When I wrote a short story for a contest a few months ago I gave it to my wife and to a friend for feedback. They both love to read, but I hadn’t anticipated the results.

My wife felt comfortable telling me that it was terrible. My friend just said it was alright.

I thought they would both say something similar, but my wife ended up giving me the feedback I needed in order to rework my story. She was right. The original one didn’t work.

Paying $15 to enter a lousy story into a contest is not my goal.

Just about every article that passes the “wife test” is accepted by an editor or at least receives praise. One story, that passed the wife test, even received an honorable mention in a Glimmer Train contest.

I’m lucky to have such a talented reader in my home that I can trust implicitly to provide honest feedback. She is my secret weapon who has saved me a lot of disappointment and frustration in the long run.

I have read similar stories from writers who rely heavily upon one trusted reader who is sometimes a spouse and other times a member of a critique group. Keep in mind that a spouse is not always the best choice for feedback.

What to look for in a reader:

• Interest in the same subject matter.
• Attention to the details in your genre (eg. what makes for a good plot in a novel).
• Trust and comfort to tell you the truth.

No writer can catch all of his/her mistakes. If there’s a hole in an argument, a weak point in the plot, or an explanation that falls flat, oftentimes an attentive and critical reader is one of the safest bets in finding them. If you’re waiting for an editor to catch your mistakes, chances are you’ll just receive a form letter saying, “Your work does not meet our current needs.”

That could be a clue that you really need better feedback before you submit your work.

If you read a book explaining the significance of the beaver trade in colonial America or telling the story of a young woman who finds out that she’s really the princess of a small country, I’m guessing you wouldn’t be tempted by another book that explains the animal-centered commerce of colonial America or how a country found it’s unsuspecting princess in a mall department store.

In other words, if you’re just rehashing what’s already out there, chances are you’ll have a hard time finding readers. That isn’t to say you need to have a completely fresh and unique idea that no one has ever done before. There are fresh angles to explore in topics that are already addressed in books and new spins we can add to old stories.

However, you need to watch out for the “been there, read that,” response from readers. It would be terrible to invest a year or two of your life into a book project that fails to sell because it’s been done.

I know that the spirits of aspiring authors are crushed every time a new vampire book is released, but even if there are plenty of repeats out there, publishers and the general public are looking for unique books with something new to say. For every vampire spin-off, there are plenty of innovative and unique books released each year. For example, I encourage you to read something by Susanna Clark, Jasper Fforde, or Neil Gaiman for examples of authors breaking new ground by tinkering with older forms.

Can you add a new angle to a topic that has been covered extensively? Can you draw in your readers without tossing in a character with a gun (such as secret agent Michael Scarn?)?

If someone has already nailed your book topic, I encourage you to buy that book, read it, and consider what else needs to be addressed in your own book. In fact, reading your competition is essential by way of not only selling your book, but making sure you write with an awareness of your genre and field.

If you claim to present a ground-breaking, fresh, new, riveting book that only rehashing what five others have already done, then you’ve just spent a lot of time working on the project that’s going no where fast.

Perhaps you could begin by asking yourself this question: What can I write that no one else can?

It’s most important in my experience to summarize the book succinctly, to have a solid title in mind, and to know exactly what you need to say in order to evaluate its merit. The details of each chapter may be fuzzy, but at least the main idea, controlling metaphors, and outline should be pretty clear before evaluating whether or not a book could work.

Some sample chapters will help you sort through how substantive your ideas are and if you can carry on for an entire book. Many good book ideas work better as magazine articles.

There are several factors you’ll need to consider when evaluating whether your book idea works. I’ll give you a hint right now, it won’t be enough for the idea to be good. I’ve seen my own good ideas and the good ideas of others fail the editor test.

They need to be better than good, and that’s what I’ll discuss in my next post.

Think about it. No one will visit a book store and stumble upon your book. No one will find it on a publisher’s web site. No one will read about it in a catalogue. No one will want to stock in a book store because it’s self-published.

Oh, of course you can sell it online, but how will readers find it?

That is the trick. Can you assemble a realistic marketing plan that will sufficiently take into account all of the setbacks that self-publishing brings, while still connecting with readers on a scale that will ensure you sell enough copies to at least break even?

