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What IS a best-selling author?
You have to answer that in your own mind.
Technically, it’s any book that makes it into the Top 100 list at ANY online or offline bookstore.
However, what does it mean to you?
Is it someone who sells 300-500 books in a day through online bookstores like http://Amazon.com and makes the top 10?
Is it only the person who makes it to #1?
Is it the person who sells their book from their own website and makes $10,000 in a few months?
Or does it have to be a specific list… like the New York Times best seller list?
What does it mean to you?
It’s a tough call. But you CAN have it all.
Selling your book through an online or offline bookstore will mean less money for you upfront, but will provide you far more leverage in the long run.
Selling your book from your own website and taking your own orders will mean far more money in the bank for you initially, but you’ll have to work a little harder on the back-end to get the recognition you deserve.
Both ways work. Neither way is right. It’s really what’s right for you.
Let’s talk about the steps necessary to make your book a bestseller whether you want to do it through an online bookstore or from your own website.
1) Pick the specific day you want to become a best seller.
Focusing on a specific day is what provides you the leverage to sell a large amount of books quickly. Selling 500 books over 6 months is not as impressive as selling 500 books in one or two days.
2) Create your “what’s in it for me?” offer.
Your book is a valuable resource for your clients. But selling it alone puts it up against all the other books already on the market for your subject. I don’t like those odds.
What you need is something “extra” — something that really let’s the perspective buyer know that you want to help them.
If you were to sell your book (for let’s say $20) and then offered everyone who purchased your book on the specific day you decided on in step 1 around $200 in bonuses from experts… do you think they’d be more likely to buy? And buy on that day?
Of course they would.
This is the step where you stop thinking about you and start thinking about the group of people you want to help by writing this book in the first place. Think of everything you can possibly offer to add value to your book and build a powerful arsenal of tools and resources.
When the potential buyer asks, “What’s in it for me?” (which they always do)… give them TONS of answers.
3) Use the 12-step method to create a promotional sales letter.
Now that you’ve answered the “What’s in it for me?” question, use the 12-step process to build a sales letter site for your book that explains it to the potential buyer.
They have a problem in their life. Your book is going to give them a solution for their problem… and a whole lot of “extras” if they buy on the specific day you’ve selected.
Tell them – using the proven 12-step process.
4) Leverage the relationships you’ve built.
Now, simply go back to the experts who provided you the bonus items for your book promotion, let them know the day you have picked as your bestseller day and ASK them if they would help you promote it on that day.
GIVE THEM A FREE COPY OF YOUR BOOK.
Don’t be stingy. These are experts who have earned the right to be called an expert. You are asking them for a favor. Be generous enough to let them read your book first.
If you can afford it, send them a physical copy. If you can’t, email them a digital copy with a short, concise explanation of what you are doing.
Pick a specific day to target your focused effort. Give an overwhelming amount of bonus reasons for people to buy your book on that day; and then leverage the relationships with experts to get them to help you promote your book.
Why would they want to? Some will want to give back for the success they’ve earned. Some will want to because by doing so their bonus item is getting in more people’s hands (and their bonus item promotes them).
What will these experts use to help promote your book?
You guessed it… the “list” of their current clients.
Authors 25, 50 or 100 years ago would buy out their own first printing to make it appear their book was popular. Many “best sellers” used this tactic to get the Best Seller status so publishers would contract with them for future titles.
Tricky? Maybe. Successful? Absolutely.
Now it’s your turn.
Now that you know HOW to become a best seller, let’s address where to become a best seller.
Right now the 2 most popular bookstores for running best seller campaigns are http://Amazon.com and http://BN.com (Barnes and Noble).
To get your book listed in http://Amazon.com you can either:
Purchase the $149.95 option from http://Lulu.com for Global Distribution. This will get you listed in all major online and offline bookstores or go to http://Amazon.com and do it yourself.
If you take the “do it your self” route at Amazon, be sure to join http://Amazon.com’s Advantage Program. They will walk you through the process of signing up and getting your book listed in their store.
If you want to get listed in Barnes and Noble (online or offline), then visit http://BarnsandNobel.com.
Lulu.com will make both of these a simple process because you’ll already have an ISBN and you can order just a few books initially to get started with http://Amazon.com and/or Barnes and Noble.
Let’s talk through a few examples of how the Best Selling promotion may work:
1.) Leverage experts
We’ve already covered this one.
If I was writing the Pet Name book, I could find experts who are currently providing products and services to pet enthusiasts. Ask for bonuses and/or content from them. Then let them know the day I’m going to promote it and ask for their help.
I would provide them a digital or physical copy of the book to review. I would also ask what I could do to assist them. I’ve got to make it worth their while to help me.
2.) Leverage businesses
Rather than relying on 1 sale at a time from individual readers, I could approach businesses that sell pet-related products and see if I could get a licensing agreement with them where they buy a large quantity of books at one time.
I could sell 500 books to 500 different readers or I could sell 500 books to 1 or 2 pet stores.
3.) Leverage home town support
If it’s a localized subject – like a travel guide to North Carolina beaches – you could focus on specific businesses along the North Carolina coast to promote your book.
You could also contact local radio and/or TV stations to get publicity for your book promotion.
The biggest key to your best selling book promotion… don’t just go through the motions. Make It An EVENT! And have FUN with it.

