The prevailing feeling I get when I speak with authors and surf the web is that book promotion is a necessary evil. Many people, myself included, are trying to take the pain out of book promotion. This morning I woke up and wanted to know if any author out there is having any fun promoting his or her book.

Personally, I like selling. Selling my business, my book and my kit, Self-Publishing in a Box is fun for me. I like having a goal and working to attain that goal. But what about authors in general? Are you having fun promoting your books? If so, let us hear what you are doing. Promoting your book should be as fun as writing your book. Is it?

When you start using Amazon, either as a customer or an author, you will want to build your profile. If you are a new customer to Amazon or you want to start a new account, when you go to Amazon.com you will click on the link to start a new account at the top of the page. Once you log in, you will then see several new sub-menus appear and one of these will be “Your Profile.” Click on this and begin building your profile.

While filling out the profile is fairly straight forward, a few things to keep in mind is that whenever you do something on Amazon, people will see your signature and be able to click on your name and come directly to this profile page. Your profile page is your portal on Amazon. When you build a listmania list, it will appear on your profile. When you leave a blog post or a book review, it will appear on your profile.

Another helpful hint is to be sure to include your blog site address or your website address in your signature. You will see why when you start interacting on Amazon. Your signature appears when you interact in the Amazon community, like when you leave a book review for example.

When you set up your profile, you will also want to set up your AmazonConnect function. You can click on the orange button that says, “Edit Your Profile” to find the AmazonConnect set up page. You can also get there by going to www.amazon.com/connect. Once you set this function up, you can begin using your Amazon blog. If you already have an outside blog, you can simply have your posts feed directly to your Amazon blog. This is what I set up, but I also plan to make original posts when I can.

It might be helpful to view my profile to get a visual of what I’m talking about. To see my profile, click on this link.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2Y200C07X1N5T/ref=sv__4

Every month I attend the Utah chapter of the National Speakers Association and each month we spend about 3 hours learning how to build a solid speaking business. I’m not a public speaker by trade, but as a preferred guest I get to attend these meetings and mingle with some of my perfect profile customers. Last month we learned how to come up with titles that sell.

You may find this advice a little strange but that’s okay because most of us attendees did too. The speaker, Sarah Victory (http://www.thevictorycompany.com/index.htm) told us to buy all the tabloid magazines in our neighborhood grocery store. Tabloids like The National Enquirer, she said, are full of examples of great headlines, like this one: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve read a lot about ebooks and I’ve blogged many times on how well they work or don’t work etc, etc. Today I found this blog post (see below) and I thought, why worry whether it works or doesn’t work, we should all just be doing it. The post gives detailed information on how to get your ebook out and then there are multiple comments from other people offering great insight. Here are two things that impressed me. First of all, the author sold 30 copies in 20 days. That’s great. Sure, he had some problems and he returned some, but 30 copies in 20 days, that’s over $300 in sales with no variable printing and shipping costs. The second thing that impressed me was that half of his ebook sales were by customers outside of the US. He attributes this to a better acceptance of ebooks overseas. I’ve spent a lot of time outside the US and this author may be on to something. To read his article, click on the link.

http://www.fonerbooks.com/2008/05/new-pdf-ebook-sales-data-and-problems.html

John F. Kennedy lived a long time before the Internet and the mega online bookstore Amazon. And yet, the more I learn about social media and using Amazon to promote books, the more I keep thinking about Kennedy’s famous inaugural speech back in January 1961. Toward the end of his speech he says:

“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.” Inaugural Address by John F. Kennedy - January 20th 1961

A few months ago I walked into the Sam Wellers bookstore, an independent bookstore here in Salt Lake City, Utah and I asked the General Manager what kind of author he likes to work with. He simply said, “a famous one.” That got me thinking about JFK’s speech. How often are we so caught up in what we want or need that we do not think about what the bookstore owner wants or what an agent wants or a publisher or Amazon?

In the month of October, I will be discussing 10 tactics authors can use to promote their books on Amazon. When you look at these tactics, you will notice that most of them are geared to helping Amazon sell more books. You will also be interacting with your competitors. To be successful on Amazon, authors will need to be comfortable with these two concepts: helping Amazon and helping other authors, authors who sell books similar to yours. But, as you go through these 10 tactics, you will begin to see how these tactics will also help you build your own author platform.

So here are the top 10 tactics I’ll be discussing in the month of October:

1. Building your Amazon profile
2. Using your Amazon blog
3. Using Listmania
4. Using Amazon Guides
5. Building your book detail page
6. Using Amazon Advantage
7. Using the search inside function
8. Using Amazon Marketplace
9. Why you might want to use the BXGY service
10. Using the CAP program

Interesting article here by Gregory A. Kompes titled Writerpreneur: Electronic Self-Publishing. In his article, Mr. Kompes talks about using blogs, articles, ebooks, audio and video to build an electonic footprint on the web to improve your author platform.

