Savvy authors know they can earn more profits when marketing their a course in miracles using what I call The Marketer Strategy. In this article I will show you how to publish a book and maximize your book sale profits.
In the publishing industry, publishers, wholesalers, and bookstores do virtually no promotion of a book. The author is expected to do virtually all promotion and pay for it out of his or her own pocket.
This is true whether you publish with a publisher or self publish. Because the publishing industry expects the author to take responsibility to market the book, publishers give authors a generous discount on all the books the author personally buys as an incentive for authors to sell the book through their own talks, websites, and other promotional activities.
Whereas first-time authors can be timid about marketing and hope that royalties will take care of them, top-selling authors ignore the royalties and take full advantage of that author’s discount. Why?
If you do the math, a 50% discount can be more than 10 times more money than the average royalty. On a $20 book, the author pays the publisher $10. When the author sells that book himself, he takes in $20 minus his $10 cost, leaving $10 gross profit — which is 14 times more than that $0.72 royalty example I gave you in a previous article.
It means on every book the author sells, he can more than double his money. That is a significant return.
And, if you self-publish, the margins of profit available are even better. An author can earn 2-10 times your money with each book you sell.
Authors can use that money to pay for promoting their book in the marketplace. That is especially crucial if you want to rely on distributing your book through commercial trade distribution, in other words bookstores.
On average, it takes about one-and-a-half years of successful book promoting for a book to develop enough momentum to become a best seller on one of the big lists, such as the New York Times best seller list. However, you only have 90 days – just three months – to make it or break it in bookstore distribution.
Believe me, I speak from lots of experience on this subject. I’ve personally marketed more than 50 books through bookstore distribution and have advised many hundreds of other authors on it. I’m going to tell you something that I hope you remember….
Commercial book trade distribution, relying on distribution through bookstores, is a situation where basically the bookstores take your book on consignment.
Why do I say consignment? Because the bookstores get 90-day terms. In other words, they don’t have to pay the publisher for 90 days, but the bookstores get a 90-day return privilege. They can return your books to the publisher anytime up to 90 days after they get them in the store.
Believe me, bookstores take full advantage of that return privilege. I have seen authors hit with a tsunami of returned books, starting about day 100. It’s not fun at all.
If an author wants their book to make it in the bookstores and not be returned to the publisher, what the author has to do is as soon as the book is published, engage in intensive book promotion to begin creating awareness of the book in the marketplace so enough people will come to the bookstores and purchase the books within the first 90 days.
Now, what smart authors have been doing for years is they take advantage of the 50% author’s discount that their publisher gives them and load up their car with books and set off on a book tour. They do as many talks, media interviews and other promotional events as they can in which they sell their car full of books through back-of-the-room sales.
