Once a novel or book is published it must be publicized to gain sales. (If you self publish a book of history for your immediate family, there is no problem. You just give them a copy and you are finished.)
If you have a publisher like Random House®, they will handle the publicity for you. You may have to go to book signings or appear on radio and television shows to hype the book, but much of the arranging and scheduling will be handled by the publisher.
If you self publish, you may be on your on.
A Note on Self Publishing
Finding a good literary agent to pitch your book to publishers is not easy.
The good ones are too busy to mess with you.
The bad ones will charge you for their services.
The rule is that you never pay a literary agent because he or she is going to get a cut of your royalties. Actually, because of rising cost, some ethical literary agents charge for certain defined services.
Self publishing is becoming more common. The reasons a writer like you may self publish are:
1. You don’t need any more rejection slips to cover your bedroom wall.
2. You would rather write books than letters to publishers.
3. You don’t know how to find a literary agent and you don’t want to learn how to find a literary agent.
4. You don’t want to wait three years to get your book in print.
5. Self publishing is very easy to do and the cost to publish a novel using a print-on-demand publisher can be as low as $100.00 of even free. A print-on-demand printer can publish your book in any quantity from your PDF file. Your word processor will probably create the PDF file for you. Also, if you use software like Adobe PageMaker, etc., a PDF file is easily created.
Lulu.com Will Publish Your Book at No Cost to You
Here is one site where you can publish your book free directly from your word processing file or PDF file, etc.: http://www.lulu.com/
Self publishing companies can charge high fees so you must watch out for your interest. Lulu.com is safe and easy and, as I said, free.
With print-on-demand you do not need to start with 1000 copies of your book. The books are printed one or more at time on order.
Editors
Self publishers may offer editing services but some insist that you are the editor and you must make sure the grammar and spelling are correct before you submit your book files. I published four novels and found that I tended to overlook errors during repeated edits especially those inserted by my spell checker. That is, the spell checker overlooks or changes a word. For that reason, you may want to have a professional editor edit your book.
You can find such an editor listed in Writers Digest Magazine or on the Internet. Just make sure you know up front exactly what the cost will be and what the edit will entail. You probably don’t want an editor to rewrite your book changing the style from yours to his or hers. An edit for grammar and spelling errors should be sufficient.
Publicizing Your Book
With the above digressions (to help those just starting out), how do you publicize your self-published book?
If your book is nonfiction then you can easily identify a market. If your book is Feeding Your Praying Mantis, you have restricted your audience to those who have captured a praying mantis and want to feed it to keep it alive as long as possible.
I would say that the size of your audience is zip, but lets take a look with Google. I put feed a praying mantis in the search box and got 199,000 entries. If I put in the incorrect spelling of praying (preying mantis), I got 221,000 entries. (In comparison when I put Taylor Jones the Hack Writer in the search box, I got over 500,000 entries.)
As I look at the entries on feeding a praying mantis, I see that a lot of folks have them as pets. In the wild, a praying mantis mainly eats insects. One article says that baby praying mantises just love fruit flies. So I would say you do have a market of folks who would love your book.
How do you reach this market?
I would think that you would want to set up a web page to pitch your book.
You have to decide if the page is to focus on you, the author, or the book. I would set up a site on the praying mantis where I would have free content on the praying mantis and a description of my book.
Most of us focus on ourselves such as my personal site shown at the end of this article (tjbooks.com). As I said, that may not be the best thing for your praying mantis book. You may want to have an author web site and a praying mantis website. To do this, you can simply go to GoDaddy®.com and have them give you a hand. They have the best customer service I’ve encountered and the cost of getting a domain name and having them host it is easy and inexpensive. They also have the software you need to design the site.
I use CoffeeCup® software to design my sites. They do not charge for their software if you host with them. They also have great customer service. Their site is: http://tinyurl.com/3ag4t8 You may be able to design your web pages right from your word processor but I don’t recommend it. It puts in a lot of extraneous code.
