Book Marketing Matters™
Brian Jud's free, bi-weekly ezine dedicated to helping you get your fair share of sales in special-sales (non-bookstore) markets, and sell more books profitably
Volume 14, Issue 8, Number 326 April 13, 2015 |
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| | Greetings!
Here is your April 13 edition of the Book Marketing Matters special-sales ezine by Brian Jud. It contains regular columns with tips from Dan Poynter, John Kremer, Guy Achtzehn, Rick Frishman, Eric Kampmann, Paulette Ensign, Judith Briles, Tonya Evans and Roger C. Parker. The guest columnist in this issue is Carol Topp.
This newsletter is sent by subscription only. Please pass this information along to people you feel may benefit by it. If there were any problems with this delivery, please let me know. If you prefer to have this sent to you as a pdf, please reply with "pdf" in the subject line or body copy. If you no longer wish to receive this -- or if you received it in error -- please reply with "Remove" in the subject line. All of us at Book Marketing Works wish you success in your book-marketing efforts, Brian Jud Click here to view this newsletter as a pdf document |
News From APSS
(The Association of Publishers for Special Sales) | The Latest Benefit for APSS Membership: Publicity to hundreds of thousands of viewers, bloggers, readers and followers. Interact with readers through live chats. Give your book a chance to be discovered where the readers are with BookTrib: The Lifestyle Destination for Book Lovers. We offer opportunities for readers to interact with popular authors online via live chats, providing reviews, book trailers, and ever-popular weekly book giveaways. The majority of the site's viewers are college-educated working women between the ages of 25 and 65, and readers include members of book clubs, book bloggers, librarians, bookstores and thousands of readers who appreciate books as an object of beauty as well as entertainment. * Give your website an additional advantage by setting it up on BookTrib.com. We will send an announcement in our newsletter to over 12,000 subscribers, with a screenshot and a link added to our Facebook page with 8,399 friends, Google+ with 406,340 followers and 2,111,091 views as well as on our Twitter feed with 13,475 followers. $500 ($450 with your APSS membership number) * Get interviewed by a BookTrib writer and for an added bonus we will offer your book as a giveaway. Your Q&A will live on our home page and also appear in our weekly newsletter that is emailed to our 12,000+ readers. $450 ($405 with your APSS membership number) * A live video chat that is pre-arranged and promoted to thousands of our media, blogger and reader contacts. We create several digital assets that are used to promote your live chat. You can use these assets on your own social media entities and our live chats are also promoted in our newsletter and on all of our social media. $1,500 ($1350 with your APSS membership number) * While slots last we can add your e-book book to our Net Galley account for 8 weeks that includes an e-blast to 15,000 professional readers and reviews will start filling your inbox. $1350 ($1215 with your APSS membership number) To your success, Brian Jud Executive Director, APSS |
| We can sell your books to non-bookstore buyers -- non-returnable | | Do you want us to sell your books?
Commission-based special sales. Non-returnable. We pay shipping
We get about 3,000 hits per month  on the ESP search engine. Most of the titles in our program receive some action on a regular basis. We cannot show them all, but here is a list of the direct inquires for which we send sample books. We usually customize them with the customer's logos or with a tip-in insert page. www.premiumbookcompany.com |
Notes From the Front Lines (Excerpted - with permission - from the Book Publishers' Handbook, by Eric Kampmann, President, Midpoint Trade Books ekampmann@aol.com) | | A lot of confusion exists around the concept of "Pub Date." Some think that "Pub Dates" are unnecessary or have no impact on your publishing strategy, but I would disagree. First, let us remove the confusion of terms. "Pub Date" is not the same as "Bound Book Date" or "Ship Date." "Bound Book Date" refers to the time when the book comes off the printers press. "Ship Date" refers to the time when your warehouse releases backorders and begins to ship your title to book store accounts, including wholesalers. Then finally comes "Pub Date." This is the day when you really begin to market your title to the consumer. This is when you should begin media appearances, advertise or have display promotions in stores. |
Poynter's Pointers (Excerpted - with permission - from Dan Poynter's Fifteenth Edition of | | Retail your books for full list price. Do not compete with your dealers or cheapen your product.
