1000 Books and I'm Published: Selling Books

http://www.ramandgoat.com/

Selling Books

The hardest thing that an author does is selling books.  And you are always selling books.  Writing is what you do in between selling books.  What makes this all the more difficult is that you are selling books to people who don't know who you are.  So while you are writing and selling books you are also trying to develop a crowd.  What I have found is that all three of these aspects of writing books seem to grow together.  While I was writing my first book, The Fourth Day: Why the Bible is Historically Accurate, I heard an author that was being interviewed on National Public Radio describe what writing was like.  He said it was a lot like piling manure.  If you pile it high enough eventually someone is going to notice.  Despite the gross mental picture this is actually pretty good advice.  What he is suggesting is this, build a resume.  Start writing articles and post them to the web  ( I use ezinearticles.com and have about 20 articles posted there).  The more you write the more your skills improve and as you accumulate this pile of articles people will begin to notice.  Since posting my twenty articles on ezinearticles.com I have accumulated 7000 hits over the last 3 years.  Therefore this approach is a good strategy to address writing and developing a crowd but what about marketing.

I have noticed that I have gotten better at marketing as I have written more books.  When I started out I was depending on the "internet" to sell my books.  The power of the internet lies in its ability to distribute "free" content.  Since 2006 I have had 7000 people read my free articles and 300 people download free versions of my book.  I have only been able to sell 10 books for profit during that time.  The internet is not the answer. 
Go ahead and set up a website but use it as a convenient way for your customers to find your book.  Since a month ago I have been selling Living in the Age of the Ram and the Goat to small groups in face-to-face gatherings with a lot more success.  I have sold 20 books in a month using this approach and I have been pleased with the results.      

    

Getting Started

It has been about 2 weeks since I was told by Defender Publisher that their review panel had accepted my manuscript.  So far I have received 24 "pre-orders" for my book.  A "pre-order" is a product where I offer to sell them an electronic copy of my book, the promise to give them a signed copy of the book and then put them on a e-mail bulletin that tells them how I am progressing toward getting the book published.  I really need to average 20 of these "pre-orders" a week to successfully collect 1000 of them in 12 months. 

I have had a couple significant events this week. Regarding the first event, I sat down and had a meeting with the interim pastor of my church and the association director of the Southern Baptist churches in the county where I live.  The objective of the meeting was to see if the association director would be helpful in endorsing the book.  His endorsement would open the door to talking to several churches in the area.  However that didn't happen.  On the other hand my pastor agreed to read through my book and I think he may help me by introducing me to other churches in the area.  This is a lot more support by any pastor I have tried to work with in the past and I am grateful.

The other significant event this week has been my discovery that some local newspapers will accept a press release from me.  The first day I tried to contact newspapers it was discouraging, it was hard to find anyone that would accept anything from me.  However, when I found out that they would accept a press release from me if I could show that this was a "local" story things began to turn around.  I was able to convince papers where I lived that this was a local story; I was able to show papers where I grew up that this was a local story and I was able to show papers where I went to college this was a local stories.  When I was done I had found about 6 newspapers that would accept a press release from me.  This approach works OK with small newspapers however for the most part large newspaper weren't interest (I did find a large newspaper that this worked on though).  The accumulated circulation for all the newspapers amounted to about 130,000 readers.  Much better than I was hoping for.