Get your book reviewed on Amazon

Our friend Penny Sansevieri from Amazon's Top Ten Reviewers. It is well worth the read.

Wow. That is a lot of books!

According to MJ Rose over at Buzz, Balls & Hype, English-Speaking Countries Published 375,000 New Books Worldwide in 2004. Wow. That's a lot of books.

No wonder my reading pile keeps getting bigger and bigger and I can't seem to keep up. No wonder authors feel like they're being ignored by their publishers and the media. No wonder readers are bombarded by a never ending stream of books. No wonder the old way of doing book marketing no longer works the same.

Is this bad?

No way. It is actually great news for people who keep up with new marketing ideas and go with them, ignoring the folks who keep on telling them to do it the same old way. The same-old type authors will find their marketing harder and harder and you will find yours easier and easier.

Keep your eyes on this blog for exciting new ways of marketing books. In the next week you will see a review of the best book on marketing I've seen in years, a new service that helps you reach readers and booksellers in one fell swoop and a system for becoming a best-selling author.

Here we go!

Get in Newsweek - TODAY

Don Crowther, our colleague who convinced us to start blogging by saying, "Kim, get a blog - NOW! Don't ask why, just do it," has a great post today about how to get linked from Newsweek and The Washington Post's sites.

It is full of great stuff that you need to read.
Don't ask why, just do it.

Successful Niche Marketing for a Book

Tom Nixon over at Small Press Blog has interviewed Michelle Dunn about her successful niche publishing venture. It is well worth a read to get some great ideas about book marketing and also a healthy dose of inspiration.

One thing in particular she says in the interview that is really powerful:

I would like to share that marketing your book is very hard, I think harder than starting a business, because it is a business, but so is the marketing. You can never stop marketing. Sometimes it will seem like you are wasting your time, postage, ink and paper. One day, I had a call from NPR. When I asked how they had heard of me, they said that someone in the office had an old copy of Ladies Home Journal and they saw my story in it. That was two-and-a-half years later. So keep on.

Congrats Michelle on all your hard work paying off. Thanks, Tom for sharing her story.

Do you worry about censorship?

The path of one author who had hoped to get published, is documented in Ed Quillen's article in The Denver Post. If you are concerned about, or even interested in, censorship, this article is a must-read.

ed quillen
The censors and CU

Intro to Pyro Marketing & Terry Whalin

Terry Whalin over at The Writing Life has posted a download to the Introduction to Pyro Marketing. Head over there and get it. My printout of the introduction is still hot off my printer.

While you're there, check out Terry's blog. Lots of good stuff there. Terry has written more than 60 nonfiction books plus published in more than 50 magazines. He is the fiction acquisitions editor at Howard Publishing, and Terry encourages writers (beginners to pros) at Right-Writing.com. To help people pursue their own dreams of a published book, Terry has written Book Proposals That $ell, 21 Secrets to Speed Your Success.

Gotta go, I cannot wait a second longer to read that Intro...

Defining the target market for your book

In a comment at the end of a very long and interesting post about the tie between Pyro Marketing and The Purpose Driven Life, Greg Stielstra, the author of Pyro Marketing made this spot-on description about reaching the absolute best part of your target market.

It all started with a statement he made saying "if he promoted a book about quilting 'to one-tenth of one percent of left-handed quilters,' he could land the title on the non-fiction bestseller list and prime it for even bigger success."

Here is what Stielstra said about this practically infamous statement of his:

Mass marketing tries to reach everyone all at once with a deluge of messages. PyroMarketing believes marketing begins by speaking to a passionate few and creating the conditions by which that message can grow and spread. The authors I work with often resist this.

They fear that an audience narrowly defined is too small to support decent sales. To demonstrate that, because there are six billion people on the planet, even a narrowly defined audience can be quite large, I began using the example of left handed quilters.

An author who wrote a book on quilting would not want to limit its promotion to quilters. Instead they would want to "broaden the audience" by advertising to needle pointers, or perhaps anyone that sews. Instead I would tell them that if we promoted their book to 1/10th of one percent of left-handed quilters in America, and those people all bought the book in a single month through reporting stores, then their book would be a bestseller.

Here are the numbers: 15 million people enjoy quilting as a hobby in the United States. Ten percent of the population is left-handed so it is reasonable to conclude that 1.5 million quilters are too. One tenth of one percent of 1.5 million is 1500. At the time the Christian Book Bestseller's List counted the top 20 books and the average monthly sales of the book at the 20th position was only 1200 units per month. Therefore, 1500 meant you made the list with 300 to spare.

WOW! What a great thought process about target marketing. What a brilliant way to understand that going for the bullseye - the very best segment of your target market - is the best first step in marketing.

Yet, authors do tend to want to reach "everyone" and therefore end up making their marketing harder than is necessary. In reality it is much easier to go for the cream of the crop and then reach out to the larger audience. And it is also relieving to know that a book can be a bona fide success just by reaching 1/10th of 1% of the total market.

After reading this comment and other things about Pyro Marketing, I am a big fan of Greg Stielstra and am excitedly waiting for the release of Pyro Marketing on September 27th. Count me as one person standing in the hypothetical line to buy the book as soon as it hits the sheleves. Truth be told, I will probably order it on Amazon and wait not-so-patiently by my mailbox for it to arrive.

You can count on me to let you know all about it once I have gotten it.

I feel like the ladies in the Mervyn's commercials saying "Open, Open, Open."