Your book selling, book marketing, and book promotion planning should begin before the manuscript is completed. Assuming you’re a self publisher or book publisher and you’ve already published your book, you need to immediately implement a strong, no-holds barred, book marketing and promotion strategy to sell your books fast. You can have the best book in the world, but if no one knows about it, no one will buy it; publicity, promotion, marketing and a focus on selling more books should now be a big part of your daily life.

Don’t underestimate the value of a good press release for making book sales. When picked up by wire services, a press release can easily end up generating hundreds of mentions for your book. Make sure your press release spells out the ‘who, what, where, when, and why.’

Send out at least 10 press releases to the print and broadcast media in your area every month. Send out the same press release to the editor of your local daily newspaper every week until you are called for an interview or are written up. Make sure you have at least one good press release, written in AP style, which you can send out for the lifetime of your book.

Press releases can generate thousands of dollars in sales when picked up by national trade or print media. Using press releases can be a very effective marketing tool if used properly.  Read more... (645 words, estimated 2:35 mins reading time)

Becoming an author happens once in a lifetime. As soon as you publish your first book, you forever more become an author. And regardless how many additional books you write, that label never changes. The interesting thing is that you get the same designation whether you had your book published by one of the industry giants like Penguin or Random House, or if you self-published it. And since the process of self-publishing is a lot easier than getting one of the industry giants to accept your book proposal, I suggest doing your first one yourself.

One of the tricks to this process is to register a fictitious business name that sounds like a publishing company and then using that name as the copyright holder for your book. Your still publishing your own book but it looks like you used a real publishing company, adding credibility to the finished product. I would think of a regal-sounding name and use that. The exercise will cost you about $50 but it will add tremendously to the final piece.

There actually are thousands of smaller independent publishing companies and no one in the world knows them all. The reason for saying that is that your fictitious business name doesn’t need to be a recognized name like Penguin or McGraw Hill. It can be a different name that nobody has ever heard of before. The important thing is that the book appears to have been published by a legitimate publishing company and they own the copyright.  Read more... (531 words, estimated 2:07 mins reading time)

Your efforts do not stop after you have taken to write your pride and joy book or novel. In fact, formatting it up to the standards of different publishers and finding the right publisher needs an equally great effort, time and research if you wish to avoid a stack of rejection slips landing in your mail box..

Although there are hundreds and hundreds of them, the best place to look for book publishers is the Writers Market, this is a book which is published once a year incorporating information on book publishers, magazines publishers, and any other imaginable publisher in the writing market.

It will give you the most up-to-date information about the specialization of each publisher, whom to contact, and how to you have to format your manuscript to meet their specifications. For more up to the minute information Writers Market is available online too.

There is a lot of guidance available online which gives tips on how to approach book publishers as well as how to attract the attention of an editor by sending a well-drafted cover letter with your manuscript. Paying great attention to small nuances like these may make a big difference in getting someone to read your submission instead of it being tossed in the rejected pile unread.  Read more... (416 words, estimated 1:40 mins reading time)

If you are looking to earn good money online, then use the affiliate guide for publishers in order to increase the traffic on your site. Online publishers play a very significant role in running the affiliate marketing programs. It is easy to become an affiliate with other online merchants.

All you need is to have a website with good quality content as well as an impressive design. As the increase of traffic is important for your website, you are required to update the content of your site on a regular basis. Make sure that you keep refreshing your site with keyword-rich content. Go through the affiliate guide in order to get high page ranks for your website through search engines like Google.

There are certain requirements that you must meet in order to become a successful affiliate. One of the biggest platforms for the sale of programs or products is through advertisements. Online merchants tie up with publishers in order to generate a larger amount of traffic or visitors for their websites. For higher traffic, the merchants put their advertisements on well promoted sites.

The publishers, being resourceful affiliates, can generate more traffic or visitors than the merchants themselves. The affiliate guide for publishers can help them learn even more tips for creating traffic generating articles and keyword-rich content. The success of the publisher lies in his ability to create more keyword promoting articles.  Read more... (460 words, estimated 1:50 mins reading time)

As I travel the country speaking to writer’s groups in workshops and seminars, I’m struck by the amount of misinformation that is floating around. Having spent 25-years working for two of the largest publishers in the world, I thought it would be important to set the record straight and write about three of the most common myths.

It’s not about who published your book, but will it make money

First, there seems to be this impression that if an author publishes with a print-on-demand company – or god forbid self-publish their own manuscript – the big publishers will never be interested in their book. This is wrong! The fact is that the biggest companies in the world are focused on making money. If they discover a title they feel has potential to gain widespread distribution and sell lots of copies, they don’t care who published it, they want it. The big publishers rarely look at who published what, for them, it’s about dollars and if they feel your writing has the potential, they’ll publish it.

An agent is not required  Read more... (511 words, estimated 2:03 mins reading time)