Category: Sales

1. Aim higher. Are you writing the book to just “have a book” or are you writing the book that your fans, subscribers, followers, clients, prospects, customers, and influencers want to read? The second one takes more careful thought and strategic action. But it will also skyrocket your book’s influence, impact, and income.

2. Act faster. How long have you been noodling on your book idea? According to surveys, 81% of people say they want to write a book but only a tiny fraction of a percentage take action on it. If you’re tired of years and years of wishing and you’re ready to start doing – now is your time.

3. Your book needs to FLOP. FLOP is an acronym for “Feature and Leverage Other People.” And you specifically need 3 groups of people to help propel your book’s sales – your endorsement posse, your contributor tribe, and your launch partners. Nothing great is ever achieved alone.

4. Books don’t sell themselves. Just like “good work should speak for itself” is a complete myth, good books don’t speak for themselves, either. You need to promote, market, catalyze, tease, tempt, help, and serve your readers in lots of ways – and your book is just one of those primary ways.

5. Offer value, invite engagement. Nobody likes to be talked at. But we all love to be talked with and listened to. Make your book marketing and promotion campaign more like a conversation and less like a data dump. Interact, interview, be radically generous, be radically helpful, seek to converse, and not to convince… and the sales will come flooding in.

6. Marketing your book = Marketing YOU. Don’t think about marketing your book as a one-off project. If you’ve written the right kind of book, it will serve and support your business for years to come and vice versa. In fact, the activities that you need to be doing to market the book are the same activities that you need to be doing to market your business!

7. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t fall into the trap of short-term thinking. Your book launch is the beginning – not the end – of your book marketing journey.

8. Focus is everything. If you make your book the focal point of your business, it will become the central driver of your high-payoff marketing, sales, and business development activities. Put massive goals in place and then create a game plan to take baby steps every single day. Rain or shine. Happy or sad. Feel like it or not. That’s the fast path to results.

Here are 13 rookie mistakes that kill your book sales:

1. Self-publish your book and wait by the phone – Ugh, been there, done that, it doesn’t work.

2. Traditionally publish your book and wait by the phone – also not recommended. Books don’t sell themselves no matter which publishing route you take.

3. Not establishing your platform sooner – you need reach and visibility to sell books (and anything else for that matter!)

4. No book proposal – Even if you plan to self-publish, creating a proposal serves as a blueprint and roadmap for your book marketing success.

5. Having only books in your arsenal – A book is a “gateway” into all your other investable opportunities. Make sure your high-fee offerings align with the content of your book.

6. Going it alone. You need book endorsers, launch partners, possibly even contributors to help you build a community of promoters around your book.

7. Using expensive PR firms – almost every single author regrets doing this for the simple reason that their campaigns do NOT generate book sales.

8. Paying for “Amazon #1 bestseller” campaigns. As you may know, a dirty sock became an Amazon #1 bestseller and there are a ton of scammers and goofballs promising “guaranteed” bestseller status. We’ll reveal why that’s not the point — and how to hit your goals regardless of this phony metric.

9. Not branding the book. Your book is your brand and you should be able to build your business around that book and its ideas for the next 3-5 years.

10. Being afraid of sales. Don’t worry about hawking your books. Focus instead on selling your ideas, value, impact, results, outcomes, and gifts – and selling everything (including your book) becomes much easier!

11. Buy into an anthology. For most authors, this is a shortcut that seems very appealing until you realize it’s a money-making ploy for the so-called “publisher” and you get very little juice from being in a book with 20 other authors who couldn’t cut the mustard on their own, either. Sigh.

12. Marketing overwhelm. Having no idea what to do – when to do it – how to get it done – and thus ending up frustrated, confused, and doing next to nothing to market your book. Lack of marketing leads to a lack of sales leads to a lack of monetization. That’s called a doom loop.

13. Mistake size for value. If you’re writing your first (or next) book, don’t give in to the false assumption that you have to write a 300-page tome. Many of the highest-grossing and bestselling business books of the past 20 years weigh in at less than 125 small-format pages.