Get your discounted ticket at: www.millionaireauthorsbootcamp.com

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.

The impact of a bestselling title on book sales can be little short of dynamite. Top titles create anticipation, excitement and enthusiasm. They express the passion of your message. They connect emotionally with your reader.A top title helps you avoid the slush-pile. It gets you on publishers’ desks. It attracts media attention. Most importantly, it will helps you with book sales.

It’s a simple trick, but an effective one. So don’t waste this opportunity to help your book shine.

Here are some tips to help you get started with both fiction and non-fiction titles:

Include ‘How to’ in your title

People love to learn with simple and easy steps. They like miracle solutions and ‘quick fix’ answers. In today’s busy world, they like anything that suggests they can shave off time from their learning curve.
Eg. How To Write A Bestseller / How to Become a Forex Trader

Make a big promise

If you have a big-gun promise, don’t be afraid to use it. However, use your promise sparingly, and be ready to deliver. Your readers will remember if you fulfill your promises, and will come back for more. They’ll also run a mile from hype ~ so give careful thought to what you’re promising!
Eg. The 4-Hour Work Week / Lose A Stone In Six Weeks

Command your readers

The command has an immediate effect. It makes the reader think: “Yes, I want that!” It also reassures them that it’s possible to achieve this and helpful advice will follow.
Eg. Tame Your Toddler / Buy Your Dream Home in Brazil.

Offer your top benefit in your book title

If you have a non-fiction book, tell the reader how they’ll benefit from reading it. What’s the problem your book is going to solve? Readers buy books for something that will help them grow, profit, improve health, solve relationship problems or gain more time.
Eg. Think and Grow Rich / The One-Minute Millionaire.

Ask a question

Most times, your reader will answer your question in their minds. They’ll be hooked in. The key is providing the answers in your book.
Eg. When Did You Last See Your Father? / How Good Is Your Sex Life?

If you’re still struggling for ideas, use other authors’ books as inspiration. Check out the bestsellers’ list in book stores or on Amazon. Is there anything that makes you want to buy a book right now? Aim for something that has magnetic pulling power.

It doesn’t matter if your title is just one word. It’s worth devoting the time and energy to getting it right.

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.

The business of publishing requires consideration of everything from:

• Choosing a publishing company name for yourself
• Filing sales and income taxes for books sold
• Creating the door of credibility
• Opening further opportunities
• The possibility of branching off of a current business and/or setting up a completely new business

You must intentionally plan how all of this and more can tie together to become your total business presence, one that truly represents who you are and where you want to go – and  to grow.

How to choose your identity and when to do it:

• Many authors that do not already have a business will think of branding after their book is published, but if you are thinking about publishing 100% independently (or subsidy or even vanity), consider branding first.
• Remember that branding is how you represent your image to the world.
• Your logo, colors, tag line, and book covers should all contribute to your brand.
• Branding is the glue that holds together everything business-oriented that you do and will do in the future. Think of food companies that branch out into toys, t-shirts, books, and other products when they originally started out just making cereal.

My Personal Branding Tips:

• Start with your favorite colors. Do you like calm colors like blues or greens? Are you sophisticated and prefer black, white, silver, and grey? Do you like neutrals with a splash of something bold like red? What fits your personality?
• Start with a logo, photograph, object, or even an element to represent your company, your books, your brand.
• Consider the psychology of color: how you look and feel effects how people “see” you.
• Your brand should be something you will be happy with for a long time, so think big! You will see it everywhere and it represents who you are and what your company is all about.
• Consider the feelings you want people to have when they see your books or marketing material.
• Use your branding on everything you can: business cards, letterhead, envelopes, postcards, email announcements, your website, your blog, social media, signs on the side of your vehicle, bookmarks, labels – not just your book cover!

Remember, branding is not just a simple label you place on the back of your book. You get to decide how your written voice – your company – is presented to the world. You have options, so take the time and consideration to decide. You are a creative, growing, living being – make sure your choice of brand can make the journey with you. Remember that your book is not just some childhood fantasy or dream finally come true. It is a catalyst for you to go to amazing heights, and branding is your best friend!

If you’ve written a book or if you want to get your message out to the world, there has never been an easier time to become a bestselling author. The Internet has provided writers with an unprecedented opportunity to spread their message and reach more readers at a faster rate than ever before.

So let me take you through the process step-by-step of how to turn your book into a bestseller and gain more ‘customers’ or readers.

Your number one priority is to give away something of value to your potential readers. It sounds back-to-font – but trust me, it isn’t.

You might give away valuable content such as: a ‘how to’ article; a free ebook or report; an ezine; a teleseminar; or an MP3.

Better still, team up with other experts who can provide this free content. So if your book is about dog breeding, contact other pet experts. Or if your book is about gardening, contact high profile gardening experts (preferably those with a large database or ‘list’ of clients).

Tell them you’re offering the chance to promote their business if they’d like to offer something for free in return. It’s a win-win situation: they provide you with a freebie, you promote their website to your readers.

When you put a value on these free bonuses, it can run into thousands of dollars. This makes a $9.99 book phenomenal value – in fact, readers will sometimes buy a book just to get their hands on the bonuses.

