How to Sell Books After Publishing

Want to learn how to sell books after publishing? Of course you do, otherwise, why publish your books? There are many different marketing methods available to writers that will help you sell books more effectively and will ultimately produce a residual effect of lasting passive income.

But where to start? Well, it's like building a house; you must build the foundation first and go from there.

Marketing is such a broad term. The only way to possibly know how you are going to promote your books is to understand how to set up a good foundation for your book writing, publishing, and selling business.

Selling books in order to make money from your books is easier said than done if you set everything up right. You probably thought people just bought your book, right? Sorry to break it to you, but how are they going to find your book if you aren't marketing it?

Unfortunately, not all writers are business minded individuals and not all writers know the art of selling books. This is probably the single most failure source among authors after they publish a book. They simply don't know how book promotion works.

How about you? Do you know how to sell books to your target market?

The Starting Point of Your Book Marketing Foundation

Broad marketing (or blanket marketing) will bring in a few sales here and there, but it won't establish the residual momentum you could be getting through narrow, more focused marketing.

Narrow marketing is a strategy to target a specific group of readers who will most likely buy and read your books. You can also use this strategy to choose new book ideas and write based on where the money's at.

The first thing you need to do, way before you even finish writing your book, is determine your target market by exploring your book's categories. Knowing the proper book category to market to will help you figure out the best approach for the marketing plan of your book.

Once you know what category or categories to place your book, you can research your audience to figure out who is most likely going to buy and read your book.

How to Sell Books to Make the Most Money

In order to make steady income from your books, you need a strong marketing plan for your books. If you are writing all of your books in the same categories, this is easy. If you are jumping all around writing books about everything under the sun, you will need a marketing plan for each category or book niche.

Learn how to set up and build a book marketing plan that will laser focus your promotional efforts in the direction to make the most money.

How Are Readers Going to Find Your Books?

There are many ways to attract readers to your books besides planting them on a sales platform under the right category. You must control your readers (or potential readers) to control the entire focused sales process.

Building an email list of readers or fans is your first and number one priority in book marketing. This is how to sell books over and over again every time you publish a new one. Once someone reads your book, they know who you are and what you write. If they like you and your book, they will certainly want more.

From my experience, the writers who succeed the most (or make the most money from selling books) are the ones who build an email list.

There are many ways to build lists of buyers, readers, and potential readers, but you want to focus on getting the buyers in your email list if you want to sell books.

So, how are the buyers in your category going to find your books? You need a way to attract them, capture their information, and push them through a sales process that sells books on autopilot.

The first thing you need to do is build a writer website (or an author website). This website can drive additional sales for your book, but is primarily a way to build a relationship with your fans. You can advertise all of your books on this site, establish a blog to keep people up to date on what you are doing with your writing and publishing, and can be a place to send people you meet when they ask what you do.

Next, you want to build a book website centered on your book's category. This serves all of the above purposes, can be focused on your book's topic, and can be updated with new related books every time you publish. Best of all, you can add a form on your book's website to capture names and emails of the people interested in your book or your book's category.

Once your two websites and methods of capturing customer's and fan's information is established, you want to build a sales funnel to drives potential buyers through a sales process that builds onto itself. Learn how to sell books through your book's sales process to get those books into reader's hands and money in your hands.

After Your Marketing and Sales Platform is Set Up

Once you establish your websites, you need to get visitors (potential readers) to your websites so they will subscribe to your lists. There are several ways to do this and can be found on my Book Marketing Strategies page so you can learn how to sell books for lasting, residual results.

I also have some great book marketing tips to help you avoid mistakes that can snuff out all book sales in one wrong move.

If you are having difficulty any of the process of how to sell books, please contact me with your questions and concerns and I will help you as quickly as I can. I also encourage feedback. If you have something that works very well for you, let me know. It's all about helping others succeed.

What's Going on?

Publisher's Notebook is adding content as quickly as possible to help as many writers and publishers as possible. Keep checking back for new, helpful information related to writing, publishing, and book marketing.