Recently I’ve been watching with increasing dismay as one of my author friends rushes around, relentlessly trying to push her books in every single social media channel on earth, while hassling book bloggers, reviewers and online media to the point of exhaustion.
As well as turning herself into a social media train wreck, she also continues to ignore the most powerful selling force that’s staring her in the face.
How can you get a ‘rave’ response when you launch your next book?
The day your book launches is way too late to start your marketing program. Ideally your ‘theater’ needs to be filled with an eagerly waiting crowd, long before your book fronts the footlights. But for first time authors this can quite rightly seem to be an impossible stretch.
It’s an unavoidable fact of life. Most writers tolerate a ‘Day Job’ to keep the writing dream alive until such time as the work becomes popular enough to carry the day.
But even history’s most successful writer had to keep a ‘Day Job’ going, it’s now been revealed. A new study by researchers from Aberystwyth University in Wales claims that William Shakespeare was a ruthless businessman who avoided taxes and lent money to the vulnerable at usurious rates that would have made even Shylock blush, while writing plays about their plight to entertain them.
The inevitable has finally happened, but… it’s still something of a shock.
Online retailer Amazon has just announced it is buying book-review site ‘Goodreads’ with its 16 million members, an acquisition that clearly recognizes the massive promotional value of the Goodreads ‘social network’.
We already knew that Amazon was the 800 pound gorilla of online book stores, but when it comes to directly reaching book readers, this makes it a 10,000 pound King Kong.
Picture this awful moment…
It’s 2 o’clock in the morning and you’re sitting at your computer, the unfinished draft of your book lighting up your tired face. Empty coffee mugs are scattered around the room.
It’s been more than four hours now, and you haven’t been able to write a single decent sentence yet, let alone a chapter. The flashing cursor sits there on the screen, mocking you as you desperately try to come up with the right ideas. With the right words. With anything at all.
You’re afraid, even fearful. Why?
At the recent ‘Tools of Change’ publishing conference in New York, Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler revealed a remarkably simple, effortless way for authors to sell more eBooks on Amazon… or in fact anywhere eBooks are sold online.
In a survey of Goodreads’ 15 million strong membership, he found that the main driver of eBook purchases was, unsurprisingly, ‘referral by a friend’. But when a follow-up question was put to readers, another powerful sales strategy for authors emerged.
Okay, be honest – did you experience a pang of anxiety when you read the headline above?
Don’t worry, nobody’s perfect, and we all make mistakes. (Trust me, I’ve made plenty of them in the course of my writing career…) But some mistakes can prove more costly than others, and you can easily end up sabotaging your book sales without even realizing it.
I’d like to take a moment today to look at 7 common but costly mistakes that I see many authors making, in the hope that you won’t fall into the same trap.
Here they are:
Ray Bradbury, science-fiction aficionado of the 20th century, produced an astonishing array of fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery stories.
But his success didn’t happen immediately. While he eventually sold more than eight million copies of his novels and short stories, Bradbury actually struggled for years to support his family before making any meaningful progress.
Of course, we all know that learning to write well takes a considerable amount of time and commitment. But surely there’s a way to avoid the unnecessarily arduous experiences that Bradbury suffered?
Fortunately, before he died in 2012, Bradbury recorded the secret of his breakthrough, the moment he stumbled upon the elusive force he needed to power his writing.
Every author who cares about their sales should pay close attention to what’s happening with children’s eBook sales, and understand what this means for the future of all books.
According to Digital Book World’s latest report ‘The ABCs of Kids and eBooks’, over half of all U.S. children aged two-to-thirteen are not only reading, but 85% of them are using eReaders, with tablets being the preferred choice.
This is more than double the number of U.S. adults e-reading, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
How to use Twitter to find readers and increase your book sales, and how it can help you get a publisher.
Founder Jonathan Gunson has worked in publishing, in advertising agencies, and in television drama programming for more than two decades. He coaches writers in the techniques needed to get published and sell more books, including traditionally printed books and ebooks.
His bestseller puzzle book 'The Merlin Mystery' sold over 350,000 copies, and was translated into 7 languages.