Technorati Tags: Author, Become, Bestselling, Book

Are you ready to take your career to the next level? If you are a speaker, seminar leader, consultant, coach, writer, service business owner or an expert in your field you might be interested in writing a book.
Put your insightful message in book form and watch it catapult your career to the next level. Interested? Here are 10 good reasons you should write a book:
1. A book captures your unique insightful information. You have specific skills and information. Thousands of people search for specific information daily. They want simple to read and easy to understand information.
Write a book to educate your audience; include engagement tools in your book. Help them make more money, cut costs or solve their problems. Examples include: online assessments, how to tips, short reports, resource lists, how-to tutorials, dictionary of terms in your field, etc.
2. A book builds extra credibility to your message. People are more likely to value your message in book form. People want to listen to what you have to say. It carries status that’s not quite captured in other formats like tapes, cds or even video.
3. A book crystallizes your message. Write a book and it will focus your personal or even professional mission. People will take notice because author stands behind your name. Your book expresses your message in a clear permanent format.
4. A book expands you audience. Speakers reach 100s through the speaker’s circuit on a regular basis. A book will potentially reach 1000s. It takes on a life of its own. Even in the 21st century a book may travel and capture an audience that even televised media can’t go.
5. A book distinguishes you in a crowd. Your professional associates may be used to competing and winning more business. Write a book and leverage higher fees for the same amount of work. Leave your pro associates in the dust with author behind your name.
6. A book brings a new level of fame. Write a book to elevate your name in your field. More people will know about you and gain respect for your expert knowledge through a book.
7. A book creates greater opportunities for profit. Write your book and create other products that complement or follow up your original work. You can create cds, courses or podcasts from the material in your book.
8. A book is your new business card. Write a book to provide your original, different information. Have you wondered what makes a new diet book sell well even when there are scores of diet books on the market?
The author presents their unique set of successful diet rules, their exercise program, their perspective, their testimonials and their credentials. They use original, different information for the same results. Make your book your best business card.
9. A book creates a world of opportunities. Offer your readers an opportunity to learn something new or interesting. Sprinkle your book with little known interesting facts about your topic.
Be careful to avoid information overload with pages of detailed statistics. But if you sprinkle them as morsels throughout your book, you create anticipation that will lead your readers through to the end. People love statistics and bite-sized trivia about just about any topic.
10. A book makes it simple. Give your readers an easy to read style to learn about something. Take a complex subject in your field and make it simple. Most people enjoy an easy reading language. They will not only reward you by reading to the end but your readers will be happy to tell all their friends about your insightful easy to read book.
Don’t put it off any longer. Focus in on your good reasons to write a book. Your audience needs your insightful advice. Just do it and watch your career take off to new levels.

