If you want to become a best selling author then, as “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” author Robert Kiyosaki has said that clue is in the world “selling”!
As an author you have to take responsibility for selling and promoting your book at every available opportunity. You need to become good at persuading and influencing people.
One of the books I strongly recommend to people who want to become masters of persuasion is Robert Cialdini’s “Influence”.
Cialdini is a Professor at Arizona State University who has conducted extensive research into the factors that trigger people into automatically complying with another person’s request.
Here is the final one of these six factors, that will show you how, as an author, you can apply them to sell more of your books.
Key 6: SCARCITY
Psychological research shows that people assign more value to opportunities when they are less available.
The scarcity principle holds for two reasons:
- Things that are difficult to get hold of are seen as more valuable. Think of the lack of availability of certain children’s toys or the latest games console in the market and the strong desire this provokes amongst children and parents to have the item whose availability is limited.
- As things become less accessible, we lose the freedom to have them. According to psychological reactance theory, human beings respond to the loss of freedoms by wanting to have them even more than before!
The scarcity principle ensures that commodities that are perceived to be in short supply are valued more highly than those that are in abundant supply. Powerful human emotions are aroused when people experience scarcity.
Think of the scenes of people camping out overnight to be first in the queue for a department store sale and then almost literally fighting with each other as the doors of the store opens!
Think of the fuel shortage in the UK a few years ago and how this caused people to queue up for hours to get fuel (often as a result of the powerful effect of ’social proof’ discussed in an earlier article) and people who didn’t usually fill up their fuel tanks filling up to make sure they had as much of the scarce fuel as possible and inadvertently making fuel in even shorter supply!
You will see the scarcity principle used in a lot of business marketing e.g.
- Sale must end Friday
- When its gone its one
- Limited time offer
- One-time offer
As an author you can make powerful use of the scarcity principal in your book promotions, copywriting, advertising etc. For example, in conjunction with my publishers I have run a promotional campaign where people could get a bundle of free bonuses for buying my books. The bonuses were only available for a limited time period. This was to use to scarcity principle and to encourage people to take instant action. Which they did!
Now that you are aware of this principle I am sure you will be able to think of lots of ways to use it to enhance your book sales.
