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.

When choosing to use a subsidy press or vanity publisher, you will likely only go through a couple of steps. These include approving the final copy of your book once you’ve submitted it and promoting and marketing, much of which you’ll still have to do yourself.

On the other hand, when publishing independently there are more steps involved, however you will soon understand why these steps are worth the effort. Publishing independently involves finding a contract editor as well as a contract book designer, going through the process of registering your ISBN number, your LCCN, copyrights and other registrations, contracting with a printer, and finally promoting and marketing.

Though it may seem like more work, and it likely is, the benefits are larger as well. When choosing to use subsidy publishing an author will split the profits with the press, most likely encounter quality issues, and run into distribution blocks when promoting to bookstores. However, when choosing to publish independently, you will keep 100% of the profits, end up with a higher quality book, and avoid those distribution blocks.

Ultimately, it is up to you, the author, to decide what option you will choose for publishing. After all, you are the one who must put in the work and who will benefit from the results. Take your time and choose wisely!

So, why was I successful?

Was it just a fluke?

Well, back then I thought it was, but now, 26 books on, I realise that I got several things right.

So, I go to the flipchart and start to ask the audience what they think the reasons for my success might be. It always follow the same pattern. To kick off, they suggest things like focus, a good title, the right idea at the right time, a market, a wow factor and authenticity, but then the room falls silent. They wrack their brains. Then someone says, it always happens, someone says: “There’s something else though, isn’t there?” and the rest of the audience begin to nod.

You see, the other reason I succeeded was because I believed in myself. I was 23, I was young, naive, filled with hope. I did not consider for a moment that the fact that I was not a cook and had not been published before would stand in my way. I believed I had a good idea. OK, let me get it out of the way right now, before you wonder how I got away with not being a cook – though I had not written the recipes and could not cook, they had been given to me by French families while I had been living in France. The book was called French Tarts and it was a good idea and, in the mid-eighties, it was the perfect time. I truly believed I had a good chance of the book being accepted.

I believe that self-belief is the number one requirement if you want to write a book. It should not be the last thing on the list but the first. So, what follows, are five ways that I suggest you try to develop this elusive item.

1. Ask for feedback and take it, welcome it, know that without it you will never really know how good you are. Improve your chances by suggesting how you want the feedback to be served. Say you want to hear what they liked, what they felt might be missing and how they might improve it. This kind of feedback is much easier to digest and will leave you feeling good about your work.
2. Write every day. OK, almost every day. If you have a journal and are in the practice of doing ten minutes of what Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, calls Morning Pages, then you will begin to feel like a real writer rather than an imposter. You see, real writers do something phony writers don’t – they write.
3. Read other books in your market. Devour them. Make Amazon your best friend and read everything else out there that is like the one you want to write. You’ll soon find things that you consider not to be so great about each book, as well as things you’d like to emulate in yours. This will boost your confidence in your idea.
4. Get published in a small way. Nothing will make you feel more positive about your potential as an author more than already having your name in print. So write articles, start a blog, write book reviews or theatre reviews. Get your name online and in print, build a portfolio. Not only will this increase your profile and Googleability, but will also develop belief in your writing.
5. Join a class or online program, one that makes you commit to writing, forces you to do homework and ensures you turn up at the class and the page regularly. Being in a class means you get feedback from the rest of the group, if you you are lucky, and from a professional,the teacher. Practice makes perfect and is habit-forming. Try it.

1. OK, so everyone knows about The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, don’t they? This 10 week course will get you writing every day, for just ten minutes and will not only get your writing back on track, but will get the skeletons in your closet nicely aired too!
2. Stephen King’s On Writing is about his return to health after this famous Sci Fi author was hit by a car. It talks about how he got his own writing back on track. He is frank at all times and pulls no punches. Just as I was having a lovely old procrastinate, telling myself I’d write my novel after I’d got a new laptop, created a ‘writing corner’ and bought a new chair in which to sit, I read about King’s own experience of this and how, in the end, where he sat made no difference at all. All that mattered was that he just did it. He wrote.
3. I guess Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg was the first book on writing I ever read. It’s about writing anywhere, writing what is in your head, and giving yourself permission to ‘just go’ with the pen. This is the perfect limbering up book for writers.
4. I am ashamed to say that it took me 20 years as a writer before I found the work of Anne Lamott. Her Bird by Bird is a fabulous journey inside the mind of someone who makes her living as a writer. It teaches you, pretty much, as King explains, to cut the excuses and just write. But more than that, it explains how you just need to write in little chunks, just as you would if you were writing a book on birds, cover one bird at a time. Liberating stuff.
5. And the other one, Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, was written in the 50s and it’s another book that aims below the belt and gets me going again. In it she suggests that if you tell yourself that you will, say, write a page a day, or ten minutes a day, and then you fail to turn up, that clearly your desire to fail is greater than your desire to succeed. Boy, did that one get me back to the keyboard.

