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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The ultimate aim for any author is to sell books – to turn their knowledge into cash.  By the same token the publishing company is a business and is there to make money. To find a viable product to take to market and sell enough of, to recoup their investment in printing and marketing the book. Therefore in order to get published and turn your work into cash, you need to create a product that will sell, and this means thinking like a businessperson.

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…Or in other words – how to make more money from the ‘upsell’…

What if I told you that you are sitting on profits that you haven’t tapped into yet?  Would you believe me?  Now you have your book written, the readers that buy it may be willing to buy something else from you too.  You could perhaps sell another book to them if you have more than one, or an extra service or product.  The Kings of the upsell have to be McDonalds with their “would you like fries with that?” This sentence alone has earned them millions!

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Let’s face it, it is getting harder for us to communicate about our products to sell with potential customers.  If someone who you don’t know, sends you an uninvited email newsletter, flyer or ‘discount notification’, it is very likely that it will end up in your ‘Deleted Items’ box, if  you don’t simply ‘Unsubscribe’.  We are bombarded with marketing messages on an hourly basis, and it is necessary to preserve our sanity NOT to look at all of them!

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Getting published is the most desired objective of most writers so it is worth giving some thought to how you will approach this mighty task.  You know what kind of book your have written (or intend to write) so the best place to start is to find the publishers that specialise in your kind of writing.   For example, if you write a crime novel, you will have more success approaching a publisher that has published other crime writers.  They will have the specialist knowledge of this field to be able to determine if your book will make enough money in this area.  If you are a non -fiction writer then don’t go to publishing houses that produce ‘chick-lit’.  You are likely to be knocked back!  So once you have honed down your target publishers to just a few, you can move on to the next stage – actually approaching them!

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We live in an era that is busier than ever.  Technology, long working hours, the ‘pressure’ to have work life balance, family demands – all of these things are packed into our lives and the result is that we fall victim to a bad habit that is the deadliest of all – because we don’t even realise that it is bad!  I’m referring to a ‘hurry habit’!

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