What Makes One Book Outsell Another?

You don't have to leap high buildings to get your book selling well, just follow these eleven tips.1. Write a book that people need and want. People want how-to books; they want skills. Notice the demand today for eBooks. It's best to see the need and fill it rather than have an idea—then look for an audience.2. Nonfiction books sell better than fiction. It makes sense to write and market a non-fiction book such as self-help first. Use your profits to finance your fiction project. 3. Short books in any format, like eBooks, guides or special reports are faster, easier, and cheaper to write than full-length books of 150-300 pages. They can be as short as five pages (special reports), to eBooks that can be five to one hundred pages (even longer). Anna Quinlen’s bestseller contained the number of pages that just one chapter does.4. Women buy far more books than men do, about 75%. If your message benefits women, you'll do well in sales. The Chicken Soup for Women series sold 20 million copies out of 68 million for the total series sold. .5. Image is almost everything. Choose your title with care. Your front cover and title have around four seconds to impress your potential buyer. Be clear, use metaphor and make sure your visuals connect to your title. Elicit an emotion through your title words (preferably five to seven words). What solutions and results does your book promise?6. Expand your book into a series. Think of the huge success of the Chicken Soup Series. They have one "brand" everyone recognizes. A series works well for children’s books, self-help, and even fiction7. Create spin-off products that relate to your book. Some people prefer to learn by listening to an audiotape, or downloading a CD-ROM. I recently bought a serial eBook and loved getting two chapters a week—so easy to digest. These formats can actually help you sell more books. Other spin-offs include coaching, consulting, speaking, seminars, columns, or videos.8. Impress your potential buyer within eight seconds with your back cover copy. At the top put your headline. It must hook your readers, stir up their emotions, and hit their desire. Headlines usually include the number one benefit of your book such as “Imagine Thousands of Readers Buying your Book Next Month.” What benefits does your book offer? Include these through your testimonials from decision makers and the man/woman on the street9. Create your written marketing plan before you finish chapter one. This plan covers your first year's launch period and lifetime plan. The biggest mistake new authors make is that they quit marketing after the initial six months. Word of mouth takes a while. Be patient and market your book for up to three years to get the buzz going.. Another mistake is that inexperienced authors wait until publication before they think of marketing, losing a great deal of sales. Your plan could include how many books you want to sell, your 30 second tell and sell, book reviews, news releases, the articles to market your book, the book signings, talks, electronic newsletters, and a book Web site. Without a written plan, an author creates vague results. 10. Put as much time into marketing as you did the writing of your book. Your goal is to have people read and learn from your unique message. Why plant a garden if you don't harvest it? To finish your book project, write down in your organizers one to three High Level Activites you will do. They can include: reading this book, sending a chapter rough draft to an associate for feedback, or contacting a good bookcoach. 11. Include Web marketing to sell more books. While you can sell your books on other peoples' site, such as Amazon.com or Booklocker.com, you will also will want your own. An author without a Web site is like a person without a name. Put useful information up for your Web visitors—articles, a blog, or past ezines. The more interactive it is and the better the ad copy, the more return visits you'll get. The more visits, the more opportunity for sales.Think beyond the box of traditional book selling and incorporate these ideas into your book marketing plan.

Television or Books

Have you ever put down a good book to watch a TV show? Or did you ever stop watching television to read a good book? Well I never did put down a book for a TV show because I think that a book is way better than a TV show. I do have evidence supporting my statement. A TV and book both affect the viewer or reader physically, academically and mentally which I will be explaining in the upcoming paragraphs. But think about this, there are a people who occasionally blink when they are staring at the television barely inches away from the screen. There are also people who barely even look up when they are reading a book for hours and hours until their neck burn from looking down. Both of these types of people are really into what they are doing, but which one is better and more useful?

