5 Reasons Non Fiction Books Don’t Sell

I'm sorry to say there's a chance your book won't sell. I wish this wasn't true. I wish there was a magic formula to solve the problem of a good book not selling. But there's no such thing. There are, however, some very common reasons a book doesn't sell. So if you want to know what those are to set yourself up for a better chance of success, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of a fabulous professional self publishing services team called Book Launchers. Book success is not so much about whether you could write a great book or not. I'm sure you can think of a mediocre book that topped the bestseller charts, right? It's far more about your current platform, the market conditions, and your position in that market, and the uniqueness of your story or solution to appeal to a specific audience. Your willingness as the author to hustle and adapt to the market will matter a lot too. The good news is that nonfiction books are a popular category in the world, and they actually outsell fiction. It's also an easier genre to build your audience around. I think people have problems and nonfiction offers solutions, but still, many books won't sell. So what are the reasons a nonfiction book commonly doesn't sell? Number one Lack of Author Platform when people ask me to predict whether their book will be a bestseller, the first thing I ask them is the size of their current audience. This is the single biggest predictor of a book's success, especially for launch. It's why the major publishing houses look first at the author's platform to determine whether they will give a book a deal or not. If you have 100,000 people reading your newsletter, or 1 million people or more watching your videos on YouTube, you've got an audience that will buy books, and probably a lot of them. So what kind of a platform do you have? If you say you don't have one, you it's really not reasonable to expect that you're going to have an enormous launch. There's nobody waiting right now to get your content now. All is not lost if you don't have a platform or it's not that big. My first book, More Than Cashflow, topped the charts of Amazon because other people with platforms promoted the book to their audiences. Many of our clients sell hundreds of books to corporations in bulk deals. They have one connection that can lead to hundreds of sales. So there's still possibilities, but lack of an email newsletter list or social media following, or a speaker platform or an audience anywhere does dramatically impact the sales of your book, especially from launch. Number two. The hook of your book was weak. Let's say you've been helping people lose weight for 20 years. You have experience, but you're not a household name. Why should someone buy your book? What would you have to talk about on a TV show or a podcast that the other hundred experts they've already talked to haven't already said? Martha Tatenborn came to us with a book on how she powered through cancer. We talked about how she changed the angle of her book to make it a stronger hook to appeal to an ideal reader in an Author Spotlight video that I'll link to in the description below. Her book was positioned to be all about how you can use a keto diet to be stronger through chemotherapy treatments and if your body is stronger, it can do a better job of fighting the cancer cells. Hacking chemo was born through this using a ketogenic diet, therapeutic fasting, and a kick ass attitude to power through cancer. It's much easier to market her book and get her interviews to build her brand because we have a very distinct hook and a clear audience to market her book to and she has the credentials to back this book up. She's not just been through cancer herself and used the keto diet to kick chemo in the butt. She's been a registered dietitian for 32 years. She's taken keto diet specific training and and she's also a health coach. She's got the goods to back this book up too, which is 0.3. Largely, people buy books from people they've heard of or people they can trust, and that trust comes from their credentials. We want to learn from people with decades of experience who've had the failures and successes and are willing to give that to you to consume in a few hours versus having to experience the pain of learning the lessons yourself. These the average person's story can work, but if you don't have an audience and you're relying on others to promote you and put you in front of their audience, that can be a challenge because people want to promote something that is proven. Being the author of the book on the subject can take you a distance as far as building credibility, but you need credentials or experience. And if you don't have strong credentials, you can do things to develop them for your book. You can partner up with someone that will help you with that. You can interview, you know, interview hundreds of billionaires to share what they do that nobody else does. Or you can do what Ryan Berman author of Return on Courage did. He collected incredible stories of personal and corporate courage in his book to bolster his position as the expert on courage. It's a great approach. The only exception I have on this is if you're writing a memoir. You are the authority on your own life. Your credential is you lived it. You don't have to add to that. That said, you still need a clear, engaging, reader focused hook. What makes your story an exciting, interesting and engaging experience for the reader? Please, whatever you do, do not say that your story is to inspire others. Dig deeper. What will they be inspired to do, say, believe or become after they read your story? Number four, your cover blends in or your title doesn't sell your book with a benefit for the reader. These are really each their own problem, but I'm lumping them together because they're both things that happen during the production process of your book and we've already covered these topics extensively on this channel. The book cover is the packaging and it must be designed to appeal to your reader. Sure, I would love for you to be proud of your book cover, but what matters the most is your target reader immediately identifies the book as something for them. In a future video. I'm actually going to break down the COVID process for my book, self publish and succeed. Fun fact for you, my least favorite color is yellow. It would have been the last color I put on my book cover if the process was focused on me and what I liked. But we focused on the category we wanted the book to compete in and what would make this pop out for an ideal reader. So subscribe to the channel and turn the notifications on so you catch that video when it comes out next month because it's a cool inside look at how we develop covers and decide on them. The COVID is vital, but you can change your cover post launch without too much pain. Your title is really hard to change. If you get it wrong, don't focus on what you like or what your friends say is good. Focus on what's going to be memorable, easy to say, benefit driven. It sells your book to your ideal reader. Number five, you think your target market is everyone, which means it's nobody. I get it. You want to imagine your book being read by millions of people and for that to happen you think you have to be general and focus on a wide market. But realistically, your book, if successful, will be lucky to sell 10,000 to 50,000 copies. And that's if it's really successful. So let's focus on where you're going to get your first 1,000 or even 10,000 readers. Okay? Your next book can be for a wider audience if you think that that limited you. Even then, when you go wide, you'll still need a specific audience with a specific problem. Because a book that is written to interest everyone will read very flat because it will not have a connection to anyone. You want the feeling of oh my goodness, did she read my mind? I had that exact thought. And that will only happen if you have reader clarity and a compelling hook that will help the reader create a better life as a result of your book. You have to get into the minds of your reader and this video coming up right here will help you with that. After you leave a comment on the other reasons a book won't sell, head on over to this video and start your reader research so this doesn't happen to you. And when you comment the day a video is released, you'll get entered to win some sweet noboringbooksswag like our mug and our oh so soft journal. And if you're solid on your reader research, this video on titles and subtitles is the next one you really must see. Let's sell a whole lot of books together, okay?