Author Watch – Why Some Authors Sell Books and Others Don’t

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It is very easy to get frustrated as an author when your books are not selling.  Why?  Because you have spent so much time on the work and you really want people to take a chance and read what you have written.  Maybe therein lies the problem, expecting people to take a chance.  Sometimes its not chance at all, it is a matter of supply and demand.  Have you written a book that someone wants to read?  You can write day and night but if there is no demand for that particular book, it will have limited or no sales.  In marketing one of the first rules is market research first.  Then create the product.

If you want to ensure that your book will make a connection with readers then why not do market research first?  Test the idea.  Instead of writing a 350 page book only to find that no one will buy it, why not write a short story on the topic and see if it will sell.  This type of test will take you far less time and give you the results that you will want before you invest hours of writing, editing and marketing.  One of my favorite marketing stories is a person that wanted to write a particular book, but refused to write the book first.  All he did was put up the cover and a set of blank pages.  The book sold extremely well based on only the cover.  How did he recover from selling blank pages to disappointed people?  He said it was an error and he’d get the books out right away.  That gave him time to write the book he always wanted to write, while already having the money from people that were eager to read the book.

I do not recommend doing that, but I will say that he understood market research first and applied it in a very unusual way.  Be creative with your market research and see what results that will bring you.  I believe that all well written books will sale if there is a demand for the book.  Here are some ways that you can test:

1. You can take a survey.

2. You can ask people would they purchase the book based on the cover.

3.  You can set up a social media party and see how many people sign up based on the topic of the book.

4.  You can start a book club and see how many readers are willing to purchase the book for the discussion.

5.  You could publish chapters of the book and see how many people read the individual chapters.

 

These are simple things that you can do to test for demand.  Suppose you have already written the book and have not tested it, is it to late to test?  No.  You can do the same thing, but this time your objective would be to see if you should continue with marketing efforts you have already employed.  Even if it does not test out well, change things like the cover, the title or the formatting and see if that will help.  No matter what, don’t give up.  If you dream to become a paid writer, keep writing until your dreams come true.  One thing we know for sure is that the world loves to be entertained by books.  Test until you find out what book grabs their attention.

 

copyright 2015  Linda Leon

So, what do you think ?