Did You Think About It, Before Writing Your Book?

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There are a couple of hard questions you should ask yourself before writing and publishing a book. Having heard all these stories during the last years about (very few) authors who self-published their books and became famous / rich, might tempt you to follow their path.

90% of all authors I talk to, haven’t done their research. There are lots of questions any author should ask (and answer) before writing – not only as independent writer, but also before pitching to publishers:

• how many books of this topic (sometimes even with the same title) are out there already
• where are these books sold and for which price
• who are the customers of these books
• how are these books received and which ones are bestselling
• in which categories / genres are these competitive books listed
• what cover designs have been chosen for these books
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Research First and Build a Solid Foundation
Barely any author is really planning their book and its promotion. Only when frustration sets in, they think about getting help.  Becoming an author-publisher is a long-term commitment and requires hundreds of small steps on the path to success!  Before you even attempt to write, develop and market an e-book, or paper book for that matter, create yourself a road map.

The problem is that too many authors are in a hurry to start writing and don’t lay a foundation for book marketing. They spend all this time writing, and then they have no readers and customers to buy their books.
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Ask yourself some hard questions:

• Who will be your e-book readers?
• Is there a demand for your eBook product?
• Is your e-book a “must have” purchase?
• How much will people pay for your product?
• Does the purchase of your eBook lead to additional e-book sales?
• How much money will you need to fund your project?
• How likely are you to excel among the competition?
• How do you contact and “pitch” your product to your potential buyers?
• How to you get the important book reviews?
• Do you have already lots of followers in your social networks?

Writing your book is only 20% of the work, 80% is marketing! Having a plan on how you intend to market, publicize and sell your book before starting to write it is crucial.

• Choose your book content
• Start marketing your book, even before writing it
• Design and format it into a perfect downloadable file
• Create a professional cover for your e-book
• Select the e-book retailer to upload your book (Amazon, Apple, B&N, Sony…)
• Continue marketing your book

You are responsible for providing your own ongoing marketing for e-published work – the same as for paper books that are often not very well marketed. A book might be great, but if nobody knows about it, it won’t sell. Authors can’t count on the public seeing their books on shelves or in store windows – they have to find it on the internet.
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The Statistics are Dire 
There are more than one million books published in the USA alone every year.  Of those, some two thirds are self-published.  Book sales are declining, having peaked in 2007.  Your nonfiction book published in 2014 will, on average, sell less than 250 copies per year, fewer than 3,000 over its lifetime, which is increasingly short since publishers don’t back-list as much as they used to.
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Create Your Own Market 
More books, fewer sales means that publishers have less money to spend on marketing to try to reach those increasingly rare readers.  Less help from the publisher means that the author has to do more and more him/herself.  So you not only have to write the book, you also have to figure out how to sell it. How will anyone hear about your book?  They won’t see it – there’s a less than 1% chance that your book will be stocked in a bookstore.
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Establish Yourself as Expert
In an era of increasing specialization, and a daily explosion in knowledge, experts have clout and authority.  So if you want to be at the head of your field, you need that book – especially if you’re a consultant or something similar, who’s hired because of your expertise.  And then you’ll probably need another book in a few years’ time.  But let’s worry about the next book later.
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Become a Professional Public Speaker
Public speakers – the paid ones – still need a book to point to.  Even (former) President Clinton has had to write books to keep himself in the public eye. That’s why it’s important to get clear from the outset why you are writing this book.
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Don’t Let You Fool By These Bogus Stories
Writers claim to have sold hundred-thousands of their books in short time or claim bestseller status, and cash in on these stories.  When you look behind the scenes, they have either paid for hundreds of reviews or a service company bought ten-thousands of their own books (which these authors had to advance), catapulting them to New York Times bestseller status. All this false hype brings writers to think their book is a failure if not showing up in bestseller lists. Wrong!

Don’t Be Discouraged
Just do more research into your book market, learn everything about book publishing and marketing, and built step by step your author platform and brand.  And for your next book:  Do the research first!!! Before you start writing.

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If you would like to get help in all things publishing, have your book intensively promoted and learn how to navigate social media sites: We offer all this and more for only $159 for 3 months! Learn more about this individual book marketing help: http://www.111Publishing.com/Seminars
Or visit http://www.e-book-pr.com/book-promo/ to advertise your new book, specials or your KDP Select Free Days.