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| The Cover Story - Peri Poloni-Gabriel (Peri Poloni-Gabriel of Knockout Design has been in the business of designing books for over 15 years. She can be contacted at www.knockoutbooks.com) |
For this book, a collection of yoga lessons, the author/teacher provided a cover photo from her studio. Using colors from the photo for the text is one way to create harmony in a design, in this case blue and brown. Of necessity, the photo is the focal point, so we used the empty space above the model's head for the title. For the word Yoga, we chose a graceful typeface with alternate characters that look like they are stretching
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The Book Shepherd - Judith Briles (Judith Briles is the Chief Visionary Officer of www.AuthorU.org. She's known as The Book Shepherd ( www.TheBookShepherd.com), and is the author of 30 books including Show Me About Book Publishing and Author YOU: Creating and Building the Author and Book Platforms. Download podcasts from Judith's radio show, Your Guide to Book Publishing at: http://rsrn.us/youpublish | | Authors need to do their pre-work. Bookstores, and the people who work in them, book store-one of the biggies, like Barnes & Noble and one of the independents. I'm in Colorado-we've got the fabulous Tattered Cover in Denver; there's also the Bookies and wonderful places like the BookBar that are popping up. I bet that there is something that is unique to you and your locale. Bookstores can be your best friend. Your authoring journey is the perfect time to become a familiar patron at your local one. Whatever is close, go. Get to know the personnel, the person who heads up the section/genre that your book would land in and meet the manager. For the developing author, experienced bookstore employees can offer some coaching-what's moving in the store; what colors are popping on covers; what type of books customers are asking for; or what types of problems are customers seeking solutions to; what the local book clubs are reading and buzzing about. |
You're On The Air (Deborah Wetzel, morning news anchor and talk-show host on WCBS-FM, New York City) | | Two concepts determine your relative success in answering questions on the air: preparation and flexibility. You may or may not know the questions you will be asked, nor the person asking them. But if you know your topic and know what you want to get across to the audience, you can perform well in any situation. |
The Very Idea
(Editorial by Brian Jud) | Most buyers in special markets care less about your cover design than they do about the content of your book. They want to know how your information can help them increase sales, motivate their employees or help them become more profitable. Also, bookstore buyers want to know how you can help them increase store traffic; librarians want to know how your content can help their patrons.
Peel away that which is not important and focus on the meat of the issue - what you can do for them. Appeal to them with reasons why your content is different from and better than competitive titles. Demonstrate your competitive advantage so they know your book is the best of the bunch. Do that and you can quickly become the top banana in your target markets. |
Ideas for Selling to Non-Bookstore Buyers Guy Achtzehn (President of The Promotional Bookstore, offering commission-based sales of books to non-bookstore buyers, guy@msgpromo.com) | A book can be customized to the recipient. Place the company's name on the cover of the book or replace the cover with one of leather. Ask the company's president to write the foreword. Some companies may want to include a page of advertising or links to its related products and services. The content may also be tailored to fit a special occasion or season, to recognize service anniversaries or celebrate a company landmark. |
Leadership and Growth Concepts - Tom Hill (Founder and CEO of the Eagle Goal Coach, an organization devoted solely to assisting others find and follow their life's passion. Tom can be reached at tom@tomhillwebsite.com) | We all have developed a personal value statement in some form or another. Our companies have mission statements. Have you ever written a Spiritual Mission statement? Adding the word "spiritual" changes the dynamics of the statement. Write a spiritual mission statement. Then go back and reflect on whether or not your "spiritual mission" statement matches your personal or company mission statement. |
Marketing Planning (Excerpted from Brian Jud's e-booklet, Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan: 461 Tips for Profitable Marketing Planning; www.bookmarketing.com) | A basic tenet of marketing is to give your customers what they want, not only what you have to sell. Creative marketing discovers and produces solutions that customers did not ask for but to which they enthusiastically respond. |
Book-Marketing Tips - Roger C. Parker | | To sell more books, move beyond the obvious. Information, alone, is not enough to create a book that publishers will want to publish, or readers will want to buy. To become profitably published, your book must move beyond communicating mere information and, instead, must appeal to your reader's emotions. To succeed, your book must inspire your readers. Every aspect of your book -- its cover, title, organization, and contents -- must communicate that the problems your readers face are solvable and the goals they want to achieve are achievable. To justify buying your book, readers have to be inspired to believe that your book's promise is attainable, possible, and realistic. Inspiration requires simplicity. In order to appear credible, the information in your book has to be simplified, or organized, into a few key points. Contents have to be organized into chapters, and chapters have to be organized into affirmations, commitments, habits, parts, principles, questions, sections, or steps. To be remembered, shared, and acted upon, each organizing principle has to be stated in simple, everyday language. The smaller the number, the more likely your book will survive. A few habits, pillars, principles, questions, or steps are easier to remember than a large number. As you analyze the information you want to share with your readers, ask yourself how you can organize and simplify the contents so that you can inspire your reader's by emphasizing the likelihood of success. |
Marketing Strategy
(Excerpted from Brian Jud's e-booklet, The Buck Starts Here: 635 Tips for Creating Successful Marketing Strategy; www.bookmarketing.com) | A successful book must satisfy some market need, have a unique point of differentiation and be produced in high quality. |
Legal Matters That Matter to Writers (Contact Professor Evans at Legal Write Publications, info@legalwritepublications.com or www.legalwritepublications.com; The information contained in this column is for general informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. If you need advice regarding a specific legal matter, consult a lawyer as each case is fact-specific.) | | What Copyright Does Not Protect Despite the broad protection of copyright law, it does not protect the following things: -
Works that have not been fixed in a tangible form of expression (for example, choreographic works that have not been notated or recorded, or improvisational speeches or performances that have not been written or recorded). -
Titles of books and other works, proper names (including Web site domain names), short phrases, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring; mere listings of ingredients or contents. -
Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from descriptions, explanations, or illustrations. -
Works consisting entirely of information that is common property and containing no original authorship (for example, standard calendars, height and weight charts, tape measures and rulers, and lists or tables taken from public documents or other common sources).
