How to Make Money Writing and Publishing Books

There are many ways to make money writing and publishing your books. Some sales will be automatic through your book publishing platform, some will be through your website, and some will be driven by your book marketing efforts. But there are other ways to make money selling books that can surely add to your bottom line.

Methods and techniques to make money writing and selling books have been bouncing around my brain for quite a while now. The reason I'm very passionate about this subject is because it is one of the most difficult areas of writing and publishing to master. That's also why over ninety percent of new writers will make under $100.00 with their first published book and never want to bother publishing ever again because of these initial poor results.

I want to change that for you. You can make money writing and publishing your books, you just have to do things the right way.

Make Money Writing Your First Book

There's nothing more powerful than making a lot of money selling your first book. Knowing that it can be done is half the battle. Repeating is the other half.

Between all of my own marketing research with my all of the books I've published and marketed over the past 14 years and observations I've made of other writer's success stories, I am starting to break the code to make money writing. I'm hoping this will put book marketing for the unknown self-published authors on the map and enable writers just like you to have a fighting chance at business success as a writer.

With that said, you must treat your writing as a business. Changing your mindset to a more business mindset is one of the keys to selling more books, especially with self-publishing books.

If you don't know what you're doing, selling books can be difficult. Selling non-fiction books is by far the easiest to do if you know how to target the right market and have a solution for people within a certain area of interest.

Fiction is a very aggressive and saturated market filled with lots of competition in all categories. The only thing breaking your story apart from the competition is your unique ideas, styles, plots and characters. Considering your writing as a business, even during the idea stage, will organize everything about your writing and set you up for ultimate financial success in the long run.

Once you create your writing and publishing business, you must immediately dive into your marketing plan, even while you are still in the process of writing, in order to make money writing. Most good writers start marketing their new books before they even start writing their first sentence. Telling all of your friends and relatives what you are doing and when they can expect to read your book is a great motivator and keeps you on track with your goals and deadlines.

Announcing a release date for your book before it's ready is a great way to set the publishing goal for yourself and hold you accountable for reaching this goal on time. You don't want to disappoint your audience, do you? It's never too early to start marketing your books to agents, publishers, friends, family, and potential readers within your target market.

Once your book is published, whether you have self-published your work or had it professionally published, you must take action on your marketing plan right away.

A marketing plan is your marketing road map that spells out a plan of how and where you will be selling books and at what stages you are going to apply leverage to make even more book sales. This is where establishing your writing as a business plays the most toward selling books.

The Importance of Self-Marketing

Selling books to people you know well is easy. They will most likely buy your book on the simple fact that they know you. But selling to people who don't know you is the real challenge and where you will make money writing and publishing your books.

While the initial marketing efforts are centered on all of the people in your immediate network (your friends, family, and people you are associated with on a regular basis), your long term aim will be at driving sales from the people in your indirect network or people outside of your network all together (friends of friends, friends of family members, people in other countries, etc...).

One of the first marketing platforms you should establish for selling books is to make an website you can send people to in order to find your books and will naturally attract customers to itself. A website for you as an author will help too.

I don't mean settle for a one or two page website...you know, the ones that a publisher may give you after they publish your book. Those types of websites are straight sales websites that will not attract a lot of people by themselves. They will work as a place to send people, but very rarely will people ever find them on their own unless they know the title of your book or your name.

You need to learn creative ways on how to make a website that will be found by people looking for information about the subjects you write about or about you as an author. You need to create a website that does more than just act as a place to send people to. You need a website that is going to naturally attract people to it (from all over the world) and that do most of the work for you so you don't have to.

Once established and your website pages are ranked high by all of the major search engine providers, your book and author websites will be working for you 24/7, giving you more time to write more books and to concentrate on more media options to get people to your website. Blogs are another great method for getting your name out there and marketing your stories to people who are interested in similar topics.

It takes dedication and determination to keep your business going once you start. Many publishers offer marketing assistance (for a healthy price through their partners) that will help produce sales. A lot of these types of marketing require additional expenses you may not be able to afford right away.