If you decide you want to push the book directly from a book site which concentrates on your book, make sure the domain name has keywords in it. For example, feedprayingmantis.com is not taken and you could register it. However, prayingmantis.com and praying-mantis.com are registered domains.
If you set up the site feedprayingmantis.com you would create a site with lots of free content on the praying mantis. Then you could advertise your book on the site. It could be made available by a simple link to Lulu.com if that is the way you would want to go. If you include an ISBN number and price bar code (on your book cover), you will be able to sell it on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble’s site, etc., using simple links. You can sell your book directly to customers too if you have them pay you for the book and shipping by PayPal.com or by some other method.
The fact is you can self publish by putting your book into a PDF file and uploading it to your site. Then using PayPal.com as your payment method, the book can be downloaded to your customer while you are sipping lemonade on the beach.
Once you are set up, you will need to drive traffic to your site. Since you have a narrow market you could contact some of the other sites and have them link to your site. In fact, you would trade links. That is why you want lots of good content on your site so that other sites will want to have their link on your site. Don’t forget to submit your site to the top ten search engines to save time. The spiders that will read your site take their time getting to yours. Make sure you have meta files giving the name of your site, a description of your site, and keywords. Go to one of my sites and click on View on your browser then click on Page Source or Source. You will see my source code and my meta files.
Once you are ready to go, blog the Internet that you have a new site on the praying mantis. Then blog that you have a new book out that tells how to feed them. Write articles on the praying mantis and publish them on the web. You could publish them right here at http://www.ezinearticles.com You will be able to place your personal and business site links at the bottom of each article. Whenever you write a new article, blog the Internet that you have done so.
To set up your blog, go to blogspot.com or other blog providers. My blog is tjbooks.blogspot.com
You should send a press release to insect web pages and to any print magazines that have readers interested in the praying mantis. You would describe your site and your book.
There should be no need to spend money for publicity for a book such as yours. Classified ads, however, in print magazines with a very targeted audience can be profitable. You would have to test your ads for response and profit. Don’t waste your money placing ads in newspapers or on the Internet.
I wrote several western and detective novels when I retired. I have just listed four of them on mysteryloverscorner.com (http://www.sleuthedit.com/mlc.html). Dawn Dowdle runs this site. When Dawn has my details online, a mystery lover will be able to find the books and buy them from her site. The cost to do this is minimal. The point is that mystery readers congregate at her site and buy books. (This paragraph seems like a blatant ad for Dawn’s site. But sites like this can help you get exposure. I have invited Dawn to become a writer for [http://www.ezinemagazines.com])
If you are creative, you can think of many ways to promote your books. The narrower the market, the easier it is to promote. The broader your market, the more competition and the harder it is to zero in on the buyers. Just because you have your book listed on Amazon.com does not mean it will sell. You have to do the promotion yourself if you are not tied to a publisher that promotes for you.
There are many books on publicizing your book and there are many sites on the Internet that give good ideas. You will need to study up. Just watch for greedy hands.
For our example on the praying mantis, when you get your site up, you may want to start an ezine on the praying mantis. Then you can collect email addresses of people to whom you can sell by offering a discount or a coupon of some kind. You can also put a free PDF on your site available only to those who sign up for your ezine.
I’ve thought about selling my novels at fairs, etc. I don’t because my publisher does not give an adequate discount unless I buy one hundred books. I told them that was fine, I wanted 25 of each. They said that was not how it worked. I would have to buy 100 of each. Who are they trying to kid? My doctor wont let me lift more than a gallon of milk.
I will say this for my publisher. They let folks read a few chapters of each of my books before they buy them.
The End
copyright©2007 John T. Jones, Ph.D. (Taylor Jones the Hack Writer)
John T. Jones, Ph.D. (tjbooks@hotmail.com), a retired college professor and business executive, Former editor of an international engineering magazine. To learn more about Wealthy Affiliate University go to his info site. If you desire a flagpole to Fly Old Glory, go to the business site.
More info: http://www.InternetBusinessToolCenter.com
Business web site: http://www.AAAFlagpoles.com
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