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How to Restore Lagging Book SalesBy Patricia L. Fry Are your book sales lagging? Is promotion and marketing much harder than you thought it would be? Do you feel as though you are personally hand-selling every one of your books? This isn’t the vision you had before publishing, is it? You expected to see your books flying off of bookstores shelves into the eager hands of readers. You imagined many representatives from several distributors selling pallets of books to major chain stores. You thought that, by now, you’d be raking in thousands of dollars every week while writing your next Great American Novel. What happened? Well, it could be that you miscalculated the need or desire for a book like yours. Or maybe you are marketing to the wrong audience. Most likely, you did not write a book proposal before you wrote the book. But all is not lost, for I have devised the post-publication book proposal—yes, the book proposal you can write after you’ve produced the book. SPAWN members—those of you who have paid to join SPAWN—will receive my entire post-publication book proposal plan in the January SPAWN Market Update, which is posted in the member area of the SPAWN Web site. But we love our newsletter subscribers, too, and we strive to give you a lot of value in each and every edition of our FREE newsletter, SPAWNews. So we’re offering the following mini-version of Patricia’s Post-Publication Book Proposal Plan. What will this plan do for those of you struggling to sell copies of your book? It will help you to: More appropriately identify your target audience. You may discover that the folks who are buying your book are not your original proposed audience. Perhaps you’ve noticed a surge of sales coming from a source you didn’t expect. It’s important to identify these audiences and start promoting to them. Figure out how to reach this audience. Instead of sticking with your plan to do a few bookstore signings and travel around visiting independent bookstores, you might find that your book will sell well through pet stores, animal-related Web sites and from reviews in pet magazines. Maybe your novel featuring a Sunday school teacher and the mother of teens who ride a Harley on weekends would appeal to customers of motorcycle shops, Christian bookstores and women who read women’s, spiritual, affluent and lady biker magazines. Create a more realistic promotions plan. It’s OK to change gears when it comes to your marketing tactics and, if your plan isn’t working, the sooner the better. Identify your book’s hooks. Do you have subtle or even blatant hooks you can use to attract readers? Continue to build on your platform. Never stop adding to your credibility and putting your name out there where your audience will see it. If you change your marketing tactics, be sure to also shift your platform-building activities. Re-evaluate the focus and slant of your book. Sometimes we discover new things about our books based on audience feedback. Listen to your readers. Let them lead your promotional efforts. If reader after reader tells you that they found your book of poetry inspiring in a time of grief, consider promoting that aspect of your book. Find new ways to build promotion into your book. If your book is an ebook or you used POD technology, you could reprint it at any time. When you do, consider ways of building promotion into your book. What have readers asked for? Suggested? Hinted at? What could you add in order to expand your marketing reach? Here’s what you need to do: Reevaluate Your Book Determine Your True Target Audience Discover Where Your Readers Are Identify Your Book’s Hooks Continue to Build on Your Platform Establish New Promotional Tactics Snoop on Your Competition Make Changes in All the Right Places For access to the whole post-publication book proposal plan, join SPAWN. This plan appears in the January edition of the monthly SPAWN Market Update which is posted in the member area of the SPAWN Web site. For more information on writing a book proposal, read The Right Way to Write, Publish and Sell Your Book, second, revised edition,by Patricia Fry. (Note, for a limited time only, you can choose to receive Patricia Fry’s original, first edition of The Right Way to Write, Publish and Sell Your Book FREE with your membership fee of only $65/year.) Go to www.spawn.org and click on "Join SPAWN Now." –Patricia Fry is a full-time freelance writer, speaker, literary consultant and the author of 27 books. She is also the president of SPAWN (Small Publishers, Artists and Writers Network). Patricia’s hallmark book is The Right Way to Write, Publish and Sell Your Book (revised second edition) www.matilijapress.com/rightway.html. Follow Patricia’s informative blog: www.matilijapress.com/publishingblog. And be sure to order your Author’s Workbook to accompany The Right Way to Write, Publish and Sell Your Book. www.matilijapress.com/workbook.html
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