Please check out all previous posts of this blog (there are more than 940 of them : ) if you haven’t already. Why not sign up to receive them regularly by email? Just click on “Follow” in the upper line on each page – and then on “LIKE” next to it. There is also the “SHARE” button underneath each article where you can submit the article to Pinterest, Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and StumpleUpon.

Thanks a lot for following:

@111publishing
http://www.111publishing.com
http://www.e-Book-PR.com/
http://www.international-ebooks.com/
http://bit.ly/VmtVAS 111Publishing @ Google+

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Writing is an Art – Publishing is a Business!

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British Columbia, Canada

You might belong to these talented authors who have written a fantastic book – or several, but you just don’t have the sales numbers your book(s) deserves.

You realized that selling and marketing is a completely different process to writing and publishing your book. And you are not alone:

Very few writers have a degree in marketing / business or experience in publishing and selling on- and offline.

Barely any author is really planning their book and its promotion. Only when frustration sets in, they think about getting help.

However, throwing lots of money into advertising is very costly and in the best case, might be only a rather short-term solution.

Creating a brand long-term, and a platform from where you can communicate with your readers is more efficient, almost free and a solid base for future books and their sales numbers.

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The Internet is full of bogus stories.
Writers claim to have sold hundred-thousands of their books in short time or claim bestseller status, and cash in on these stories.  When you look behind the scenes, they have either paid for hundreds of reviews or a service company bought ten-thousands of their own books (which these authors had to advance), catapulting them to New York Times bestseller status.  All this false hype brings writers to think their book is a failure if not showing up in bestseller lists. Wrong!
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Becoming an author-publisher is a long-term commitment and requires hundreds of small steps on the path to success!
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An increasing number of authors gets book marketing help from us. You might already know that we

• offer weekend classes, 
• individual, yet very inexpensive online seminars, targeted to your needs, 
• help authors with ads for KDP FREE days, Countdown Deals and Goodreads Giveaways
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What is included in this marketing training and help?
You might have seen the long list of support URL , we give authors. But what really is included in the marketing planning, the creation of a platform and your brand as an author? There is so much behind the scenes what’s involved, have a closer look at some of what we do:

We evaluate your current publishing situation:

• What is the market for your book, your competition, your audience? Is it a popular genre, or more of a niche? Is your book in the right genre? Did you tap the full potential of categories – which can be boon or bust for your book?
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• What is your publishing situation: traditional publishing, author-publishing or God forbid, vanity publishing or contracting with an aggregator? Do you own your ISBN, do you have access to your online retailers’ publishing account? How long lasts your publishing contract?
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• Did you create separate author/book pages on Goodreads, Google+, Pinterest, Facebook and other communities? Does your author page at online retailers need improvement?
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• What was your previous marketing strategy? What worked, what not? Did you have a book launch, re-launch, any special promotions? How often and how well was your book reviewed? In which promotion did your publisher invest? Is it positioned properly?
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• What is your following on social media – and your involvement? Do you have at least 1,000 Goodreads friends, 2,000 twitter followers and the same on Google+, 500 Facebook friends and did you add your book to your Pinterest account? These might be numbers only, but did you choose the right keywords to find quality followers, such as readers, reading, book lovers, bookworms?
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• Do you show off your writing skills? Are you writing regularly blogs? Does your website have a prominent button to your sales pages? Did you write guest blogs on influential book bloggers pages?
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• What are your activities in getting book reviews? Have you sent out press releases in order to get interviews, radio / TV appearances or features in magazines / newspapers?
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• How do you approach reviewers? And have you joined reader / writer communities on Goodreads or made friends with their most popular book reviewers?
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• What are your long-term goals? Where will you be as a writer in 3 years? What will be your author brand and how will you be different from other authors in your genre?

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Getting a clear picture about your situation as an author
and that of your books, we can meet you by phone / skype and discuss details, including publishing possibilities, if your book is not yet finished, before we start customized promotion of your book through a series of articles, interviews and book recommendations.
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An important focus will be on support for Social Media communication:
Where and how can your presence be improved? How can you get more followers? How to implement your blog posts? This includes also lots of individual tips and links for your book project, explained in person or emailed to you regularly.

