Sell Your Book To Make It A Best Seller
A big portion about writing a best-selling book is not the writing only, it’s the selling. That’s why it’s called “Best-Selling Book” and not “Best-Writing Book”. You have to sell it really well.
Here are some of the efforts that I have taken to ensure that my books become bestsellers.
The first thing I did was arranging for a lot of book talks. Anytime I could get an opportunity to go out there to speak and sell the book I would do that.
So what I did was to approach all the major bookshops in Singapore. MPH, Times, Kinokuniya, Borders and Popular and arranged book talks every single weekend. So every single weekend I would go out there to speak and draw crowds. In fact, it is during my talks that I sold the most number of books.
Another promotion effort I did was to arrange free talks in schools. These talks were usually held during the school assemblies. So I would speak during the allocated time for the assemblies. And I conducted them over a 4 month period. That was what drove the sales of the book. That’s what got people talking about my book.
The other thing which I did was to put advertisements in the papers
Some of my friends thought it was a stupid idea because it was expensive.
One small ad would cost about $3,000. They said “Adam, you are never going to make back your money!”
It did eventually, and by placing those ads, it drew the crowd into the bookshops.
Which leads me to an important thing, you have to make sure the bookshops give you good shelf space. How do you make sure you do that?
It’s all about going there, building rapport with the person in charge of book placements, talking to the person and asking the person to place the books at better spaces.
I would go to the bookshop every weekend to look at where my book is and if my book is in a lousy position, I would take my book and replace it with other books which were at a good position. I know it’s a dirty trick but I did that.
The other thing I did was to create artificial demand. Initially, when I first wrote my book, no one wanted to display it well. A lot of bookshops didn’t want to bring it in because I was a local author and no one knew me at that time.
So what I did was I got a lot of my friends to call the bookshops up, asking about the book. They would go, “Excuse me, have you seen this book called “I Am Gifted, So Are You”?” and the bookshops would say “Oh, we don’t have it yet.”
And my friends would reply saying “Hey, but it’s a very good book, how can you not have this book?” I also got all my friends and relatives to write in to the bookshops complaining that it was a best-selling book, they wanted to buy it but they couldn’t get it. So that got the bookshops to start ordering it and it created that cycle.
You will notice that sometimes it takes a little thinking out of the box and effort to make your book a best seller. Ultimately, in order for your book to be a bestseller, you have to take the necessary measures to sell your book.
Adam Khoo is an entrepreneur, best-selling author and a self-made millionaire by the age of 26. Discover his million dollar secrets and claim your FREE bonus CD ‘6 Ways To Achieve Anything In Life’ at http://www.PavingTheWayToTheTop.com
How To Create a Freelance Writer Web Site that Gets Read
To get writing work, you have to let people know you exist. Setting up a Web site is the best way to start, no matter where you are. If nothing else, it makes your work visible and accessible to a large audience.
Today, every working writer absolutely must have a Web site. The reality is editors expect you to have an online presence. Editors are your customers, so you need to meet their needs to get published. With a web site, you can prove your writing is good by putting your portfolio online. Plus, because the site is accessible 24/7 in all time zones, it can be promoting your work even when you’re asleep.
People who work in publishing are extremely busy. Deadlines are a constant pressure. They don’t want to wait for a 500K file of your latest article to download. Or worse, a poorly scanned version of a press release you wrote. It’s a lot easier for them if you give them a list of links and let them read online at their convenience.
A Web site may seem like a daunting task. But a site doesn’t have to be complicated. Think about what your customer wants to know (i.e., those editors you want to impress). Then make pages to answer their questions.
All writer Web sites should contain:
1. Concise information about your writing specialty. What do you do? It’s not a good idea to try and be everything to everybody. It’s a recipe for confusion, so pick a specialty and focus on it.
2. A list of writing credits. Now that a lot of magazines are online, you can often link directly to your articles. At a minimum, you can usually link to the main publisher or client home page.
3. Samples of your writing. Some editors want to see articles that haven’t been edited by a pro. Why? A really good editor can make bad writing almost unrecognizably good. Editors know that someone else could be cleaning up your writing. So it never hurts to show a few clips in an unaltered state. This may sound like extra work. But it’s really an opportunity for you to write some original material that you can reuse later.
4. Your complete contact information, pricing or payment policies, and if you are collecting email addresses, your privacy policy.
Along these lines, many writers start an ezine or newsletter. Yes, it’s a commitment. But it’s also the easiest way to start developing content and promoting it directly to your niche writing markets. An ezine is certainly one of the lowest cost ways to promote your writing talents.