Physically, the eye gets damaged when you look at the TV for a longtime. When you look at the TV, you're eyes are straining to catch all the fast motion pictures and send the pictures up to your brain. If you strain too much your vision will start getting blurry Since some TV shows are addicting, it is more likely that you will be staring at the screen for a longer time than you really intended. Above 50% of all people who are wearing contact lenses and glasses are people who watched too much of TV. So your eyes will eventually get damaged if you watch television too much .You will also not be getting enough of fresh air and exercise, because, as I said earlier you will be watching more than you intend to which makes it hard to turn it off and go outside. Things are made even harder when you have to turn off the TV when a good program is going on. If there is not any good program in one channel, it is the other. Unlike TV, when you finish a book, you will most likely close it and go out for the rest of the day and start the next book later. Physical activity is necessary for being healthy, TV makes physical activity less among students making them unhealthy, but books prevent this from occurring. Does books and television just affect the reader or viewer just physically or also academically?

Academically, reading books have a lot of influence in your Language Arts grade. The best part in reading books is that it increases your vocabulary without yourself knowing it. When you read a book you are really into, you will mainly focus on the story more than the structure of sentences, and will eventually start using context clues to figure your way out of the story, which makes your vocabulary grow. Even if you consciously ignore the grammar, your mind will subconsciously take note of it, increasing your proficiency in the language. This happens even when you read leisurely books. Reading informative books help you gain more knowledge than seeing the news on the TV. In the TV the people will just summarize the big idea, just giving you a little knowledge of it, but in books, you can expect it to give you information from head to toe if you know where to look. If you don't get a sentence in a book you can always go back and reread it again, but if you are watching a show in the television, you cannot do that unless you recorded it .You can also never get bored reading a good book again and again but you will eventually get tired of seeing the same episode more than three times. After you finish a good book, you will always wonder if you could also write a book like that. With good proficiency and motivation, it will help you write good essays and short stories with ease. When you look at the television watching the ready-made film, you will not be doing anything, but staring at a screen. A book makes you creative because you are the one imagining the story in your head, but does a book or TV just affect you physically, academically?

Sometimes TV and books also affects you mentally and change the way you think. A book with information on a subject will change your idea on the subject when you finish the book; gaining full knowledge of that subject, but this is not the same with the TV. You may say that you can also learn from the television by watching discovery channel or animal planet, but actually it gives you very less information compared to a book or mostly makes you more confused. A book that you read for hours will be crammed into a half hour show with breaks. How much do you think you will learn? Not much and also, these channels approach a subject with a very fast introduction, which makes it very difficult for the viewer to understand leaving them with wrong information about the subject. TV also sometimes provides viewers with unwanted information in some Ads which maybe inappropriate for children. As I have told you TV is addicting and can sometimes leave the viewer excited, which everyone may have experienced, but if that keeps going on without control, the person who is watching may become uncontrollably addicted to it, and will start concentrating on it more than his or her surrounding. This leads the child getting diverted from his/her academic field to the TV, and the child will only concentrate on that TV show. Because of this TV, the child's test scores will go down, start ignoring homework and the presence of mind of his/her surroundings will go down. If the addiction still goes on, it will make them more miserable by the reasons I stated above. A book does not leave the child like this.

As you see a book is way better than TV and it does not have any negative side affects. Addiction to TV is bad and gives you problems but addiction to books is good because it helps with your academics. Just because books helps you in academics doesn't make it boring, because there are many good books out there if you know what to choose. So books are better than television.

Teaching your Child to Love to Read

Raising a child who loves books can be easy, if you have a plan. However, you must keep in mind that no matter how well you prepare to foster a love of books in your child, other influences may keep her from being a reader. All you can do as a parent is provide the encouragement, but the rest is up to your child. One thing you can do to encourage a love of books is to read to your child from infancy on. This teaches her that reading involves special time with mom and dad. She will associate books with affection, which encourages a sense of security and a love for books as objects that bring security to her. As your child matures and is able to play with toys on her own, provide books that she can touch, chew, and bang around. Even if she ends up destroying them, she will begin to associate books with having fun.Sometimes small children want the same book read repeatedly in the same sitting. As an adult, this may feel like a tedious chore. Do it anyway. Repetitive reading is one of the best ways children learn new words. Do not force your child to listen to a book if she is giving you signals that she would rather do something else. When children are young, reading must be a pleasant experience.As your child begins to read, give her a special place in the house that is her reading corner. It could be a beanbag pillow in her bedroom or a special child-sized rocking chair in the living room. While reading doesn’t have to be done only in this corner, having that special place set aside for reading will make it feel like a special event in her day. Let her choose the reading chair in a special shopping trip with mom or dad.Once your child begins learning how to read, you should still read to her. This will improve her vocabulary as you introduce her to words she has never heard or seen before. Take turns reading paragraphs or sentences to make reading a group effort.If you find that your child does not like to read, you may be tempted to bribe her to read. Avoid this if you can. Bribery does not cultivate a love of books. It teaches your child that reading is something to be endured for a reward. Instead, try to figure out why she doesn’t like to read. Are the books you have offered her boring to her? Does she have a reading disability that needs to be addressed? Does she need glasses? Try to find books that appeal to her, even if they are not topics you are interested in, and read those books with her.Finally, model good reading behavior whenever you can. Your children should see you reading a wide variety of materials. You should read books, magazines, newspapers, and even advertisements. Your child will learn from your example that reading is something to be enjoyed every day of her life.