On the day your book is launched, ask all the experts who gave free bonuses to help promote it. They can do this via their own mailing lists, as well as social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Chances are they’ll also want to bulk-buy your book to sell to their own clients. If everyone promotes your book on the same day, you can very quickly push your book onto the bestseller list for your particular niche on Amazon.

Even if it only hovers there for three seconds, that’s all it takes. The kudos of having a bestselling book lasts a lifetime! I even have a client who used this technique successfully to push her poetry book (self-published 5 years previously) to bestselling status.

What to do with your ‘customers’ or readers when you have their contact details? Write to them at least once a week. Get to know them: let them get to know you. Share valuable information with them.

Follow these simple steps and you will be well on your way to becoming a successful author.

Here are 3 powerful ways to do this:

1. Ask the person

This is quite a bold approach that can be very effective. In response to someone raising a price concern, you reply:

“Mr Jones we never offer the lowest price in the market. Why do you think that even though we aren’t the lowest priced provider that so many people buy from us?”

The person will then usually reply along the lines of quality, service and so forth. Whatever the person offers as the reason, you respond:

“Mr Jones, you are exactly right and…” and then you can add in any additional reasons that are appropriate and move into re-selling the benefits of your high quality, service etc as described above.

2. Talk the difference

In response to someone telling you that, “You’ll have to do better than that, XYZ offered a similar product me a much lower price!” a method to pursue is:

“Can I ask you how much cheaper?”

On many occasions the person will tell you the price (or perhaps an even lower price than they really have been offered as a negotiation ploy!) and you can work out the difference between the two prices.

Then sell the benefits that the person gets for the difference:

“Mrs Jones, the difference is only £400. For that investment you get…” and sell the benefits that your product and service offers over and above the competitor.

3. John Ruskin

John Ruskin was a prolific writer in the 19th century. I have two of his quotes printed onto cards that I sometimes show to people when they are attempting to haggle over price. The quotations are:

“It is unwise to pay too much, but it is unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much you lose a little money and that is all, but when you pay too little you sometimes lose everything, because the thing that you’ve bought isn’t capable of doing the thing it was bought to do.

The common law of business prohibits you from paying a little and receiving a lot – it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder it would be as well to add something for the risk you run, and if you can do that you can afford to buy something better”.

“There is hardly anything in the world today that some man cannot make just a little worse and sell just a little cheaper, and the people who buy on price alone are this man’s lawful prey”.

John Ruskin, English art and social critic, 1819 – 1900

Mr Ruskin (God bless him!) has overcome many a price concern with his wise words. Not many people are comfortable with being someone’s “lawful prey”!

So without further ado here is a recipe for making money from twitter.

Ingredients

To run this strategy you will need a site where you can post an article that can include links directly to your products. I use my own blog site but I suspect any article site will work just as well.

You will also need a niche following on Twitter, you can 2000 followers in about two to three weeks. After 2000  twitter places some restrictions on you so growth is a little slower, but this strategy works with these numbers, but obviously the more the merrier. If you want to know how to do this read the previous articles.

The third thing you need is a spark of creativity, a smidgen of research and the ability to write tweets and blog posts quickly.

The Pure Recipe

When you see this you will be amazed at how simple this is to implement. You will be even more amazed at the results it produces. But after this I will show you how you can automate the process that is even more phenomenal. So here is the pure form of the strategy:

Look for trending topics on Twitter. There are a whole lot of tools that can help you do this, but you could just look in the right hand column of your twitter profile to see the strongest trending topics. You then write a blog post linking the topic to your product and a call to action to click through to your sales page. You then write a tweet about the trending topic and a link to your post. How simple is that?

Adding Some Spice

Want to know how to write compelling tweets? Just have a scan through all those tweets that get retweeted. Ignore the ones from the famous and influential, these are retweeted because of who they are and because they have large followings.  Look for the ones that just seem to catch a following. Look at half a dozen and you will start seeing what tweets people respond to… that is how you write your tweet.

Do some basic research by using a url shortener like bit.ly. Url shorteners record the number of people that link through from that particular link. By sending out tweets with links you are starting to find out which of your tweets people respond to the most. Again you are finding out how to write tweets that people respond to.

Finally on twitter, when done well, more is better. On twitter you need to get your message to stand out from the noise. It is easy for people to miss your tweet when there is always a huge amount going on. If you have a trending topic and you can write multiple tweets about it then releasing several tweets over the course of a day or two will stand you in good stead, especially if you can get the url in all of them and it leads to a great article.

The Automated Version

In previous articles we have discussed automated tweets. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could operate the above strategy automatically? Well you can…here is how.

Firstly write a few compelling blog posts that are hot topics for your audience. Hot topics are those that you know are always going to come up for your subject. Make sure these lead to a compelling call to action for your book.

You don’t have to do all the posts all at once, if you are a regular blogger you will probably already know which of your posts have the best response rates. If you are just starting out blogging it might take a few weeks of blogs before you start noticing the trends. The important thing is getting really good articles that draw people in and have a call to action.

You then just look for the structure of compelling tweets, embed the url into it and watch the money come in every time the tweet is posted. On that note I would only repeat this a week at a time and if not a little longer, you don’t want your audience to get blind to your best messages.

Here is one I prepared Earlier

Just to get you started here is one of my best responding tweets.

7 Reasons you must   Learn Embedded Commands   http://bit.ly/8L0OLd Laugh out loud persuasion skills #persuasion