Even if you are professionally published or self-published, you will have to rely on your own book promotion ideas to make money writing from the start to even consider one of their marketing packages.

You must market your own book if you want to make money writing and publishing books.

Make Money Writing and Publishing Books Through Word of Mouth

Getting others to talk about you and your books (called referral based marketing or word of mouth) is the best way to get people you don't know to buy your books. Selling books on your own is one thing, but having other sell your books for you for free (and not even know they are doing it) is something even bigger.

This is everyone's perfect book selling dream. If you watch a great movie, do you tell other's about it? Well, that is you selling that movie to one of your friends. That is sales effort that the movie producers and writers didn't have to put forth and saved them a lot of money.

The same will happen to your book if it is really good. People will tell their friends about your book and they will buy it because of the good recommendation. And if you encourage all of your buyers to tell others about it, it will make this viral effect even more effective.

Book Signings and The Importance of Showing Face

One of the most important things you can do as a writer is not be shy when it comes to your book. Be confident and sure of what you wrote. Know that what you are selling will help someone or entertain someone interested in the genre you are writing in.

Getting people to know you as an author is important in case you write books outside one area of interest or topic. If you write fiction novels or self-help books, you want your readers to know who you are and that you are writing for them.

One great way to do this is by having book signings in common locations that people buy books. Book stores and other stores that sell books are great places to start. You can talk to the book store owners and managers and arrange a time you can have a book signing on their premises. They may want a percentage of sales from your book or a certain number of books to sell in their store separate from the signing as payment to allow you to do your book signing there, but this will get you some exposure locally and start your book marketing push.

If you are just starting out and aren't comfortable exposing yourself to the public yet, then you can host a book signing party in your own home or in a friend's home to kick start some direct sales.

A book signing party is like an Avon or Mary Kay party in someone's home. You know, when they are trying to sell some products to friends and families of those who host the party. Well, if they can do it, why can't you?

Learn more about how to host a book signing party and boost your sales in person. It's also a great way to get people to join your fan mailing list or your book website mailing list, not to mention, sell some books to everyone that attends.

People want to meet authors. They want to know the people behind the words. Even if they are family and friends, it's still good to show face and let them know you are an author and that they can buy your books. They will most likely want to support you in your en devour.

Getting Book Reviews

Believe it or not, when people find your book on Amazon, they get a warmer fuzzy when they see you have five to ten good reviews and are more likely to buy than if you don't have any reviews.

Reviews are the second place people go after reading your description to see if your book is worth reading. You may have the best write up in the world, but if no body is talking about it, is it all cracked up to be as good as the description says?

To make money writing, you need some good reviews on your book selling site like Amazon or other sites like Goodreads. The hard part is getting people to write reviews.

Learn how to get reviews for your book so you can boost your on sales page sales based on what people say about your books.

The Importance of a Book Reading

A book signing is a place people can meet the author and have them sign a book. A book reading is a whole other place you can interact with your potential readers and interest them in buying your book.

At a reading, especially for a longer novel, you can read a chapter or two to a group of interested people to get them hooked on your book. Your goal is to get them interested in the topic, keep them in suspense, and make them want more.

People will go to a book reading just to meet the author and see what it's about. But if you can catch their curiosity, they will buy your books.

Be sure to have books on hand so people can buy them directly from you.

Book Shows and Book Fairs

Every once in a while, a book show or book fair will travel through your area of the world. Even if it is a hundred miles away, you should make your best efforts to get a booth at the fair or show.

Of course you will have to have some books on hand and have the money for a booth, but you can sell your books for profit and easily sell a hundred books.

It's just like a book signing, except you are primarily marketing yourself and all of the books you've published to anyone that comes up to your table. People are excited to meet authors and are more than happy to buy a few books from you just to say they met the author.

Learn more about book shows and book fairs and how to market yourself and your books to make money writing and publishing your books.

It's not hard to make money writing and publishing books, but you must take an offensive position and make the effort to make some personal sales. These sales will produce a better viral affect then online sales and the same rules apply - get them to give you their name and email address so you can send them information about more book sales.

If you have questions about how to make money writing and publishing books, please contact me and I will help you out as much as you can.

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