An Author Must Write

The Rule of Writing

Part 7 of An Author’s Guide to Hand Selling Books
by David A. Rozansky, Publisher, Flying Pen Press
Readers, Writers & Royalties columnist
October 17, 2007
Copyright 2007 David A. Rozansky

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

In the first article in this series, I gave a general overview of why authors should sell their own books. In that article, I gave a list of the seven rules we teach authors about how they can hand-sell their own books.

To quickly review, these seven rules are:

1. The Rule of Use. Authors must use books to sell books. (Discussed in a previous installment).

2. The Rule of Sales. Authors must be mentally and logistically prepared to sell their books. (Discussed in a previous installment).

3. The Rule of 3 Feet. Authors must tell everyone that comes within 3 feet about their books. (Discussed in a previous installment).

4. The Rule of 200. Authors must prepare a list of 200 contacts and work those contacts as their core fan base. (Discussed in a previous installment).

5. The Rule of 5x5. Authors must make five separate contacts each day, five days a week, and try to sell their books. (Discussed in a previous installment).

6. The Rule of Writing. Authors must keep writing new books.

7. The Rule of Crowds. Authors must sell their books before large crowds, preferably on the Internet.

This article will discuss the sixth rule, the Rule of Writing, in detail.

Many authors are not comfortable selling their own books, and when I teach them my rules for hand selling books, their eyes start to glaze over. They begin to see that selling books can be a pretty big task, and they wonder what they have gotten themselves into.

Then I mention the Rule of Writing, and they perk up. It is the best rule, the one that they usually like the most, and the one that is easiest for them to employ.

The Rule of Writing is actually the combination of two hand selling rules, the Rule of Quality and the Rule of Variety.

The Rule of Quality states: “To sell a product, the product must be of the highest quality.”

The Rule of Variety states: “To sell a product, the seller must offer the largest variety of related products possible.”

These are combined in my rules of hand selling books, to form the Rule of Writing, which states: “To sell books, the author must write well and write prolifically.”

In writing books, there is no substitute for practice. Naturally, it will be very difficult to sell a book that is not of high quality. Grammar needs to be perfect; spelling, impeccable. A novel must grab the reader and not let go, a non-fiction title must be positively authoritative and compelling. The only way to develop the skills and talent for this type of writing is through practice, and so a writer must write every day, if only for practice.

That’s the simpler part of the Rule of Writing. The other part is about variety.

There are two very distinct benefits to an author for hand-selling his own book. One is that the profit margin is greater than royalties, and the other is that the author has the customer’s complete attention, instead of sharing the reader’s attention with hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of other titles.

However, one of the disadvantages is that the reader need only make a decision based on the one title. If that title does not interest the reader completely, then no sale is made.

Having more titles in hand makes it more likely that the prospective customer will buy a book from the author. And the interesting thing is that once a reader reads one title by an author, they then become very likely to buy more titles from that author. Sometimes they will even make a purchase of these books at one time. In such cases, the author’s efforts are rewarded with more sales for the same effort.

Thus, writing more books means ore sales for the same sales effort.

Now, from the standpoint of hand selling books, the Rule of Writing is appealing to writers, but not all that important. Of all the hand-selling rules, it is perhaps the least important. However, in the process of marketing books and selling books through the trade, it becomes the most important rule.

In fact, I often tell the Flying Pen Press authors that the most important thing they can do to help market their titles is to keep writing more titles. This is because nothing sells a book like another book by that same author. I will even say that if an author does nothing else to market their book, writing new books will sell plenty of books. If they did everything else to market a book but not write more books, then I am greatly disappointed, as sales will clearly suffer in the long run.

It takes time and hard work to build a fan base. Readers are not very willing to take a chance on an unknown writer, especially when it comes to novels. They tend to happen upon new authors by happenstance. When there are multiple titles by an author, it increases the chances of reader discovery. Once a reader has discovered an author, assuming that the reading experience was a good one, then the reader will seek out the author’s other works. In this way, happenstance sells more than one book, in the long run. This causes the earlier titles to slowly increase in popularity.

There is another aspect of this tendency for readers to avoid unknown authors. When a reader sees an author they don’t know with several titles on the shelf, they at least feel that other readers are familiar with that author. Whether or not the author has such a following, the reader feels comforted and is more likely to buy one of the author’s titles and give it a try.

There is a truism in marketing that says that the more space a product occupies on a store shelf, the more visibility it has before the consumers, and this creates more sales as well as greater consumer confidence in the product. In a bookstore, an author’s name splayed across a shelf on several titles tends to grab readers in this same fashion.

To complete the marketing cycle of The Rule of Writing, bookstore buyers decide what to stock on their shelves in many ways. One way is to see how many other titles the author has on the shelves already. A fifth book by an author is more likely to be shelved in the bookstore than a first book by a debut author. Retailers are less likely to be fooled by mere volume of titles, and will look at sales of previous titles, but eventually, a long list of titles by an author will get picked up by bookstores.

Is it any wonder that the most successful writers are the ones who write the most prolifically?

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In the next installment, I will discuss The Rule of Blogging. 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 http://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).