I hope these five inspire you. Further, I hope  you promise yourself to add every single one of them to your wish list!

Editors Panel key points:

• “Many writers are not able to articulate what their book is about in a concise way.  Rambling means that the writer is unable to conceptualize and this will discourage an agent or editor.”
• “Often, we receive a proposal where the first 20 pages of their book seem more about the author explaining the story to themselves.”
• “If your material is too unripe you will never be able to get the attention of an agent, editor or publisher”, don’t expect to come to an agent and say “will this work?  We’re not in the business of re-imagining your work”
• “What do you promise your reader and are you fulfilling that promise?”
• “An educated author is a publisher’s greatest asset, pass your work through an expert first, team up with authors who have already published.  The author needs a platform and to make a business case for their book”
• “Your book is not the frontline, it is the author themselves that sell the book, you have to prove your ability to promote your book, your book should be a believable extension of what your are already an expert at, the author is the publishers agent”
• “70% of books published don’t earn back their advances, now days the promotion plan is more important than the content, we’d like to see more authors test marketing their own books using Print on Demand publishers”
• “Self-publishing is not the kiss of death, if an author has proven themselves and is at a highly polished level we would never turn down a successful author”
• “Often a manuscript falls apart because the writer isn’t ready, become a scholar, get help to get it right!”

Would you like to be published by a mainstream New York Publishing house?  Want to know the secret to getting your manuscript considered?

Carefully follow the submission guidelines, here is an example from Morgan James Publishing in New York:

You need to answer all these questions

• Why do you feel compelled to write this book?
• Why will someone want to read it?
• Is there a particularly timely nature of the subject area?
• What are the specific benefits of your book?
• How do you plan on marketing the book?

You must mention any:

• workshops
• Teleseminars
• speaking events which will give you the opportunity to sell back of room
• newsletters
• networking groups
• websites where you can sell your book.

Now describe the contents of your book in plain English. Be as precise as possible, providing both a general overview and a rundown of subjects treated in detail. Indicate how in-depth your coverage will be.

Individually each of these ideas produces results but used in combination you can create some very powerful results. By the end of this article you will have the opportunity to see how you can use these ideas singly and together in an article.

Making Benefit Statements

If you tell your readers what they can expect to gain by reading your article, chapter, book, web page etc. then they are more likely to follow through. Obviously this needs to be modified slightly for each situation. A 500 word article may only need a paragraph or three bullet points. Whilst a book might have the whole of the first chapter, the front and back cover and the whole contents pages set up to sell the benefits of your book. Then each chapter might also start with benefit statements for that particular section.

Telling the Story

We are all socialised to listening to stories. Think about early childhood and having your parents reading to you in bed. How about your favourite TV programme, films and book? Stories intrigue, fascinate and most importantly for us keep your readers interested. Any anecdote, case study or example livens up the sometimes dry world of instructional text.

The other real benefit of stories is that they “make real” the points you are trying to get across. When used skilfully you can use a story to pre-teach your process or idea before outlining it in full. The result this creates in your reader’s mind is familiarity and therefore they are likely to take the point home more readily.

Opening the Loop

Imagine what would happen to a reader if you told them of three huge benefits they will receive from reading a particular chapter. You then in quick succession outline the first two and then explain each in depth. My guess is that you will keep reading through this to find out about the third, particularly if the third is the biggest and most powerful benefit statement. This is the basic idea of opening a loop.

Here is another way of opening a loop. Perhaps the start of a chapter might be an example of a big result you got from using the techniques you will explain in the chapter. You could build the drama of the story, perhaps the stakes were high and the results were critical with you only just finding the solution to the problem in the very last seconds.

You might even add in some pre-teaching or even how much better your life has become because of you taking on board the lessons you will share in the chapter.

All of a sudden what could have been a lifeless chapter on a specific technique can take on a life of its open and draw your reader into really wanting the information you have to give.

Putting it all together

When I first came across these ideas I was overwhelmed about how I would be able to use them and put them together in a meaningful way. This was because I had not yet really seen how easily these ideas can be put together and used.

What I needed were a couple of examples that I could analyse and work out how the concepts fitted together. So to that end I deliberately wrote two articles specifically packed full of these ideas so you can see how easily these ideas are to put together.

The first is the article you are reading now. Feel free to go back through this article and notice the techniques that I have used. The second is a case study I wrote on my own blog about finding markets. You can find the article here in the NLP Techniques Section.

Final Thoughts

In an upcoming article we will talk about techniques you can use to get your readers to backtrack and re-read sections that are important as well as anticipate what is coming up in new chapters. I will see you in a future article where we will explore these concepts more fully.