We certainly help you through our very well-established social media presence on all major sites to get the word out about your book and you as an author – as well as support for free KDP Select days and other promotions. Which means we tweet to our 40,000+ followers on these days, we place additional articles on social media sites and do everything for your book’s success

Most important:

Advertising your books, as well as the article and the interview we did with you and all the postings on our Social Media sites stay there FOREVER! This way it will have a long-term effect on your book sales. More details in a blog post or on http://www.111Publishing.com/seminar.
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And this is what former clients say:

“This was the best choice I have ever made! I have learned so very much from a person that has 30 years of experience in the book publishing industry!”
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“I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth with the great publicity you’ve already given me. I cannot stress enough just how grateful I am – I don’t think too many service providers are anywhere near as diligent as you are.”
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“This service is truly a one-on-one feature in that she works directly with the client, fine-tuning your social media platform contributing to the success of your business.”
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“Thank you so much. You are amazing, so helpful to all of us who are starting down the road of self publishing. I just printed that blog post off this morning and will start to act on it today. You are an inspiration.” Thanks again for everything.”
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“If ANYONE is self-publishing a book, I highly recommend using her for consulting. Thank you Doris for saving me $3,700”
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“Boy, you really provide a service. If you ever need a reference, count me in. Anything I can do to promote you back. You rock.
J. H.”
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“Doris “Thank you so much. You are amazing, so helpful to all of us who are starting down the road of self publishing. I just printed that blog post off this morning and will start to act on it today. You are an inspiration. Thanks again for everything.”

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We will show you how to market your book on a consistent and ongoing basis – for only a token fee of $159 for three months – less than $2 per day.  As you can see from the amount of time we invest for every author, we are not making money, rather see it as a service for like-minded folks. How can we help you as an author of a marvelous book – and hopefully many more to come?

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Be Spoiled for Choice …

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… how you want to learn book promotion.  And there is a lot to learn: Publishing evolves constantly and the success of your book(s) is very much depending on you, no matter if you self-publish or if you go with one of the big publishers. 

Choices in publishing, essentials of book / e-book layout and design, your platform and brand,  optimizing social media, use of non-traditional ways of book marketing, book distribution, online retailers, learning about  marketing on a shoestring… it’s over-whelming.  But not if you get help from someone who has studied e-publishing and marketing for many years – and practices it all.

Choose between weekend seminars or sign-up for customized online marketing training (special offer in December)  

… or plan ahead for a publishing and book marketing seminar on a 5-day Caribbean Cruise on board of the Carnival Breeze, a brand new cruise liner, taking off in Miami, FL, on November 3, 2013.  Make your travel plans soon, bookings for this offer start at the end of this month!  

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Hello, I’m Doris-Maria Heilmann with 111 Publishing.  We are not only publishers of traditional and eBooks, we extensively market our authors books.  We also host informative seminars for authors on the “art” of promotion. 

During the last years, publishing books has totally changed. Nowadays we writers need to build our own platforms, identify our own demographics, and find our own market share – even if we are with a traditional publishing house!  The profession has changed and we need to adapt in order to succeed.   

Our unique “Seminar-At-Sea” will help authors to:

• Strategically establish a writing career
• Create our own brand
• Identify our target readers
• Find out how to reach these readers
• Market and publicize our books on a budget
• Find free book publishing funding sources

Soon I will be announcing all the details of this spectacular opportunity.  But for now…mark November 3, 2013 on your calendars!!  Connect with your peers and learn invaluable information to enhance your writing career…all while having the time of your life on an exotic Caribbean Cruise!!

Doris-Maria Heilmann

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If you enjoyed this blog post, please feel free to check out all previous posts of this blog (there are almost 600 of them : ) if you haven’t already. Why not sign up to receive them regularly by email? Just click on “Follow” in the upper line on each page – and then on “LIKE” next to it. There is also the “SHARE” button underneath each article where you can submit the article to Pinterest, Google+, Twitter, Tumblr and StumpleUpon.

Follow on Twitter: @111publishing

And don’t forget to spread the word on other social networking sites of your choice for other writers who might also enjoy this blog and find it useful. Thanks, Doris

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