When you approach a publisher, apart from your book, they will want to know about your ability to sell and promote your book. They will make their decision to publish you based upon the quality of the book itself and your saleability as an author.

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 …

A famous quote reads:

“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.

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I have some very bad news for you.  You had better make sure you are sitting down.  Prepare yourself for a shock.  Your readers don’t care about your book.  And they are even less interested in you. They are just not interested in you and your book. To be frank – they don’t actually give a damn about you.

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Some people will argue that coming up with winning book ideas is as much a dark art as it is a science. But if you look closely there are certain things that all good books have in common. In this article we’ll give you a quick checklist to help you decide whether you’ve got the next best-seller! Continue Reading