Self Help Books - Do They Help?

I recall seeing a study somewhere that suggested self help books don't really help. I believe it looked at financial self help books. If I remember correctly, three or ten years after reading various "get rich quick" and other money-related books, the readers were generally making more money, but so was everyone else (on average) that didn't read the books. The conclusion was that the books didn't help.Now that is jumping to conclusions! Consider the assumption implicit in it. Researchers assumed those who didn't read books did nothing special. This seems unlikely, to say the least. From what we see of people, we might wonder if most really want to work on general self development, but we also can see that almost everyone regularly tries to better their financial situation.In other words, people in the control group were doing things other than reading self help books, and those efforts got them further ahead also. Think about this for a moment. How does this show that the books didn't help? It's like "proving" that a car can't get you across the city because walking and biking and taking a bus can also get you there. They are just different ways to the same goal!In other words, the books may have helped (on average), just like the other things people tried. Perhaps people choose the things that work best for them. Based on this hypothesis, a better test might be to have one group choose their self help methods while another is forced to use methods chosen by the researchers. If the first group shows more improvement, it suggests that many methods work, and that each person intuitively knows which will be more helpful.It might show the opposite too. It is difficult to design such research. It is also difficult to have a proper "control," and to start with the best hypothesis. One lesson from this is to be skeptical of research where things are hard to define and measure.Self Help Books Clearly Can HelpThere are those of us who don't need research to prove that a good book can help. We clearly recall a book that changed the course of our lives, or that obviously helped us in our relationships, or even boosted our income. Yes, of course self help books can help us.Now, there is the question of why they don't always help. You may have a friend who has told you all about a great new self help book or theory, yet doesn't seem to be much affected by it in the end. You may have read some books yourself that got you excited, but didn't seem to "stick" in our mind or change your subsequent behavior or life.One reason for this apparent ineffectiveness may be that you need to read each book more than once, and that self help books in general help most if they are read regularly. (It is also possible that the effects of such books can be powerful, yet too subtle to notice right away.)This reminds me of some research on eating I read about once. Researchers had people eat a meal. They then concluded that eating didn't increase the odds of survival, since everyone died of starvation two months later. Okay, I made that up, but do you see the point? Just like you have to eat regularly to get the maximum survival benefit, perhaps you need to get those self help books out again and feed your mind from time to time to get the most out of them.