I’d like to add the importance of building a strategic plan to promote your book. Authors have hundreds of tactics they can use to promote themselves, but without a clear plan in place, many authors simply dabble in these tactics and do not pursue them vigorously. If you are a blogger, then you understand the importance of blogging regularly and interacting with other blogs. This activitiy may take several hours a week. If you use Facebook, you’ll be spending several hours a week building your author platform there as well.

As you perform these electonic publishing activities, you will see your following grow. It is usually a long and arduous task, but without a platform, you have very little chance taking your book to the next level so the work is worth it if you stick to it.

I was on the phone today talking to a prospective ZDocs author and she told me she had decided not to print her book but to sell her book first as an ebook. Ebooks were all the rage years ago, but sales have not been very robust and the enthusiasm has waned somewhat. But ebooks are a great concept whose time will probably come once consumer trends change to accommodate them.

For example, push advertising on the Internet failed in the early days when most consumers were using dial-up connections. Now that most of the world has a broadband connection, push advertising is coming back through the form of RSS feeds. I think that once enough consumers (called “critical mass”) are carrying their PDAs and using them to read books, then ebook sales will start to pick up. I also think that producers of information - publishers and self-publishers alike - will need to format their information for the new consumer.

Why I’m talking about ebooks today is that a recent visitor to this blog led me to an incredible article titled Quest for bestseller means lots of returned books, by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal on how expensive book returns are to publishers. If you’ve tried to sell your books in a book store, I’m sure you’ve been told by the bookstore owner that any books that do not sell will be returned to you. This article explains why the book industry is hampered by this system and just how much it costs publishers, the book industry and ultimately the book buyer. The article is fairly lengthy, but I found it very enlightening and worth the read.

Ebooks seems to be a perfect solution to the book-returns problem. Suppliers would move to this new distribution model overnight if the consumer would demand more ebooks. So the problem to me appears to be on the demand side (the book reader), not the supply side.

I told my potential customer that trying to sell her book in ebook format was a great idea despite the overall sluggish sales at this time. To me, the self-publishing business is all about minimizing your risk, which means minimizing your initial investment.

Times are changing. My prediction is that ebooks will be in higher demand in the near future and Amazon’s Kindle is a strong move in the right direction.

My guess is that most published authors have received at least one rejection slip, especially when they were getting started and were still officially “unpublished.” I have yet to meet a literary agent or publisher who wants to work with an unpublished author. But at one point all published authors were unpublished. So how does an unpublished writer become a published writer if no one in the industry wants to take the risk with an unpublished author? It’s the proverbial catch 22.

Published writers are people who believe in themselves, who are persistent and who, over time, figure out their audience and learn how to write to that audience. Published writers are also people who understand that a good editor is someone who knows the target audience better than the author.

Once an author knows his audience, it is his job to do his best to write engaging stories with that audience in mind. The editor’s job is to know the audience on a more intimate level and to make changes in the spirit of helping the author’s work resonate with the audience. For example, If a writer is doing an article on restaurants in New Orleans, the writer will have a general idea of his or her audience. But the writer may not know that the readers of the magazine she is writing for may be offended at writing that is too colloquial. The editor’s job is to know the specifics about the audience and to make changes to the author’s work to help the author and the reader connect. Read the rest of this entry »

I was listening to an audio book by Earl Nightingale the other day and in his book he said that the top 5% of wealthy people have a strong command of language. He said these people tend to read many books each year and to have a strong vocabulary. He went on to say that if we find ourselves in the 95% of people not independently wealthy, one tactic we can use to better our position is to read more books. He said that if a person were to read just 15 minutes a day, he or she could finish 10 books a year.

This reading 15 minutes a day, by the way, is what I do and he’s right. I generally read 10 to 15 books a year, mostly fiction. I like to read fiction prior to sleeping and I can usually only get through a few pages each day, but I get through a lot of books. Last night I finished Ernest Hemingway’s, For Whom The Bell Tolls. Lately I’ve also been getting through one to two audio books a month just listening while driving around. When I’m driving, I prefer non-fiction audio books. But while I’m getting through a lot of books, I’m not in the upper 5% of wealthy people yet so I’m not sure if Mr. Nightingale’s correlation works yet. But I’m going to keep reading just the same.

Why I’m writing about Mr. Nightingale’s assertion that to get wealthy people need to read books is to refute the arguments lately that people are not reading, or if they are reading, they might be getting through only one book a year. While this statistic may be true, it may also be misleading. As authors, we need to look at the market carefully and not be discouraged by statistical polls. Here’s one way to look at it:

We have 280,000,000 million adults in the United States. 5% of 280 million is 14 million readers. Now, how many of the 95% of non-wealthy Americans are reading books to improve their position? Let’s say it’s 10%. There’s another 28 million people. If these people read 10 books a year, that’s 420 million books they will read. And my guess is that this number is probably double.

The point is that a significant portion of the population does read, despite the doom and gloom reports you might read in the news. The key for authors is knowing who reads and how to find them. In this post, we’ve identified two demographics, the already wealthy and people who know that to get wealthy they must read. Another strong demographic is the pre-teen and teen market. If you don’t believe me, just ask Stephanie Meyers, author of the Twilight series, and of course JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series. These authors have found plenty of readers.