look at our intended result: to make money.

Now we can backtrack – to do that we need to sell loads of books.  To do that we have to market our book well to the right audience (maybe we have a publisher backing us, maybe not, but marketing your book is essential to generate sales).

So now we know that marketing is essential, but who shall we market TO?  This is where your earlier planning comes in!  If you didn’t do any pre-planning when writing your book you are likely to have wasted more time than necessary.  Your book can still be knocked into shape ready to be marketed and sold but if you have a clear idea of who is going to buy your book from the outset, then you will have more direction when creating the book, greater focus, and the conviction needed to keep going and finish the work when you hit a plateau along the way where the end seems so far off.

Planning takes thought and time and it’s tempting to want to rush in and ‘get on’ with your book rather than spend this careful time in the planning stage, but the clarity that planning gives you will be worth the time spent and you will most likely accelerate your book further, faster for the time spent planning, so a proposition for your book is a must at the early stages of writing.

To write something that will sell, and not just something for your own enjoyment, you will need to address your readers’ number one concern: “what’s in it for me?”  This means you will have to put some structure around your thoughts, to answer their possible questions and this requires some thinking about.  But not only that, you will need to create content that your market will want so that they buy, and to do that you need to know who your market is.

My first book is called “The Virtual Assistant Handbook: insider secrets for starting and running your own profitable VA business” and my intended audience is existing Virtual Assistants and people who are thinking of starting up a VA business.  Because I had an idea of who would be buying the end result, I could ‘chunk down’ further to address their concerns.  I knew that many VAs who enter this profession do so from a career background as a PA, Secretary, Office Manager or Administrator so they would most likely come from a corporate background.  My book contains references to corporates and how the style of communication within them may not necessarily be the right way to speak to their new small business customers.  This is just one example of an area where planning out my end market helped to shape the content of my book.

To plan your book out and find the market that will eventually buy it, you will need to set aside some dedicated time to really think about the issues facing your readers, which direction you want the book to take and how you will get there.  Look at some books with similar content – your ‘competition’ and see who they are marketing to.  Would this audience work for you too?  If there are already books on ‘your’ desired subject, this isn’t a bad thing, it means that there must be a market for this kind of book.  You just have to make yours sufficiently different enough and address something that the others don’t or have a unique angle on the subject to motivate your readers to buy.

By taking time to work on the big picture, you can get on with creating the ‘little picture’ – your creative work.  The time spent planning and researching your end market will be recouped many times over when your book is a best seller!

2009 © Nadine Hill

I appreciate that this may be something of a shock for you.  After all you will have spent countless hours writing your book.  You are now a published author and your ego may be swelling accordingly.

However, let’s experience a harsh dose of reality for a moment.  You have only written your book for selfish reasons.  You either want the money, the glory, the kudos, the sense of achievement or something similar.  You are primarily acting out of self interest, aren’t you?

So why should it be any different for your reader?  Their primary interest is themselves.  They are most interested in the things that are important to them.

You see they aren’t really interested in you and your book at all.  They couldn’t give a damn.

What they are interested in is what you and your book will do for them.  They are interested in what you can do to help them solve their problems and get what they want. Although this may seem rather harsh it is the truth, isn’t it?

So if your readers are only really interested in what you can do to help them get what they want, why do so many authors spend their time talking about themselves and their book?

Far too many authors talk far too much about things they are interested in.  The problem is – your readers don’t care. For example:

Author says: “It took me 2 years to write this book.”

Reader thinks: “So what?”

Author says: “My book is a bestseller!”

Reader thinks: “How nice for you – so what?”

The author is talking about what is interesting and important to them.  It bores, annoys and irritates readers!  Can I put it any more plainly than that?

Let me be blunt – you shouldn’t really talk to your readers about you and your precious book.

When you can tell your readers about how you and your book can help them then they will be very interested!

Spot the difference in the following examples:

Author says: “My book contains several tried, tested and proven methods that you can use to (insert appropriate benefit to reader or reader’s problem you can solve).”

Reader thinks: “Interesting! I do need to find a solution to that problem.  This sounds worth reading!”

Author says: “The reason my book is a bestseller is that it is the only book on the market that helps people solve X problem successfully!”

Reader thinks: “I’ve got that problem! And if the book is a bestseller it has to be worth reading!

If you know what is important to your readers then you can show them how you and your book can help them with their specific problems, challenges and objectives.

Then they won’t just be interested in you and your book – they will be very interested in you and your book!  Not to put too fine a point on it – they might even end up loving you!

Photo by Sean McGrath

You should be able to say “yes” to every single point on this list…

• There are at least 3 popular magazines for my book’s potential readers.
• There are industry statistics clearly showing a market (of at least 100,000 people) exists for my subject area.
• My book solves a problem or addresses a need my market actually has.
• The market isn’t saturated with lots of books that already promise what my book promises and in exactly the same way.
• The people in my market actually buy and read books.
• There are already other big-selling or best-selling books that hit a similar market to me.
• There are definitely people who want it and/or need it.
• It solves a problem or facilitates an achievement.
• It is unique but still fits neatly into an existing/popular/mature category.

If your book has passed with flying colours so far then in the next article – we’ll see if it has bestselling potential.

If you couldn’t say yes to all of the points on the list above then look here for more tips, ideas and help.