Selling Books by the Thousands

What comes first, writing or selling your book? To tell you the truth the question is not which to do first but to write a book that people want to read. The key ingredient to write a book and sell thousands of it is to attach the book to a worthy cause.

There are thousands of companies and non-profit organizations all around the country in dying need to raise funds for their advancement. I’m sure you can find a few which you can identify with. You must be passionate about what you write because it will take a lot of work and effort in your part not only as you write the book but on the long road of promoting it. When your initial enthusiasm fades away it is your commitment to impact others with your book what will help you finish your project. A book promotion takes a minimum of two years and ideally you’ll be promoting it even longer.

Writers mistakenly think that they way to sell a lot of books is in bookstores when in reality it is outside, where you go directly to your audience. You must know who your audience is and where to reach it; the way to find out who your audience is by creating a marketing plan for your book. When you have a marketing plan you have a clear road map to deliver the book to the people.

A good way to promote your book and sell thousands is by attaching the book to a company. Companies need books and educational materials on an on-going basis, not only that but they also have built-in budgets for those expenses. All you need to do is find out what they need or are looking for, do a research on the topic and develop a book for them. This is where networking helps. While talking to business and non-profit organization’s owners you can find a need and fill it. When you come up with a book or book idea you can approach the company in order to offer them the book for their organization, ideally the book will be a good product to them to do fundraisings for their cause. They can give the book away to their supporters as an incentive or to create awareness to gain even more support. You can even offer them to sponsor the book and customize the book for their company by including documents, reports or a letter from the chairman, by doing so they will pay you to write and publish the book. When a company sponsors a book a special seal is designed and displayed prominently on the book cover. The better the sales potential of the book the bigger the amount the company will be willing to pay to sponsor it. They are basically paying for exposure, that’s why the marketing plan of your book is so important. It’s what you’ll present to the company in order to negotiate the terms for a sale order or potential sponsorship. Once the company accepts your book and agree upon a percentage of sale profits to go to their company, they will also agree to order and X amount of books when it’s published. Not only that but they will help you promote your book. The reason why they will do so is because your book will help their fundraising and raise awareness about their company’s mission.

In a nutshell here is what you do:
• Make a commitment to find a worthy cause
• Be passionate about it
• Find the right company
• Be persistent and know the market
• Prepare a proposal explaining why your book is perfect for their cause
• Make a deal

About the author:

Clary Lopez is the CEO/Founder of Guerrilla Marketers Café, Free Book Promotion site.
She is an author, moderator and publicist. She is preparing to launch her next book, BookPromo Guerrilla Style. You can contact her at guerrilla@clarylopez.com or visit her websites http://guerrilla.clarylopez.com, http://bookhomestead.com and her official author site http://clarylopez.com

Importance on Website Design

In order to bring visitors and keep them coming back, it is important to have a well designed site. I have been analyzing my website for over a month now and noting in which ways it has been effective. So far Guerrilla Marketers’ Cafe has been excellent attracting authors but not readers. I tried to incorporate certain elements like forums, author interviews, articles, etc. in order to attract them but it hasn’t work. To me the best solution was to create a whole new site for readers.

Concentrating my efforts to develop Guerrilla Marketers’ Cafe solely for authors will be a good choice. In it, I plan to incorporate useful resources, tools and services for authors and book marketing techniques and materials. Whoever becomes a member will have access to the site in which readers will come to view new books, interviews, review and win prizes.

In the next couple of months everything will be different and we will launch a redesigned site and a new site. There is much more in the works of services to be provided to authors in order to help them with their book marketing. I’m looking forward to a very succesful 2007 for all the members of Guerrilla Marketers’ Cafe.

Processing Changes

After much thought and analysis of the situation with the website I decided to split the site.  Since the big taffic comes from authors it will become the power source of information, resources and tools for authors looking to learn to promote their books.  I think that will provide me the freedom to include more things in this site without distracting the focus of it, I like that.   

A whole new site is in the process and two others will provide premium services in the next 6 months or so.  There is so much to do and ways to promote that I would like to provide choices for all the Guerrilla Marketers’ Cafe members in order to help them move along quicker from book  pre-publication to readers. 

I won’t provide much details here about he new site until we get closer to the grand opening, all I can say is that is going to be great and a place were readers would love to visit frequently.  In the meantime we have added about twenty new authors to our site and their books, so if you are looking for some really good books make sure you check our bookshelves. 

Analyzing Websites

Learning how websites work and how to best reach your target audience takes time and research. I believe I’ve managed to attract my initial target audience, authors, to Guerrilla Marketers’ Cafe but the integration of readers to the site hasn’t been that effective. It’s either a matter of restructuring the site to meet the needs or splitting the site in two entities to achieve the goal.

Redesigning will have to take place with CSS ,which I’m not familiar with, in order to simplify the site navigation since it has too many things going on. Trimming down on the site’s navigation will help the visitor finds its way around the site and what it has to offer.

My goal is to be able to expose all the books properly and providing a site for readers to not only view the books but to review them and find out about book signings and author special promotions. The Featured Author interview would go on that site as well. By having a site dedicated just to readers will free Guerrilla Marketers’ Cafe to authors looking to learn in detail how to market their books. I could set up some kind of Content Management system on it to provide even more than we already do.

The next two months will be crucial in this analysis and transition in order to offer the level of quality service I want to offer authors as well as readers. If you get a chance to visit the site let me know your thoughts about it and what you believe would be the best thing to do. The ideal situation would be to find a student website designer willing to take on the redesign as a project.

Research Project

   
A long discussion about using MySpace as advertising has been part of Guerrilla Marketers @ Lulu Forum since April.  Jumping onboard last week was Adam Schultz from Search Engine Lowdown.    Adam has been analyzing how to use         as a tool for marketing for a while after he saw the potential with the success of the X-Man movie release who created a         for its promotion. But what caught my attention was his entry on another author, Niambi, who has successfully created  hers        and attracted over a thousand people to it. I would love to have her come here and share some of her experience with the site.   

Since we deal with authors in our site we are exploring the possibilities to use this medium to create awareness for our books and connect to our readers.  I just found out today about a new area in MySpace Books. 

We have one author, Alan Baxter, who is using the medium to network with people who enjoy Dark Fantasy Fiction and getting some friends already reading his book and commenting on his space. He also uses it to drive people to his regularly updated blog. 

The jury is out, the market potential is there, I guess it will be a matter of learning how to make it work and hopefully we’ll find a way right here.  If we put our heads together and share our experiences I’m sure we’ll get somewhere. 

So here is the deal for this research; for those authors who have a         and would like to participate of this research I’ll welcome your ideas and experiences.  Anything at all that you can think of, we’ll look into it and see if we can put it to the test and share the results here. Make an entry on your blog and email me the link post to share here at Inside the Mind of a Guerrilla Marketer.  We’ll be storming some ideas and sharing experiences until the end of the month.

Note: This message was originally posted on our Guerrilla Insight for Authors.  See Comments on this entry.