However, starting an ezine is a bit of work, so first get your Web site up and functioning. Then once that is working for you, decide on a focus and a format for your ezine. Write a few articles ahead of time. Then get an autoresponder or list mailing service set up, and being promoting. Of course that’s the bare minimum, but there are many resources online on starting up ezines. As a writer, you’re probably also a researcher, so this is a great opportunity to learn.
One classic writer question is, “how can I get published if I don’t have any clips?” It’s the chicken and egg problem recast for writers: you can’t get work without any clips, but you can’t get clips if no one will give you work.
Creating your own Web site content solves the problem. Write your own articles and publish them yourself online in your ezine. If you’re concerned that these “self-published” clips won’t be as impressive as published clips, don’t be. Remember what editors want: articles that are original, easy to read, accurate, and on time. Your Web site proves that you can at least deliver on the “original, easy to read, and accurate” parts!
Susan Daffron is the President of Logical Expressions, Inc. (http://www.logicalexpressions.com) and the author of books on pets, web business, computing, and vegetarian cooking. Visit http://www.publishize.com to receive a complimentary Publishize podcast or newsletter and bonus report.”
Writing Contests: 10 Tips for Creating a Winning Entry
There are literally hundreds of writing contests open for entry at any time of the year. There are contests for every genre and level of experience — from amateur poetry writing contests to competitions for published novels.
Some of today’s top novelists, magazine writers and screenplay writers got a kick start in their careers by entering and winning writing contests.
Here are 10 tips that will help you position your entry to become the next WINNING entry!
1. Follow the Rules. Read them once and then print them out and read them again, this time with a highlighter in hand. If the rules are in a miniscule font, copy and paste them into your word processor and then increase the size of the font until you can easily read it. At risk of repeating myself, be sure to FOLLOW the rules. If it says 500 words or under, you will likely be disqualified for submitting 501 words.
2. Examine previous entries. If the contest organization posts or publishes the winners from previous months or years, read the winning entries. You may get insights into the types of stories and the writing styles that have caught the eye of previous judges. Are the winning entries experimental or conservative? What style(s) did the judges move towards? The idea is not to clone last years winning entry, but to get an idea of the overall direction that the judges appear to prefer.
3. Submit more that one entry. Judging a contest is an extremely subjective process. Submit several entries. Make them quite different in content and style. Your favorite entry may be totally bypassed by the judges. The entry you thought to be the weakest could take a winner’s ribbon simply because it evoked the right response from the judge(s).
4. Polish your entry. There is no hurry. There is ALWAYS another contest or another year. Never rush, and never enter a contest in a rush. Unfinished work always looks like unfinished work. Take whatever time you need to polish your entries and only enter when you feel the work is totally finished for now.
5. Write on Schedule. Good writers practice their art. They write regularly and are always learning. Set aside some time every day for your writing. You may only have 15 minutes a day. That’s OK. Over a month only 15 minutes a day will add up to almost 8 hours!
6. Read good work. Good writers are usually voracious readers. Don’t just passively read, take action, make notes on what you like. Pay attention to how your favorite author describes a character or a location. If the book is your own, make notes in the margins. Highlight sentences, descriptions, and passages you love. Focus on your weak areas. If, for example, you are weak on dialogue, analyze what your favorite authors do. How do they keep out of the “he said, she said” trap?
7. Create a Work Space. Your workspace could be at home, in front of your computer in the kitchen, or it could be in a coffee shop with your notebook or laptop. Your workspace should inspire you and be conducive to your writing. For some that will mean a totally quite space. Others can create a cocoon of inspiration in the midst of chaos. One of my favorite writing areas is MacDonald’s during the morning coffee rush! If I lack inspiration, all I have to do is look up!
8. Opening word, sentence, and paragraph. Your opening should immediately grab the attention of your audience. In a contest, your audience is the judge. You have a lot of competition sitting there on the judge’s desk. If you don’t capture his/her interest right away your entry will quickly go into the rejected stack. Rewrite and polish your opening until you are sure it will keep the reader moving onto the next and then the next.
9. Format. Whether you are writing Haiku or a screenplay, there are accepted formats. The format may be specifically outlined in the rules. If formatting (i.e. double spaced lines) is not specified, do some research and find out the formatting conventions for your specific genre. For example, if you are submitting to a screenplay contest you must use screenplay-formatting protocols. If you don’t know what these are … find out!