Ah, distribution is a huge problem for self-published authors. Heck, when self-publishing A Path to Publishing, I still didn’t quite grasp the amount of work ahead of me or the sheer quantity of potentials readers I needed to connect with in my niche.

Where should you start if you’re self-publishing?

For starters, check out my free online marketing guide. That gives both traditional and new ways to market your work.

However, the most important principle in selling books is to make a real connection with a potential reader and to communicate clearly why he or she may want to buy your book. Someone else may be able to do that for you by way of an endorsement or a review, but kicking it all off depends on you and you alone.

I began this series saying that “self” is the key word when it comes to “self-publishing”. If you have any hopes of selling your book, make sure you have more than Plan A and B for distributing your book. You’ll probably need to have plans that range from A to Z.

Your job is to find the communities, blogs, forums, Twitter users, Facebook users, groups, societies, and any other group of potential readers in your content niche. That is the publishing sales game in a nutshell, and it’s a tough one on your own!

In fact, if your font, lay out, and spacing look sloppy or are unreadable, they won’t take you or your book seriously. There are simple things you can do to correctly format a self-published book, ensuring that readers will be drawn in and take it seriously once you’ve successfully marketed it to them:\

Keep Your Lay Out Simple

Don’t make your book’s lay out too flashy if you don’t know what you’re doing. Instead, use the templates that are available at sites such as www.lulu.com. Your primary job is to write a great book, and therefore a book template will save you a lot of time and pay off in the long run.

Research Your Design Options

Beyond the options offered by book templates, many of your most important design decisions (cover design, font choice, font size, and line spacing) can be figured out by researching your options and reading what others have found to be true in online forums. Some test-printings on your home printer will also give you a good idea of how your fonts will show up for readers.

Compare your design choices to the books you enjoy most, what experts recommend, and what others have found in their own publishing experiences. Readability is a major concern for self-publishing authors and deserves a lot of consideration.

Invest Where It Counts

There are some things that you cannot do well on your own no matter how hard you try. One of these things, for most of us at least, is designing a great book cover. Of course most self-publishing services provide a cover creator as part of their packages, but if money isn’t too much of an issue, I think it’s well worth paying a professional or even novice designer to at least create a cover.

Even designing a simple cover requires choosing the appropriate font to match your material and then choosing the size, spacing, color, and location that works best. This can be quite difficult to do.

A catchy, professional cover will not necessarily sell more books, but it will be an important part of the whole package. You don’t want an unappealing cover to give customers a reason to ignore your book!

A Path to Publishing: What I Learned by Publishing a Nonfiction Book

When working on a self-published book you may have put together a passable first draft, and even managed to spruce up a pretty decent second draft. However, chances are your argument or story will have some significant holes in it, to say nothing of some sections that readers will find confusing.

While working on my third draft of A Path to Publishing I couldn’t think of any significant changes to make, so I sent it off to several friends and colleagues to read it. Sure enough, one reader found the same glaring flaw in two of the book’s chapters.

She very gently suggested that those two sections needed significant revision. She was absolutely right. I had a few doubts at first about those sections, but I had decided they worked fine. Thankfully she pointed out some other reasons why needed to be not only rewritten but largely deleted.

And that brings us to the challenge of editing your own book. You always need perspectives other than your own to make sure your book flows and makes sense. No matter how talented you may be as a writer or an editor, you can’t catch all of your own mistakes.

Depending on your relationship with your friends and family, you may ask them for help. However, remember that a good editor will not worry about hurting your feelings. A good editor needs to feel comfortable pointing out all of your book’s flaws. Will your friends and family be able to do that?

My friends through social media and blogging have been a tremendous help in reading drafts of my books, while several key friends and family members have helped at times as well. However, I think it’s important to choose your readers carefully and to give them deadlines that can be flexible if need be.

In addition, keep in mind that these friends may publish their own books some day. Guess who they’re going to e-mail before anyone else for help…

In conjunction with the release of my self-published book

When you’re self-publishing all of the work falls on you, the author. No matter how much published authors complain about the lack of marketing support provided by their publishers, which can be spotty at times, the worst publicist will do more than upload a file to a web site, which is all you’re doing when self-publishing.

The Basic Ways Publishers Market

Publishers have established lists of contacts who receive their catalogues, e-mail newsletters, and browse their web sites. They represent authors at book stores and can send releases out to major press services—something that can be quite costly to do on your own.

