How to Increase Your Book Sales By 20% This Year

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Would you like to be able to increase your book sales by 20% this year? Hi, my name is Shelley Hits. I'm an author coach and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's time to time to let your light shine. And in this training, I'm going to talk to you about how to increase your book sales by 20% this year. And it's really just a mindset shift. And I honestly think most authors don't look at numbers, but I think for most authors, we just don't think numbers. A lot of authors aren't really strong with marketing because you're so strong with the creative stuff. And a lot of authors I know just don't want to even think about marketing. You know, you just want to write. And I totally get that. But there's a really simple thing you can do to really think about how to increase your book sales. Because one of the biggest questions I get is, Shelly, how can I sell more books? I've invested all this time, I've invested all this energy money into this book and I want it to sell. I do, too. I want my books to sell, too. So I was at a conference this last weekend. It was the national association of Christian Women Entrepreneurs. It's a mouthful. We just call it Naqui for short. You can check it out@nacwe.org and one of my author audience academy members just stepped in to the role as president. And it's amazing group. I highly recommend it. But I was there this last weekend and one of the speakers, she was talking about this concept and I just thought it would be a really great practical exercise for us to do on one of my trainings. So let's just take a number. So I would what the first step you're going to need to do is you're going to need to figure out how many books did you sell last year. You can go into kdp.Amazon.com, createspace.com, wherever you've published your book or if you have a publisher, ask them for these statistics. But you can go in there and check your book statistics. I also use a tool, it's called Book Tracker, and it helps me to be able to just easily see how many books I've sold. But you just need to know that number. Now, unfortunately, a lot of authors don't sell more than just a few hundred books. So let's just for the ease of math, because I'm doing this on the fly, let's just say you sold 100 books last year. So if you want to sell 20% more books, that would be selling 120 books. You know, 20% of 100 is 20. So it'd be like selling 120 books. Now let's take that 20 books. Now how many books would that mean you would have to sell per month? So it would be less than two books per month or let's just say around two books per month. How many books would you have to sell per week? A half of a book, you know, you'd only have to sell one book every other week in addition to what you sold, you know, the sales you had last year in order to increase your sales by 20%. That sounds doable, right? And so sometimes we think to increase and to grow and to do these things, it just seems so out of reach. So when we did this exercise, I actually did it based upon Author Audience Academy, my membership, and what would it take for me to increase by 20%? What would it take to increase by 10%? And it really only just takes getting one to two new members every month. That's it.

And it would be an incredible amount of growth. They said on average, and I haven't looked this up myself for the research, but on average businesses are really happy to grow 3 to 7%. So if you're growing 10 to 20%, whether it's book sales or services or you know, whatever you're offering coaching, you are just rocking it, you're doing good. So would you be willing to do this? Would you be willing to sit down and write out how many book sales you had last year? And you might even want to break it down between ebooks and print books, audiobooks, however you want to do it, you be, you just do it, sit down and say how many books you sold last year and then what would it take for you to increase that by 20%? How many books would that mean you'd have to sell per year? And then how many per month, how many per week? So this is just a simple, simple exercise to get you thinking. Now we're just kicking off a brand new 90 day accountability group, inside Author Audience Academy. And I have a new team member. She is our education coordinator, Kim Steadman. She's going to be hosting these calls. I hosted the kickoff call today and what I'm challenging all my members to do is to set a new 90 day goal. And so I like to think in 90 day goal chunks. And so you could even just do this for the next 90 days. If your main goal right now is to sell more books, think about the next 90 days. What would it take for you to increase your sales 20% from the last 90 days? So there's a lot of different ways that you could apply the same concept into your business, into your books, and really be able to break it down into something that seems much more. More doable. Because the honest truth is it really doesn't take as much as we think. Many times, you know, we have this big goal, it seems overwhelming. But if we break it down, if we have that big 90 day goal, then, you know, break it down into 12 to 13 weeks. However many weeks like this, 90 days where there's 13 weeks, I have a personal goal, a 90 day goal that's based on income. We need to buy a new car. And that's why based on income and then based on some other numbers. But I shared this inside my Author Audience Academy group today. But what I did then is that big goal seems kind of out of reach for me right now, and it does feel a bit overwhelming. But what I did is I broke it down. What would it take every single week for 13 weeks for me to reach that goal? If I broke that goal, divided it by 13 and then what would it take? If I divide that into each day and divide that by seven each week as seven days, divide that by seven and then what would it require every day? And all of a sudden it seemed much more doable. So instead of seeing the whole picture, instead of seeing everything that you have to do in order to finish writing and publishing or marketing your book, could you just do what you need to do today? Could you break it down a little smaller? Could you say, what is just the one next thing that I can do? What is just the one next thing that I can do to reach that goal? And just think about that one thing right now. Kind of put everything else aside for a minute and focus on that one thing. That's how I've really been able to write and publish over 40 books. It's how I've been able to grow an academy with hundreds of Christian authors that I serve every day over the last two years. Inside Author Audience Academy. It's how I'm now creating art on a daily basis. And I'm teaching art classes, new classes every month on skillshare. It's basically how I've been able to accomplish what I've been able to accomplish. Just breaking it down, having Focus follow one course until successful. Repeat after me Focus follow one course until successful. Put the blinders on and then breaking it down into doable bite size chunks. Are you willing to do this with me? If so, just tell me. I'm in in the comments and I would love to hear from you and and if you want some accountability, if you want to join us in Author Audience Academy, we would love to have you join us. You can find out more@authoraudienceacademy.com so thank you so much for joining me for this training. I hope it just helped you just switch your mindset just a little bit, sit down and do this with whatever you're working on right now. If it's your 90 day goal, break it down into smaller chunks. If you're wanting to sell more books, do the 20% exercise. See what it would really require. I bet it would be it would surprise you Again, my name is Shelly Hitz. I'm an author coach and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's time to let your light shine. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Author Audience. I would like to invite you to attend one of my free trainings all about how to sell more books without being pushy or self promotional. It's called amplify your message. Plus I will give you two free gifts just for attending. No credit card required. First you'll get my best selling book 9 Strategies to Build and Grow youw Author Platform and you'll also get my ebook titled List Vend 5 powerful emails you can use immediately to grow your business. These are basically fill in the blank style templates and they are yours at no charge when you join us for the training. You can sign up for my free training by going to ShellyHits.

Amplify. That's shellyhitz.coms h e L L E Y h I t z.com amplify this training and the two bonus ebooks are free and I would love to help you sell more books.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.