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Booklet Ideas - Paulette Ensign | | "I never thought of that." That's a frequently heard comment when discussing tips booklets and the many ways the content can be expanded, contracted, and re-used as a marketing tool and a revenue stream. You are telling your clients, prospects, audiences, and online followers what to do to improve their life based on your expertise. Yet it may not have occurred to you that you can put that information together as a sale-able product, or even in multiple products. After all, it can be easy to presume everyone knows what you're sharing. Or you may wonder who would actually buy the information, be unclear about the formats to create, not know how to develop the products, or be able to imagine anything other than a book - which you have no particular interest in writing. Since you are reading this article, you do have a level of curiosity about tips booklets. That's the starting point. Many people enjoy reading, and learn best that way. It is an ideal foundation piece on which to build an entire product line. You'll create the booklet in both downloadable and printed versions. That's the beginning of expanding your product line, easily, effortlessly, and almost without even realizing it. Another step in your product expansion is to audio record the tips content from the booklet. Speaking the information in a conversational manner reaches people whose learning style and/or lifestyle is better suited to listening to information. Like the booklet, your audio recording is created as both a downloadable file and printed as an audio CD. One more of the many possibilities is to create a card deck, with one tip per card. You may have seen affirmation cards or angel cards or other card decks that can be good models for this. The downloadable version of this is to upload one tip per email to be able to "drip a tip" on people who subscribe to an online mailing list. All of this came from one set of tips, and became six products. Three are hard copy and three are downloadable. Each product format becomes a new revenue stream for you and simultaneously markets your business and your expertise. The revenue streams can be single copy sales, one product to one person at a time. Or you can focus on large quantity sales to single buyers at companies, associations, educational institutions, and places who want to use your products to help sell more of their products or services. ACTION - Imagine the many places your content can appear, online and offline. You have probably received your fair share of customized pens, calendars, coffee mugs, shirts, and caps over the years. Looking beyond the company name on those products can get you thinking about where else your tips content can go when a large quantity buyer likes what you have and has a particular idea of their own for how they want your content to be used. Those clients will also help you expand your product line with their purchase, without you stocking any inventory or making any financial investment. |
Guest Columnist - Carol Topp, CPA (Carol Topp is an accountant and author of Information in a Nutshell: Business Tips and Taxes for Writers. She may be reached at Carol@CarolToppCPA.com ) | The vast majority of authors are sole proprietorships with good reason. It is the simplest business structure - easy to start and easy to close. A sole proprietorship is a business with one owner and is popular with writers for many reasons. Reason #4: Easy to understand. Partnerships and corporations can be very complex and difficult to understand. On the other hand, you probably know someone who operates a small business as a sole proprietorship and can understand what they do. |
| | | Enlisting the support of well-known and/or well-respected individuals can help book sales. Such individuals can help in many ways, by writing your book's foreword, preface, or introduction. Or they can provide an endorsement for your book that can be placed on the book's cover, back cover, first few pages, and/or promotional materials. Endorsements usually help when they're from individuals that most people recognize or who have a large following. However, the head of your local Chamber of Commerce, a city Supervisor, or another local bigwig may love your book and have lots of clout close to home, but if your writing doesn't target your local area, their endorsements may not carry much weight with agents and editors. |
Kremer's Korner (Excerpted - with permission - from John Kremer's Sixth Edition of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books. Contact John at http://www.bookmarket.com) | | How to blog effectively. To create an effective blog, one that will get you noticed and linked to, you have to think like a blogger. Here are a few basic actions that should help your blog get noticed: - Post every day.