The staff at publishers generally have social media accounts and blogs, and they may even generate some buzz for your book through these tools. At the very least these publishing professionals will tell potential readers about your book. You’ll at least have a few warm bodies with a measure of interest in selling your book.

Any way you slice it, the least that a publisher provides still puts their authors way ahead of the self-published ones.

What Self-Published Authors Need to Do

While it’s important to seek out some reputable endorsers and reviewers who have a large group of readers, I don’t think self-published authors realize the number of readers they need to pull off a self-published book that sells more than 25-50 copies. Simply put, self-published authors need a massive number of connections with potential readers.

The “potential reader” part of this is crucial. Authors may have lots of “connections” through social media, their blogs, or more traditional means, but many of these connections may not view their books as something they’ll want to purchase.

I’ve done quite a bit of networking, but I have been reading Crush It! by social media expert and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, and he’s been blowing my mind. I usually drop by some blogs to leave comments and contribute to writing forums, but he advocates a scale of networking that few would ever consider.

I sure didn’t!

I could try to describe it to you, but to be honest, I’d be doing you a disservice because I can’t do his methods justice. Crush It! is available at a pretty low price as a Video Book, which I highly recommend, though it’s also available in print. You may not do everything Vaynerchuk suggests, but I think he’ll give self-published authors the reality check they need about how involved the marketing process will be for their books.

An author who is new to the publishing process will underestimate the amount of work necessary for marketing. Count on it. As a published author I still underestimate the amount of work I need to do. Before you invest heavily into a book, begin marketing yourself and making connections today. It’s a worthwhile investment you won’t regret.   

Next Steps

• Check out the free online marketing guide at www.pathtopublishing.com.
• Pick up Get Known Before the Deal, a must-read for authors new to marketing their work.
• View a sample of Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk at vook.com.

What Self-Publishing Involves

The most important word in self-publishing is “self,” not publishing. The publishing part is fun. The self part is not.

Of course self-published authors boast higher royalties, greater control, and many other benefits. These are all true to a certain extent, but consider what you’ll need to organize by yourself:

• Researching the market and audience for your book.
• Outlining, writing, and editing.
• Researching a publisher and comparing the various packages.
• Paying for and organizing the editing, design, printing, and distribution (which of course will vary).
• Putting together a marketing plan.
• Creating a publicity kit
• Contacting bloggers, radio producers, newspaper editors, and other media outlets about your book’s release.
• Contacting independent and chain book stores to set up book events. Many of them will not call you back because you are self-published.
• Finding conferences where you can sell your book—that is, if you pay for the space.
• Setting up book events and eating the cost if they flop.

Granted, many publishers today are quite light on the marketing end of things, especially for nonfiction books where a marketing platform is essential for new authors. That being said, at least having someone who is paid to help you send out press releases and to advise you on ideas can save you a lot of time and frustration. In other words, even the publisher who provides minimal help with marketing a book is still way better than doing everything yourself.

What You Need to Know about the Publishing Business

If all of this is new to you, then I’m guessing you’ve never commercially published a book. While self-publishing is easy to jump into from the standpoint of writing and printing a book, making it into a product that someone will actually deem worthy of $15 is quite another matter.

Here are a few things you need to know about publishing as a business:

• Most books need significant editorial development.
• It takes time to learn how to write for a specific audience.
• A bad cover and sloppy interior design can be fatal for a book.
• Distributing a book effectively will take a lot of e-mails and phone calls.
• Marketing a book is a full time job.

If you want to self-publish and to sell more than 500-1000 books, your work is cut out for you. Thankfully it can be done. In the coming days we’ll discuss the importance of a marketing platform for self-publishing.

Looking for a bit more about publishing right now? Check out A Path to Publishing. It’s available for $10 as an ebook and for $15 as a paperback.

The price through Amazon is $15, while the ebook price through Lulu is $10.

So far the feedback has been really encouraging, including comments from readers who have found the book both informative and well-organized. One book publisher enthusiastically purchased a copy, and he’s someone who certainly could have taught me a thing or two about publishing! So I’m grateful to see positive responses to the book as it starts out.

If you’re interested in hosting me for an event with your writing group or book store, I offer group discounts and free publishing workshops along with my book events.

