Author's Guide to Hand Selling Books

An Author’s Guide to Hand Selling Books
Part 1: Overview
by David A. Rozansky, Publisher, Flying Pen Press
Readers, Writers & Royalties columnist
October 6, 2007

 [This is the first article in a nine-part series]

 
I am always amazed that more authors don’t hand sell their books. I find it frustrating whenever I meet an author and when I ask him about his book, I get a vague, uninteresting description. Or if the author delivers a great sales pitch about the book, does not have a copy on hand for me to look at.

Authors should sell their own books by hand. Many authors believe that selling books is best left up to Amazon, bookstores or the publisher. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Publishers don’t sell books. Publishers sell authors; authors sell the books.

There are many reasons for an author to hand sell his books. First, there is the profit motive. Publishers generally give authors a deep discount on their own copies. While royalties are great, the difference between the author’s discount and the royalties is generally a factor of 6 to 10. That is, an author sale is worth about eight bookstore sales.

Of course, authors would like to see thousands of books sold, and for this, the bookstores and Amazon are important, of course. But books don’t just sell themselves. Books need buzz. More than any other type of marketing, word-of-mouth is the best marketing tool for books.

Contrary to common belief, a good book does not develop buzz. It takes far more than that. Readers must talk about the good book they read. They must be reminded about the book, and the book must be on the top of their minds and the tip of their tongues.

To create this frame of mind, the reader must have a high level of enthusiasm for the book. They get this enthusiasm from others, and no one is more enthusiastic about the book than the author is.

Thus, it follows, that when a reader buys a book directly from the author, they develop a very special bond with that book. They tend to talk to many people about the book, they write reviews, they tell bookstore owners to keep copies on hand. Without author-made sales, this force is completely absent.

Flying Pen Press puts authors through a day of sales training before their books are released. We give them seven rules to remember. This series of articles will explore each rule in detail, but here is an overview of all seven rules:

1. The Rule of Use. It is important to use any product you intend to sell. This is especially true for books. A reader expects a writer to be well read in the subjects that are of interest to that reader. It is also important that the writer be intimately familiar with what he has written.

2. The Rule of Sales. Books do not sell themselves, and an author must be prepared mentally and logistically to sell the book. A sales pitch and promotional material must be at the ready, and having a supply of books in hand is of course imperative.

3. The Rule of 3 Feet. It is important that an author tell everyone that comes within 3 feet that she has written a book, and what that book is about. This is not meant to be an opportunity for hard selling, but rather a simple chance to excite a potential customer’s curiosity.

4. The Rule of 200. Most everyone has about 200 acquaintances, from immediate family to nameless people we meet about once a month. This circle of contacts is the core of the author’s potential sales, as well as a sales force who will talk most often about the book in the most generous terms.

5. The Rule of 5x5. An author should contact five people a day, five times a week, in separate attempts to make a sale. This can be a major distributor’s sales rep or the newspaper boy, a phone call or an email, a single-copy sale or a pallet. It is not the quantity that counts as much as it is the momentum.

6. The Rule of Writing. Nothing sells a book like writing another book. The more titles an author has on the market, the more likely a random reader will stumble on the book, and when the reader enjoys that book, she will have a tendency to seek out the author’s previous books, especially if the book is fiction or part of a series. This attraction will snowball, so that eventually, one sale counts as many sales.

7. The Rule of Crowds. It is easier to sell a book to a crowd than it is to a single person. And the biggest crowds are on the Internet. Writers should always publish blogs and online articles, with the intention to interest the crowd into buying the book. Smaller crowds like seminars and genre-specific conventions are helpful, but one blog with 30 minutes of writing a day will reach one hundred times more readers than a weeklong convention full of panels and seminars.

After teaching these seven rules of author book sales, we then show the author how bookstore clerks sell books. There are several techniques retailers’ uses to make books more attractive to buyers, and we try to give authors that knowledge so that they, too, can be expert booksellers, at least as much as we can in one afternoon. I will cover some of those techniques in the last installment of this series.

I hope that by sharing our training program with others in the book business, it will help authors, their agents, editors and publishers, as well as booksellers and readers. Too many wonderful books out there do not get the attention they deserve. Let’s change that, Get out there and sell that book!

I would also like to hear from readers of this column about the techniques they use to hand sell their books.

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To subscribe to the entire series of articles on the topic of An Author’s Guide to Hand Selling Books, please click on the “Subscribe to this Group” button at www.ReadWriteRoyalty.Gather.com. To receive all of Mr. Rozansky’s articles, subscribe at www.FlyingPenPress.Gather.com.

David A. Rozansky is the publisher of Flying Pen Press. He has been in publishing since 1987, and has more than one million published words under his byline. Flying Pen Press is at www.FlyingPenPress.com.

Flying Pen Press is the publisher of David Rozansky’s highly anticipated guide to writing, Blitzquery: The Prolific Approach to Writing and Selling Magazine Articles, to be released January 2008 (ISBN 978-0-9795889-3-8).