Technorati Tags: Book, Career, Catapult, Level, Next, Write

Are you finished writing your book? Congratulations! But wait, does your book title still need work? Most working titles should never make it through the final edit. Titles are one of the most important aspects of your book’s selling power. Getting this wrong could mean your book never receives the attention your message deserves.
Researchers say a disappointing title versus a grab-you-by-the-collar title can cause your book to plummet or soar in sales. Therefore, you owe it to yourself and book’s success to write your best title.
After all, the better your title the more people will reach out and grab your book to read. Craft your title to rise to a top seller status. To make sure your book captures all the attention it deserves, start with two top tips to sizzle your title to sell:
1. Write a Book Title to Quantify Change and Add Time Limits
Another characteristic to include in writing your best book title is to promise change. In your title spell out the change that readers can expect if they follow your book’s concepts. Let them know what to expect. Use secrets, steps, tips, ways and time limits to promise change.
You can add focus and credibility to your title by adding a time frame or quantifying change. C.J. Hayden’s book “Get Clients Now: A 28-Day Marketing Program for Professionals and Consultants” The first part of the title tells what the book is about. Adding now brings immediacy. The 28-Day parts emphasize that the reader will get day-by-day instruction and probably enjoy results in less than a month.
A good friend of mine includes in her “Write Your Best Book Now: An Easy 7 step Writing Program for Entrepreneurs and Writers” uses the same principle of adding immediacy with the word now. She also quantified change with steps that communicate to the reader; read this book and they will get their best book written in 7 easy steps.
Other good examples of quantifying change are “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R. Covey and “7 Steps to Fearless Speaking” by Lilyan Wilder.
Another change oriented title is “Weigh Down: An Inspirational Way to Lose Weight, Stay Slim and Find a New You” or “How to Be a Great Communicator In Person, On Paper, and on the Podium: The Complete System for communication Effectively in Business and In Life.
Change motivating titles often begin by identifying their target market including the problem, event or characteristics the book address. In doing so, they promise an easy structure leading to the promised change. List instantly communicate easier success by changing big task into a series of smaller tasks.
2. Write a Book Title that Use Concept and Memes to Connect Instantly.
Another top tip for developing a sizzling book title is to aim for a concept, a memes, a word, or phrases that tell a story. Using a story, your readers can immediately connect with and want to associate with your book. Names that tell a story, or express a benefit, are memes. They are words or visual images that tell a story at a glance.
As a primer to developing your own book title, visit Sears and look at the brand names of their proprietary products. The short names of these products are concepts; that tell a story in an instant. At a glance you get it.
You understand the message. Examples, include Diehard batteries, Weather-Beater paints and Craftsman tools. Each products name is a concept. Think about it, which product would you be attracted to “Diehard” or “Stop Slow”. Or would you choose tools with the name “Apprentice” or “Craftsman?”
Many successful books are based on concepts or memes. For example, “A Happy Pocket Full of Money” by David Cameron tells a story of happiness and money. From the title you know this book is going to be about getting more money in your pocket.
The Chicken Soup series instantly brings images of comfort and being cared for. It resonated with a whole generation of Americans that have bought the book into the hundreds of thousands.
The Dummies series communicate anyone can read one of these books because you don’t have to know anything to get it. People automatically know the book will somehow make the complex simple to understand.
When writing your book title, think of a concept, a meme, or phrase, to tell a story that your readers will instantly understand and want to be a part of. You may ask where are the customer benefits you’re always telling me to include. The benefits are still a part of the meme title but a suggestive part. Your mind will fill in the benefit because it’s an understood part of the story.
For example: Chicken Soup book promise and deliver the comfort and care of good stories. Pocket Full of Money readers know how to get a pocket full of money and gain happiness. Dummies communicates you don’t have to be an expert to understand the book.
Don’t forget when creating your top selling book title, your possibilities are limitless. Choose a title that is flexible enough to be expanded into more than one book. Think series, including other information products that can be developed and sold from your website.