Throughout the third and fourth weeks of May a number of bloggers will be posting reviews and interviews. I hope to have the schedule up soon.

In addition, I’ll be posting a series here next week covering what I learned in the self-publishing process. If you subscribe to my e-mail newsletter (in the right column), you can also read about the inside story of self-publishing, the decisions I made throughout the process, and why I followed the course I chose.

There are a lot of decisions to make in the self-publishing process, so believe me, reading about my process will help you a great deal! I learned a ton over the past 6 months.

Either way, it’s important to evaluate the reasons for a rejected query. If an editor has filled you in on the reasons, then you’re well on your way. If not, you’ll need to review the magazine and its guidelines as you ask some of the following questions:

Do you have the experience necessary?

Perhaps you’re overreaching into a topic or a field in which you need more experience or research before you can submit an effective query.

Have you learned the craft of writing? Are you well-read?

Some writers will need to spend more time reading up on the basic techniques of nonfiction writing, style, and grammar. I took a workshop with the former editor of Vermont Life Magazine and he just about blew my mind with his various diagrams for structuring a magazine story. Books such as On Writing Well and The Elements of Style are bestsellers for a reason!

Do you know your competition?

Did you query an editor regarding an article or book on a topic that has already been addressed by many other writers? Have you failed to address a fresh angle or to offer a unique perspective?

Do you know your audience?

Even if you have a great idea, sufficient experience, and a unique perspective, you may still fall short of writing directly to the magazine or publisher’s audience. I have run into this on many occasions in the field of religion when I took angles that were a bit too liberal, charismatic, or conservative depending on the editor’s taste. In addition, some magazines are more academic or scholarly, while others aim for general readership.

Do you know your potential publishers or agents?

Many magazine editors, publishers, and literary agents who receive queries from writers state their preferences on their web sites, list previous publications, and sometimes even share a theme or genre list. Did you miss any of that crucial information before sending in your query?

Keep Trying

Even if you’ve been rejected or ignored, keep working on your queries, articles, and book ideas. It’s a tough business, but you never know when the right situation will fall into your lap. Unless you’re trying, that will never happen to you.

Well, sort of. Don’t thank them for rejecting it. Thank the editor for reading your submission and for taking the time to e-mail you back even though he/she is probably overworked and underpaid.

If you received a reply within a few hours or days of sending your query, then treat the editor like a god.

Personal Rejections

If you didn’t get a form letter, that’s a good sign! Read what the editor tells you, take it to heart, and save that message so you can refer back to it every time you query that magazine or one like it.

Suck It Up

Writers need to develop thick skin and get used to rejection. You will never write for any sustained period of time if you don’t know how to take a textual punch. They come fast and often some days.

Saying thank you has a way of keeping yourself positive and showing the editor that you aren’t fazed by the rejection—which you shouldn’t. The next time you send a query to this editor you’ll start on much better terms than if you’d pouted or offered a rebuttal to his/her rejection.

Even if you think the editor is out to lunch, you need to move on. Whether or not you ever query this editor again, you can’t argue your way into convincing an editor to accept your work. I know, I was awesome at convincing my mom to buy me legos and ice cream, but really, it doesn’t work on editors.

Transition

You can be grateful that this rejection is not the end, but just the closing of one of many paths. There are other magazines where you can send your query or article, so get moving.

Good books are rejected because of similar books.

You may have a great idea and you may be an incredible writer, but if someone has written a similar book, especially for your publisher, you may be out of luck. In addition, there may be projects in a publisher’s pipeline that you could never know about unless you submitted your proposal.

That isn’t to say that different publishers will back away from your book if there are similar books. You just need to show that it has a unique message or perspective that distinguishes it from its competition.

Good books are rejected because of different focuses at a publisher.

You may have addressed an important topic, and that topic may be within the interests of a publisher, but perhaps you wrote a book that didn’t strike the right angle or genre for that publisher. One publisher may aim for literary books, while others may opt for the academic route.

Good books are rejected because of cuts or changes with editors.

Sometimes publishers may change their focus or even eliminate a line of books. With new editors come new criteria for accepting books. Editorial changes will mean a book that may have been accepted a few months ago will no longer work for a publisher. Timing and luck are huge factors when pitching book and article query letters.

Good books are rejected because editors don’t always know what they want.