10. Enter. One of the saddest tales is “I had this great idea, BUT I never got around to it. It probably would have won. I should have, BUT you know, life got in the way.” Yes, life does get in the way. BUT winning writers find a way to get their writing done in spite of it all!
Melanie Rockett is THE Contest Guru. Visit her website for more information on entering and winning contests, and for information about DOZENS of current writing contests. http://www.contestguru.com
Spelling Matters – Confessions of the World’s Worst Speller
This is a true story about my friend, Doug O’Brien. He is an accomplished musician and NLP trainer, personally trained and certified by Tony Robins and yet he had the following confession to share with me:
Confession number one: I was the world’s worst speller.
Confession number two: I always hated my brother and sister.
Well, OK, not really. But I hated that they always got such good grades in school when it was such a struggle for me. I was really good at sports and really good at art and music. I was good at science too, but I couldn’t spell my way out of a paper bag. Actually, when it came right down to it, I was only really bad at spelling and, fortunately, it only affected my grades in subjects that used words.
Now this was especially frustrating cause I started out thinking I was pretty clever. I was reading better than most kids in my grade early on. It was easy. You sounded out the letters and put them together to make words. E. Z.
But then something weird started happening. For some reason, the same sounding-it-out process that worked so perfectly for reading didn’t work for spelling. When the teacher said a word on the spelling test, I’d repeat how it sounded in my head and figure out what letters made those sounds and write them down. I was wrong more than half the time and got no points for creativity.
I didn’t get it. It was a complete mystery to me. My confidence plummeted. I felt stupid and silly. Moreover, I couldn’t get any help. My Dad told me to look up the spellings in the dictionary. But he couldn’t explain to me how to go about doing that when I didn’t know how to spell the word I was looking up.
“Work harder,” I was told. I spent hours memorizing the order of the letters by repeating them out loud over and over again. I think I remember only once ever getting a 100% on a spelling test.
So part of me began to believe I was stupid. My good grades in science and several other subjects weren’t enough to convince me otherwise. Of course, it was logical to make that deduction. No matter how hard I tried it didn’t get any better so I must be stupid, right?
No. The answer to that question is emphatically no. But, I didn’t find that out for many years after graduating high school. Part of me still believed it even as a grownup, while running a successful seminar promotion company in New York. I joked about being “the world’s worst speller.” (Unfortunately, my secretary wasn’t much better so we were awfully glad when word processors began to have spell check.)
Then it happened. I attended a seminar by a co-developer of NLP, Robert Dilts. This is the study of the structure of subjective experience. It holds out the promise that since any skill or ability is a result of that structure, that ability can be “modeled” and taught to another human being.
Astonishingly, to illustrate this, Robert used spelling as an example. It wasn’t that poor spellers were stupid, Robert said, it was that they had been taught an ineffective strategy for spelling. This struck me as a radical idea.
He explained how human beings process our experience of the world with our five senses and that each sense had different advantages and disadvantages. He said, as an example, phonics (sounding out the words) works well for reading but that it doesn’t work for spelling. He points out that you can’t even spell the word “phonetics” phonetically! Instead, when you analyze the strategy that good spellers use, they visualize the word in their mind’s eye and get a good feeling when it is spelled right.
He then demonstrated how this worked. He got a volunteer from the audience (He did not pick me even though my hand was high in the air) who was a self-proclaimed bad speller and asked them to spell the city, “Albuquerque.” We all watched as the volunteer looked down at his feet, squirmed uncontrollably, and tried to talk his way through the mysterious word.
As you can imagine, that method didn’t work. He wasn’t even close. (Neither, by the way, was I, spelling at my seat.) So then Robert had him write the word out on a big piece of paper in small chunks of two or three letters, “Al – bu – quer – que.” He had the volunteer write each word chunk in a different color and then practice visualizing those chunks with his eyes closed. Finally, he put them all together and spelled Albuquerque correctly for the first time in his life. Then, as if that wasn’t impressive enough, he spelled it backwards!
I was sold! I wanted some of this! Over the next few days I practically filled a notebook with large, colorful, small-chunked spelling words and showed off how I could spell backwards and forwards.
Today I am content to spell forwards most of the time and I have to confess am happy to have relinquished the title of world’s worst speller. My hope is that someday no one will have to wait until adulthood to learn to spell like a champ.
Peter Woronoff is a Master Practitioner in NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming with Doug O’Brien, personally designated by Tony Robbins as an NLP Master Trainer,and Rob Marton,he has designed spellinglab site to teach 3rd graders a fun and easy way to spell. http://www.spellinglab.com