- Interview interesting people.
- Use a layout the makes it easy to read your blog.
- Stir the pot. Poke fun at something.
- Recycle content.
- Post a blog roll - a list of other blogs your find interesting.
- Comment on the content of other blogs.
- Link to your website.
- Be truthful.
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Helpful Website of the Week - Adele M. Annesi
(Adele is a freelance writer and an editor with a high-tech analysis firm in Stamford, CT and may be reached at a.annesi@sbcglobal.net) |
Spreaker.com www.spreaker.com Spreaker enables writers to share content online. You can record a scene from your novel, tips from your business book or a reflective passage from your memoir. Spreaker also sends updates to social networks for live broadcast in seconds from a mobile app or desktop. |
Pam's Book Marketing Tips - Pam Lontos | Writing Articles Is A Great Way To Gain Readers Writing articles on a non-exclusive basis can get your article into multiple specialty magazines. Here is the format for a great article that magazines want to publish: -
Create a provocative title. -
Start off with a great opening sentence, also known as the "the lead." -
Open with a story. -
Use the second paragraph to relate the dilemma to the readers. -
Give 3 to 8 tips, strategies, or steps the reader can take to solve the problem. Use bullet points or numbers. -
Give a very brief, one paragraph summary with a call to action at the end. -
Keep the word count around 800 to 1,000 words. -
Include a resource box, where you put your contact information. -
In the resource box, mention your book, company, product or service. Also mention any CDs or DVDs you have. Warnings: -
Don't promote yourself or your book within the article -
Don't write it in the 1st person -
Don't put in too much fluff
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Upcoming Marketing Events
| Congratulations! You've written a book... Now what? By Lisa Pelto April 14, 6:00 pm Eastern time Do-it-yourself publishing can be daunting. But actually, your timing has never been better to publish your book! Do you know where to go or what publishing option to choose? You will after this webinar. |
Get Links to All of Jud's
Book Marketing Webinars | I have conducted over 50 webinars that can help you sell more books. Watch and listen as I describe how to increase your sales to non-bookstore buyers, how to get on TV and radio shows, get more publicity, conduct bookstore events, get more reviews and awards and more.Get links to recordings of my 60 - 90 minute webinars.
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Buy Lines -- Free Information | Do you need a jump-start to get your sales moving? If so, consider a one-hour consultation with Brian Jud. Get answers that will ignite your sales efforts. Brian can help you create a quality product, distribute it to markets you may not even know exist, price it profitably and promote it more effectively so you can...
Sell more books
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Become more profitable
Sell in untapped, lucrative markets
Minimize -- if not eliminate - returns
Contact BrianJud@bookmarketing.com for more information |
| Book Lemur - Promote your eBook and get results |  BookLemur connects ebook readers to books and authors and we enjoy finding new authors and books and introducing them to thousands of subscribers. So there are 6,800+ subscribers, and it's growing at about 100 per day!
APSS members receive a 20% discount to promote their titles
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| Sell More Books, Make More Money In Special Sales |  Now Available - the most current and complete resource for increasing your sales and profits in non-bookstore markets.
The ultimate do-it-yourself guide to selling your books in large quantities with no returns. Not just who to contact, but when and how.
By Brian Jud -- $24.95
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| Do You Want to Increase Your Sales, Revenue and Profits? |  A one-day workshop in your office -- customized to your titles -- shows your staff how to make large-quantity sales |
| |  Sales Promotional Items Use coffee mugs, pens, and thousands of other items to increase awareness and sales of your books. Get a unique item -- a bookmark that actually grows flowers when planted. Print your message on it! |
I wish you success in your book marketing efforts. There are several ways in which I can help you sell more books more profitably. Let me tell you how by emailing your contact information to me at brianjud@bookmarketing.com. Sincerely, Brian Jud
Book Marketing Works |
| | | Brian Jud now offers commission-based sales to buyers in special markets and several other programs to contact prospective buyers in special markets for you through personal sales calls, customized mailings and telephone calls. There is a program for any budget. www.premiumbookcompany.com Brian is also an author and book-marketing consultant helping publishers market and promote their books to increase their sales and profits. Brian is a media trainer, frequent speaker at publishing events and host of the online Publisher's Bookstore listing many discounted titles on publishing, publicity, marketing and writing. Contact Brian at P. O. Box 715, Avon, CT 06001; (860) 675-1344; brianjud@bookmarketing.com or go to http://www.bookmarketing.com |
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