While publishers have guidelines and specifications, they don’t always know what book would work best. This is something that some editors themselves have admitted.  See editorial veteran Leonard Goss’ endorsement for my new book A Path to Publishing.

That doesn’t mean that all editors are fickle and indecisive, and you should never tell them what they want. Rather, they always aren’t able to know what exactly will work and what will not. There are plenty of stories of best-selling books passing through a series of rejections before finding success. The moral is that editors are human like you and me, and that publishing is not an exact science—as it should be.

Good books are rejected because of publicity concerns.

Even if you’ve written a great book, some publishers may reject your proposals because they fear they’ll be unable to market it to a particular group of people or that you aren’t popular enough to promote it. Those are big problems for writers to deal with, but at least they aren’t necessarily marks of a poorly written book.

In addition, if you are able to write a good book, you can certainly work on raising your profile and reworking your material so that it speaks more directly to an audience of readers. These are big problems, but they don’t spell doom for you as a writer.

Rejection is just about the worst thing a writer can imagine besides publishing a book that is hated by readers and critics. Both possibilities sound pretty terrible, but rejection is the one thing that every writer who hopes to publish a book or article has to face from the start.

Even well-known authors with a history of successful books have to sometimes face rejection. Legendary Christian writer Frederick Buechner has published shelves worth of fiction and nonfiction, but even his latest book, The Yellow Leaves, was rejected by his life-long publisher. He had to take it elsewhere before landing a book deal.

Rejection is a real issue that every writer has to deal with in one way or another.

I had intended to write this series last week, but a few other projects and a persistent head cold pushed it back to this week. Tune in tomorrow, and I’ll discuss the nature of rejection in the business of writing.

When we talk about ways to make the most of your writing time, I know it’s tempting to begin with talk about setting our priorities straight. However, I don’t think we can discuss priorities until we take the time to categorize our tasks.

This can be a difficult exercise because we’re essentially evaluating the nature and benefits of each task. Does it pay well? Does it build community?  Does it drain time without delivering on either of these benefits? Here are a few basic categories you can use, though there surely are others you can add to your own list:

Not Paid for Original Content. Community and Experience Building: Sharing original content on a personal or community blog is an excellent way to build community. None of these things pay the bills, but it’s important to build your experience as a writer and to contribute to your community of colleagues and readers.

Not Paid for Recycled Content. Community and Audience Building: There are blogs, web sites, and online magazines that may not pay, but are too good to pass up if you’re a writer who wants to reach a wider group of readers with your helpful information. You can’t think of original content for every site out there, but many web sites and magazines will accept previously posted/published material that you’ve rewritten from a different perspective. There will be more discussions and hopefully you’ll expand your network of colleagues and friends. By exploring different angles of previous posts and articles you keep your output and community high without facing too many blank pages each day.

Paid, low: Some magazines will pay, and therefore you should take some time to pick a few that you feel best embody the kind of writing you do and the kind of audience you want to reach. Even if the pay doesn’t add up to a respectable hourly wage, there is much value in partnering with a magazine to produce great content for the ideal group of readers. In addition, you can recycle some ideas you’ve already posted on your blog, provided you revise them. You can also make a little money through your web site.

Paid, high: The high-paying projects, whether for books or magazines, carry a high risk of rejection, but the right partnership can pay off in many ways. Be careful about investing all of your time into the high-paying projects, but make sure you have several in the works in order to ensure you’ll have a chance to make enough money to help pay the bills.

These are all essential and important details that can help you sell books, but they are not the most important factors in selling a book.

• Great Endorsements
• A Great Forward
• Great Reviews
• Social Media
• A Web Site

Two Things That Sell a Lot of Books…

These are the two most important factors in selling books according to my own experience and to other authors I know.

• A well-written book that is targeted to an audience
• A Trusted Name with an Extensive Platform

While reviews, social media, and web sites are all part of extending a marketing platform, these pieces should not be confused with making very personal connections with readers. Twitter and blogs are great, but they have their limits.

The Kind of Connections Authors Need

From what I can tell, my greatest success in selling books has come from personally talking with readers whether through personal conversations, events, e-mail, or interaction on web sites.

When I have a chance to share my passion for my book, I have a much greater chance of convincing readers to spend their hard-earned money on it. However, reaching potential readers with your personal message and creating enough trust for them to spend money on your book requires a fairly significant number of connections with readers.