Technorati Tags: Book, Seller, Status, Title, Write

I first got into the audio books habit working at a temporary data entry job. One of the few benefits to engaging in such a mundane task all day is the ability to wear headphones. Listening to the same pop songs hour after hour quickly becomes almost as tedious as silence, so I started to borrow books on tape from the library. While listening to a book may seem like a serious distraction, I -along with many others at my place of employment- learned that even a brain of average capacity can swiftly adapt to the dual tasks of keying names and numbers and following the twists and turns of a plot.
Since then, I have come to appreciate the experience of listening to books. Many people take them on long drives. While I haven’t had many occasions to do this, I can appreciate the companionship a book would provide on a long, solitary journey. I have, however, found other good uses for them. They make an excellent accompaniment to certain kinds of exercise. I’m not a jogger, but since I see many people running down the street or through parks with headphones on, it’s a fairly safe assumption some are listening to books rather than music. Ditto with treadmills at health clubs (or at home). You can also listen while cooking, cleaning up or other household tasks, so long as there are no loud noises in the background (like a vacuum cleaner). If a book is especially engaging, you can, of course, simply listen to it while doing nothing else.
Since I started listening to audio books, about ten years ago, there has been a great increase in their popularity. Formats have also changed. While tapes are still available, CDs started to replace them as the favored format several years ago. Now, with the mp3 revolution, downloads seem to be the wave of the future. Regardless of the format, however, the experience is pretty much the same. I actually prefer tapes to CDs (I still don’t have an mp3 player -I tend to be one of the last holdouts when it comes to new technology; I got my first DVD player only a couple of years ago, long after VHS became almost obsolete), because they are simpler to start and stop.
What are the best kinds of audio books to listen to? It depends, of course, on your tastes. Suspense and mystery novels seem to be the easiest to locate, though you can also find nonfiction (everything from self-help to history), classics and instructional programs (such as foreign languages). One rule I have with audio books is that I almost never get anything that is abridged. This is especially true for fiction. I really don’t understand the rationale behind abridged novels. Is it to save time? Yet, most people who purchase or rent audio books are doing so in order to fill time, so why skimp on the length? As I see it, any novel that would not be seriously diminished by abridgement is not worth reading in the first place (either printed or audio). Even genre fiction is ruined by abridgement. Often, mysteries and action plots, for example, are fairly complex. I am lucky if I can keep up with what’s going on in a full length spy novel; cut out some of the exposition and “minor” scenes, and I am completely lost. One exception to this rule might be nonfiction in a genre in which I am not particularly interested in general. For example, I might conceivably listen to an abridgement of somebody’s ten volume history of the Roman Empire. In this case, I’d probably never get around to reading the whole thing, and since it isn’t a specialty of mine, I don’t mind missing some of the finer points. In general however, in case I haven’t made this clear by now, abridgement is close to sacrilege where books are concerned.
There is a certain kind of literary snob who does not consider audio books real books. By his or her criterion, if you’ve listened to a book, you haven’t “really” read it. We could argue the semantics of whether listening to a book can be literally called “reading” or not, but this is not really the point. When I’ve listened to an audio book, I tend to say I’ve listened to it rather than read it, but I’ve heard others say they’ve read a book they’ve listened to. Definitions aside, the question is, does listening provide the same experience as reading the printed version? I would say not entirely, but the comparison does not necessarily favor the printed book. A lot depends on the narrator, of course, but a well told audio book can bring a book to life in a way ink simply cannot. In an interesting way, the new technology that makes listening to a book possible actually harkens back to the very old tradition of storytelling, which predates the written word by millenia.
As I see it, certain kinds of books favor the printed version, others the audio. Some authors, such as Jack Keruoac, seem at their most natural when you can hear them spoken out loud.
On the other hand, books that require a lot of, shall we say left-brained concentration, are more written-word friendly. Sometimes it depends on the listener. For instance, I enjoy reading Russian novels, but I would not attempt to listen to Tolstoy or Dostoyevskly. I find all the unfamiliar names to be too much of a challenge, and the printed page allows me to take my time and, when necessary, go back and verify who is who. On the other hand, someone whose native language is Russian (or a scholar in the field), would have no problem listening. The same is true for non-fiction. If the field is very obscure to me, listening to it would probably mean missing key points. If it’s something I’m comfortable with, however, this would not be the case.
Narrating an audio book is a subtle art. If you listen to enough books, you will start to recognize the very skillful pros who have narrated hundreds, such as George Guidall. The trick, as far as I can tell (in addition to having a good, clear voice, of course), is to put just the right amount of inflection into the reading. It also requires the skill to do different voices, which is no easy matter in a novel full of male and female characters of varying age, background, geographical origin and education. A few audio books have tried the format of using multiple narrators. While this sounds like a good idea in theory, in practice I find it to be a distraction. The most glaring mistake made by narrators that I’ve listened to is overacting. Narrators should not, as a rule, be acting at all. If they put too much of their personalities into a reading, they are violating one of the primary virtues of books -allowing the reader to reconstruct the book in his or her own imagination. If the narrator does this, thereby intruding on the reader’s mental boundaries, he is actually giving credence to the anti-audio book argument, transforming the book into more of a radio play (nothing wrong with these, they just are not books). Most publishers, however, find skillful narrators who do not overstep their bounds, but put just the right amount of inflection and emotion into the action and dialogue.
Audio books are convenient and pleasurable, but I think they are also one aspect of contemporary life that, as I suggested earlier, actually bring back some of the virtues of slower-paced, pre-modern cultures. You may use an audio book to distract you from tedious chores or a mundane day job (a situation, alas, in which I still often find myself) or from hundreds of miles of highway, but if you are listening to a good, well narrated book, you are getting something more than a mere distraction. You are participating in the time-honored (if updated to fit the information age) tradition of storytelling. This can serve as a refreshing addition, sometimes even a necessary antidote, to some of life’s everyday events.