Simply put, a writer is, well, one who writes. Rocket science – I know! Writers’ work can vary from freelance magazine and newspaper articles to copywriting for websites and corporate marketing. A writer typically writes for a living, often freelance, or on the payroll of a company large enough to have its own copywriting or journalistic department.
 
An author, however, is a special breed of writer. Don’t get me wrong, all writers are special! But authors see a larger vision. They see the world through the pages of books. Nonfiction, self-help, novels, children’s, fairy tales-you name it; they see it in book form. Authors don’t usually think in terms of “articles.” In fact, many authors I have met with consider writing articles to be difficult and a totally new concept.

Authors often think so big, they fail to think small enough to overcome writer’s block, which could be why authors tend to be struck with that dreaded ailment so often. If you are an author, I encourage you to keep your large vision in mind (the book-the goal) but think small enough to get that next sentence down on the page. Even if you have to take baby steps once in a while, that’s better than no steps at all. Eventually those baby steps will turn into a flat out dead run.
 
And for all you writers (non-authors), don’t dismiss your talents to being too small to ever fit into book form. A short story can be the synopsis of a best-selling novel. A collection of articles can become the Table of Contents for a how-to book. If you dream of writing a book one day, start calling yourself an “author” instead of simply a “writer.” And if you don’t dream of writing a book, keep doing what you do best-helping to change the world, one word at a time.

Yes, you know where I’m talking about-that final frontier you have avoided all day. Your story, or that great idea you have for a book. When was the last time you went there? How many weeks ago? Do you even know how to get there? As the “Starship” commander of your own writing destiny, it is your mission to save the lives of those characters, inform those greatly in need of your expertise, and get your great ideas onto paper. Those great story lines and expert opinions you have running around in your head are trapped on the planet “In-Your-Head” until you put that writing “ship” in gear. And that planet is light-years away from would-be agents, editors, and readers.

So, how do we get that ship started? I once read a quote from Tim LaHaye, the famed co-writer of the Left Behind series, that said, “The only way to write a book is with seat in chair.” Even Captain Kirk had a chair! So where’s your chair?

1. The Chair - It begins with a chair. Where is that chair found? You need to establish where your writing space is located. It should be a room of limited distractions. Beware of rooms with TV’s, video games, or other mind-numbing devices (Klingons). Rooms with doors that close are helpful if life partners, housemates, or mini reproduced humans exist. Finding that chair in a coffee shop establishment is fine provided you are not easily bothered by crowd noises or shelves of books or magazines.

Now that you have found your assigned seat on the deck of your writing “Enterprise,” look around you. Captain Kirk’s bridge was specifically designed for the overall mission. Each piece of equipment, every screen, every surface had a purpose and function. As the captain sat in his chair, you could see his deck encompassed everything the Enterprise was destined to be.

2. The Bridge – This is your environment. What surrounds you? What is within reach of your hand? Just as the Enterprise was set up to meet every need of the captain, is your writing “Enterprise” set up to meet your every need? Is your desk or table surface cluttered? Captain Kirk never had to push aside bills, stacks of papers, stray pens, or pencils to complete his mission. What do you have to push aside to complete yours? Have in reach everything you need and nothing you don’t.

(Side note: Use your control panels for their intended purpose only! Distant galaxies were not discovered via web surfing expeditions.)

And now it’s time to begin your journey. Now that you are seated in your chair distraction free, it’s time to engage the engines. The good news, your writing “enterprise” is actually much easier to activate than you think!

3. The Button – It really is that simple as pushing a button, just as the Enterprise was started with a single button and a joystick, so does your writing expedition. Open your current file or favorite word processing program, place fingers on key board and begin typing. Honest. Captain Kirk didn’t have to think about where he was going-it was already programmed into the systems, just as your next point, or that fabulous plot line is already in your head. It might take a few minutes to get your mind and keys on the same page, but don’t pause. Just begin and see where those words take you.

(Side note: turn off the “spell check” on your word processing program and write without fear of errors. Write first-edit later!)

And finally, as you begin your journey as the captain of your own writing “enterprise,” the leader of the ultimate writing “expedition,” as you travel into the unknown worlds of your amazing writing talents, make sure you surround yourself with the best from the Academy!

4. The Crew – Captain Kirk did not man the ship alone. Mr. Spock, Bones, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov were all high ranking lieutenants, chosen specifically to assist Captain Kirk. Who have you chosen to assist you? Get involved in writing groups, hang out with other writers, and seek those out who will encourage you and your talent. Beware of those wearing the same “uniform” but who have no purpose on your ship. Is there someone aboard who is sucking the life out of you? If they are not encouraging your talents, it’s time to beam them off into space! Choose your crew wisely and keep them close when needed.

Your writing space, your final frontier, this is your voyage-the voyage of ultimate writer-you! It is up to you to continue your mission, to explore strange new words, to seek out new characters and new plot lines, to boldly go where no writer has gone before! Begin your journey today, right now. Write now!