I personally would not endorse every method used by authors out there to sell books and some will be more difficult for new authors to use effectively, especially radio and television, but there are lots of ideas out there about building a platform that will help you speak directly with readers and develop a level of trust for you and your book from a monthly newsletter with valuable information to a niche-focused public event.

How to Connect with Readers

Building a platform begins with the question, “How can I effectively connect with readers interested in my topic?” Keep in mind, this isn’t the same as advertising, and posting to a web site is probably the least personal way to do this, making it generally less effective.

I’m building my e-mail newsletter, working on some videos, leading workshops with local community and arts organizations, and connecting with various podcasts, but the possibilities are endless. I’ve been encouraged to hear from a respected author and friend that he finds my newsletter very valuable, and many of those who attend my workshops give me positive feedback. It’s good to know I’m doing a few things right, even if there’s always a lot more to do.

The hardest part about building these connections with readers is starting small. You may begin with twenty newsletter subscribers and workshops with only five attendees. However, if you continue to make connections, to help people with your material, and to build on those relationships, you should be able to connect with enough readers who will not only trust you enough to buy your book, they may also recommend it to others.

Previously in this Series:

Two Things That Sell a Lot of Books: #1

Also in this series: Five Great Things That Don’t Sell a Lot of Books

Great Endorsements

A Great Forward

Great Reviews

Social Media

A Web Site

While authors can’t control the economy, the trends in popular culture, and even unexpected reader preferences, there are two factors that will disproportionately influence how well their books sell.

Today we’ll cover the first thing that sells a lot of books: A well-written book that is targeted to a specific but wide audience.

Writers can’t simply sell books based on the merit of an idea or the quality of their writing—though these things are very important. They need to write clear sentences, paragraphs, and chapters that guide readers from chapter to chapter and convince them to keep reading and, on a related note, address the needs of a wide but specific audience.

Write Clear Chapters That Engage Readers

After reading what other writers do when composing drafts of their books, I’m often impressed with the number of drafts they complete and the detail of their revisions. They think about word choice, introductions, conclusions, transitions, and edit with a fine-tooth comb several times. The amount of text some delete is astounding.

Good writing isn’t an accident.

My own editor encouraged me to think about why I’m making a particular point, how it relates to the next point, and how each point ties in with the larger argument or concept of my book. As I read bestselling authors I’ve noticed their skill at hooking readers with an problem, a concept, or a mystery. They convince me that I need to keep reading in order to find that information.

Step-by-step, a good book walks readers through a story, an argument, or lesson. The writer can’t abandon the reader part-way through the book. No matter how good the idea or how important the information, if readers feel overwhelmed with information or confused by dots that aren’t connected, they’ll put the book down. Typically, writers will fail in this regard because they have ignored the closely related principle of writing for an audience.

Address the Needs of an Audience

While good writing is important, authors must also adopt a targeted approach to their book’s intended audience. Besides merely addressing a need of potential readers, authors should address that need in a way that is accessible and hopefully remarkable. When many readers find themselves inserting caveats such as “I liked this book, but I found it hard to follow at times…” some wind is taken out of its word-of-mouth appeal.

I have learned how easy it is to get wrapped up in covering my bases or in addressing every possible angle of a topic that I miss readers in the process. Most readers of my book don’t take any issue with my ideas, but some weren’t too happy about the amount of information I included. Though many readers were tracking with me, I’ve found that I sometimes warn new readers, who may be completely new to theology, about two chapters in particular that are a bit… dense. In other words, my desire to be thorough trumped my ability to connect with all of my intended readers.

We can pick up books from the library, look up information online, and hear authors talk about their books on the radio, therefore, if writers want readers to say, “I really need to own that book,” and to take the next step of saying, “All of my friends need to own that book too,” we need to get into the minds of our audience. This is an ongoing struggle to figure out the best way to connect our ideas with the preferences and needs of our readers.

It’s easy enough to think of an idea or concept that may appeal to a wide group of people, but to present that idea in a way that addresses the questions and concerns of a broad group of readers, meets a felt-need, walks readers through step-by-step, and prompts them to tell others is the holy grail of publishing—that is, if you ask me.