Technorati Tags: Audio, Books, Virtues

Whether you read often or only occasionally, when you go to read a book you first have the problem of choosing a book to read. Even the most avid reader could only read a tiny fraction of all the books that come out. At any given time, a book store probably contains many more books then you could read in your entire lifetime. How do you choose which books to read? Let me suggest a few ways to select a book.

Ask Friends – Ask friends, family members, and other people you know for recommendations. Friends work especially well for getting book recommendations, because they usually share the same interests as you. Also, friends know your personality well, so they can better guess what books you personally would like. Asking your friends for book recommendations will probably help your friendship also, because your friends will feel complimented that you want their opinion.

Authors You Like – Out of the books you have already read, try to think of your favorites. You can look at other books by the authors of your favorite books.

Bestseller List – Many newspapers publish lists of the currently best-selling books. If your newspaper does not have a bestseller list, you can also find bestseller lists on the internet or you can ask a book store clerk to see best-selling books.

Join A Book Club – Book clubs usually simply consist of a group of people who get together to choose a new book to read and discuss the book they previously chose to read. Most commonly, book clubs read one book per month. They usually do not cost anything, but the members may all put in some money for food and refreshments. Usually, the members of the book club take turns hosting. You can probably find a local book club by going on craigslist. Also, many public libraries have public book clubs.

Amazon – Amazon usually has ratings for books based on users who rate the book. It also has customer reviews of many books. When you view a book, it will show other books that you may like if you liked that book. That means you can get recommendations on Amazon by first finding some of your personal favorite books.

You can probably find other ways to help you select a book to read. If you want to try a certain book, you can avoiding losing money by simply borrowing the book from a library. If you do not like the book, you can stop reading it and return it.

Whatever you do, good luck and have fun!

Technorati Tags: Book, Find, Read