A short YouTube video by Julie Broad offering practical, low-cost strategies for self-published authors to sell their books. She presents five effective tactics—building an online presence, networking, speaking engagements, public relations, and promotions—notes that bookstore signings are usually ineffective, and encourages viewers to share other ideas and follow her for more tips.
Chapters
Hey there, it's Julie Broad of juliebrod.com and I have a critical video for you self publishing authors out there. Self publishing wannabe authors out there. I'm gonna talk about how you're gonna sell your book because as much as I would like to believe it's the case you write a brilliant book, the best book ever, you still have to find people to read it. Unless you're okay just writing a book and that's it. But unless you're Malcolm Gladwell and you've got really, really deep pockets and you can afford to spend thousands of dollars per store to totally blanket the airport stores, right? I don't know if you've flown in the month of October, but Malcolm Gladwell's new book David and Goliath is everywhere. And you might think it's because Malcolm Gladwell is a big name now, right? If you haven't read the Tipping Point or any of his other books, outliers, et cetera, you've probably at least heard of who he is. But he still had to pay for that coveted space. Now I'm not clear. Business Week said that they wouldn't say exactly how much they paid, but that that Hudson News usually sells that space per store for several thousand dollars. If you're Malcolm Gladwell, you can probably foot the bill for that because you get a couple talks for 50 to $85,000 plus proceeds from the book deal, it's probably okay, right? But most of us aren't Malcolm Gladwell so we're gonna have to find ways that don't cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to get distribution. And of course readers for our fabulous work of book. So here's five things I did and one that I did that I don't recommend, but five things I did that got really great results. And you may or may not know, but in my first week of launching my book, More Than Cash Flow, I got it to number one overall on on Amazon and it stayed there for a couple of days. And it was largely thanks to a couple of these tactics or strategies if you will, to get your books into readers hands. So number one online presence. Now for me, I'd been writing a newsletter for seven years. I had built up a fantastic base of wonderful folks who not only bought my book but told other people when my book came out. So that was critical. But if you are writing your book already and you haven't spent seven years writing a newsletter, there's no time like right now, yeah, right now you might even want to turn off this video and get to work on it to build an online presence and ideally get newsletter subscribers and social media followers and friends. That's really going to be a critical component because that audience are hopefully going to be the first folks out there to grab your book when it comes out. Number two. And this was the second kind of my secret weapon that I got with my fabulous readers who thank you, thank you. I'm still so grateful for you buying books when it came out and now still and for your Amazon reviews. But my secret weapon that got me to number one. I think we broke top 10 without friends, but we never would have got to number one if it weren't for the fabulous support of some of our friends. Nick and Tom Kradza of Rockstar Real Estate in particular, San sent some really great promotions out to their fantastic folks and that really gave us the boost we needed to get to number one. So start networking, folks, because it's hard to do it all alone. Friends, referring and recommending you and your book is going to be a huge, huge help to you. Number three, I'm sorry if you really thought you could just sit behind your computer and sell books, but speaking is really, really a solid way to sell books. If you have a short talk, you can find business networking groups, meetup groups. If you're a niche like I am with real estate, there's probably shows and forums that you can speak at. And if you give a good talk, a big chunk of that room will want to buy your book. So you can sell your book right then and there. And that's a great way to sell a lot of books. Not a great way to make a ton of money, by the way. But hey, you didn't write a book to get rich, I hope. Okay, number four, pr. And this is going to be an entire video unto itself. Because getting newspapers and radios and TVs to cover you and your book and your story, possible, but it's a little bit tricky on your own. You probably want to hire help. So that's an entire video on its own. But for what it's worth, I think that while TV looks the coolest and people think it's the coolest, I actually think that the newspaper articles and the radio station spots I've done have generated the most results. And I try to track it, but you can't really tell, right? You don't really know where your book sales are coming from. But people who come out to my book events, who've heard of me for the first time are coming from newspaper or Radio, they're not coming from the TV shows. Number five, promotion. Now this is what we did in the launch to really boost it, right? And this, this and this all combined together are what gave us a really, really strong start out of the gate. But even now, if I have a store that has a lot of leftover stock, then I might run a city specific promotion to help sell books. So that can be, you know, one on one coaching calls. It can be some of your friends who blog may have ebooks or other courses or services that they'll offer to buyers of your book. So when they send you a receipt proving they bought your book, you can then send them or sign them up for these other services. Sound good, right? It helps to sell books. I know you're selling a 20, $25 book and you're probably giving hundreds of dollars away of services and products to do that. But sometimes people just need a little boost to go get the job done. And that works. It absolutely works to get people to buy the book. Now, now, one thing that doesn't work, Bookstore signings kind of suck. Yeah, really. Listen, a lot of my friends are like, oh, I've seen all your book signings, it looks so cool. And some of them have been pretty good. But the reality is that getting people to come out to a bookstore to buy a book these days, it's actually really hard. We've tried all kinds of promotion, we've done all kinds of media, we've had postcards, we've had purchases, personal email, invites, we've even called some people and the turnouts have been really, really low. And in speaking with the bookstores, because I've done six or seven bookstore signings now, unless you're a celebrity, and even if you're a celebrity, it's really hard to get people out to the bookstores these days for those events. So I would recommend you set up speaking events or pursue these other five versus doing the book signings. The advantage to the book signings as a self published author, is that's how I'm getting bookstore distribution, right? So I'm not paying thousands of dollars, but I am spending an hour of my time to go and sit there at the bookstore. But that is now getting my book on the shelves of that store, whereas it wasn't that easy to get there before. So there is an advantage to it, but it doesn't sell a whole lot of books and it takes up a lot of time and effort and energy. So I would personally recommend you focus on these five. And if you have a great idea for selling books, let me know because I'm still looking for great ideas. Please share. You can tweet me revenue or just go ahead and post a comment under this video in YouTube. And of course, if you like this video and you want more self publishing tips from my adventure, please give me a thumbs up because it makes me happy and it encourages me to shoot another video for you in the future. Good luck with your book sales. I'd love to hear what's working for you. Please share and I'll see you on another video.