The next step…

Our next topic in this series will be the second thing that sells a lot of books: A Trusted Name with an Extensive Platform

Also in this series: Five Great Things That Don’t Sell a Lot of Books

Great Endorsements

A Great Forward

Great Reviews

Social Media

A Web Site

To really make a web site work takes quite a bit of time and effort.

For starters you need to develop a plan for composing posts and learning how to write for a blog. A good place to start includes:

• Writing a series each week on a particular topic.
• Keeping your word count to a lean 200-400 words.
• Focusing on “How to” content to make sure you connect with readers.

Besides this you’ll need to make sure your web site is optimized for search engines, that your posts appear on social media, and that you’re leaving useful comments on the sites of fellow bloggers. Are you feeling a bit dizzy yet? Well, I’m leaving a lot out!

The trouble is that authors can invest a ton of time into their web sites and even draw a nice crowd of readers without necessarily succeeding in selling a lot of books. In addition, a web site can fall on hard times when writing and promoting a book comes into play—especially for writers who have day jobs!

Great content and high numbers of readers are certainly important for any author looking to promote his/her work. Readers need to be able to find you and to learn about your writing based on your site.

However, a web site is not an active marketing tool. Rather, it’s more of a landing and conversion tool. Marketing campaigns need a web site that readers can visit, but having a web outpost does not guarantee readers. Web sites can be designed poorly or marketing can fail to draw in readers.

By all means invest in a web site, but don’t forget there are two other things you can do that may well effectively sell more books in the long run… That’s where we’re going next.

The rest of this series:

Great Endorsements

A Great Forward

Great Reviews

Online Social Media

A Web Site

Two Thing That Do

A well-written book that is targeted to a specific but wide audience.

A Trusted Name with an Extensive Platform

While there is much to commend about building up a presence on social media, and it can work over time, I’ve spoken with plenty of experienced publishers and marketing experts who caution authors about the danger of giving up on traditional marketing tools in favor of, as one put it, sitting at their computers all day to do online networking.

Don’t get me wrong, it can be incredibly powerful, especially when someone can read something you’ve written or a video you’ve made and click through to a sample of your book and then a sales page.

However, many times social media may only result in more blog views, followers, and interest rather than actual book sales. Online tools may still only make a weak connection with readers.

You can take Seth Godin’s discussion of faux followers vs. viral growth as a great example of this. Someone could spend a lot of time amassing followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook, but how many of these connections will actually become invested in your book, buy it, read it, and tell their friends about it? Godin suggests, “A slightly better idea defeats a much bigger but disconnected user base every time,” but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

In order for book sales and referrals to happen, you certainly need to use social media and to become a contributing member of the community. However, for people to actually buy your book there needs to be a bit more going on than a weak social media connection. While social media is essential, it’s not powerful enough on its own to help authors put books into the hands of readers.

The rest of this series:

Great Endorsements

A Great Forward

Great Reviews

Online Social Media

A Web Site

Two Thing That Do

A well-written book that is targeted to a specific but wide audience.

A Trusted Name with an Extensive Platform

a) This person said this on January 2nd.

b) This person doesn’t like the same kinds of movies as yourself.

I’ve found that with friends and family it can be very hard to recommend a book or a movie. At a recent gathering of friends several discussed their take about the Twilight series. To a person they all thought the books were poorly written, but some admitted that the books made for great leisure reading.

Since books can serve a variety of functions, providing an escape or valuable information, it’s hard to discern based on a review and even a friend’s recommendation whether a book will be a good fit. A reviewer may praise an author’s use of description and ability to set a scene, but perhaps the story doesn’t connect. A review may lambast an author for writing a book lacking essential information about a topic, but perhaps you found just enough to make it helpful.

Reviews are a wonderful tool for drawing attention to worthy books. They may play a significant role in convincing some readers, who may have been sitting on the fence, to pick up a book.

However, when it comes to making that personal connection with readers a review is still a very limited marketing tool. Reviews should be part of every author’s publicity plan, but a good review does not automatically translate into book sales. Those who rely on them to do this will only be disappointed.

The rest of this series:

Great Endorsements

A Great Forward

Great Reviews

Online Social Media

A Web Site

Two Thing That Do

A well-written book that is targeted to a specific but wide audience.

A Trusted Name with an Extensive Platform