WHY YOU SHOULD WRITE AN E-BOOK

The buzz in writing circles these days is all about self-publishing e-Books. They hear that e-Books are giving authors that added income in between getting their print books published, but they have lots of questions before taking that first step."How do I make one?""What do I write about?""Does anyone even buy e-Books?"Actually, putting together an e-Book is simple. You write about something you are familiar, put it in a .PDF or .exe file and voila, instant e-Book that you can sell off your website and make a few dollars, or even thousands of dollars depending on your promotional efforts, and you're all set. Or go to www.make-your-ebook-sell.comAuthors and entrepreneurs are doing this all the time and there's no reason why you can't either.The first step is determining what you want to write about, of course, and what your goal is for writing your e-Book.In 2004, I became published in print format for the first time. It was for an anthology of soul mate stories. The main reason I wanted to put this book together was because I had a goal in mind. I wanted to show people who have given up on soul mates that they did indeed exist.After it was published, I started a marketing campaign. I had heard that e-Books were all the rage and that you could make some pretty decent money off of them, so I gave it a try.I started on another book on relationships, but while waiting on this book to be finished (which was taking an incredible amount of time due to research), I decided to try my hand at writing an e-Book and selling it off of my website for added income while I waited on my print book projects to be finished.This e-Book was also centered on the soul mate relationship, which I felt would add to my expertise and would help sell my print books.It worked.Even though I only had the e-Book up on my website and just a few online storefronts, the orders were coming in. You can log on www.ebook-secrets-revealed.com However, I became disillusioned because I didn't just want to sell a few copies; I wanted to sell hundreds or perhaps more.I developed a plan.Not only did I list it with any website that would announce my book, write up press releases and send them to every free press release service out there, and a myriad of other places, but I decided I'd write another e-Book and give it away free to all those who bought my paying e-Book.This e-Book was shorter, but to the point.After I became successful using this promotional device to sell my paying e-Book, I found this experience very rewarding and learned quite a few things in the process: 1.) you do not need a publisher to publish your book.2.) Self-published e-Books DO sell and create that added income while you're waiting for your print books to sell.3.) Writing e-Books help give you expert status.4.) Your e-Books are 100% profit.5.) The more you promote and make you and your e-Book visible, the more income you will make.Writing e-Books and selling them yourself without the middleman - the publisher - is a great way to make money. Turn that "starving writer" moniker into "successful writer" and start cranking out those e-Books. Once you start, you'll wonder why you never thought of this great way of bringing added income into your household before!

Your E-books are not Selling!

Have you written an e-book recently? Do you want to make more money with it? The best way to make more money with your e-book is by selling more copies of your e-book!
If your e-book is not selling as well as you would like (or if it is not selling at all), you are not alone. Every week solopreneurs contact me to ask for help with marketing their e-books. Here are two of the most common stories of e-books not selling:
- A service professional has spent hundreds of hours writing an interesting e-book, had a copywriter create a sales letter for the e-book and put the e-book up for sale on the web site. It has been a year since the e-book was released, and the service professional has sold a grand total of two copies. For more details go to www.ebook-creation-toolkit.com. He has invested a lot of time and money into the e-book and wants to get some return on that investment. What should he do now?
- A coach has seen many of her colleagues release e-books. She decided to do the same thing. She has created an e-book put it up on her web site. She has posted information about the e-book on a few coaching lists, but no one is coming to check out the e-book on her web site. How can she get people to at least come to check out the e-book on her web site?
Does this sound familiar? If your e-books are not selling, you are not alone. Many service professionals have told me that they have spent many hours creating an e-book, only to post it on their web site and find out that it is not selling.
Do you want to know why this is happening and how to prevent this from happening to your e-book? Here is how:
- Your target market may not even be interested in the e-book. Sometimes service professionals are too excited about the idea that they create an e-book without finding out if their target market is interested in buying it.
Remember, your target market must want to buy your e-book in order for the e-book to sell and make you money. Before you invest time and money into an idea, survey your target market and make sure that the topic for your product resonates with your target audience.
- Your e-book is not priced for the target market. This is a common mistake that I see service professionals make. Many service professionals under price their e-books, thinking that they will get more sales by doing this.
Unfortunately, this is not true. Since the e-book has many benefits and a low price, your potential customers doubt that what you are promising them is true. Great benefits and a low price usually sound too good to be true. Therefore, many people just pass on your great offer. Instead, these people buy from someone else who sells their e-books at a higher price.
Many times I have seen that sales of e-books have gone up once the price was increased. Spend some time on researching your product pricing; this is a very crucial part of your overall e-book marketing plan.
- You do not market your product effectively. Many solopreneurs put up a product on their web site and expect it to sell. The truth is that a product will not sell on its own. To have consistent product sales you need to drive web site traffic to your product page every single day.
If you want to earn money with your e-books and teleseminars, make sure that your target market is interested in buying them, price your products correctly and market them effectively.

An Ideal Online Destination of All Book Lovers

Are you an ardent booklover and always looking out for something new? If books are your passion, then Novel Action is your ideal destination. Novel Action is an online book exchange offering a wide selection of books for book lovers. At NovelAction.com, you can easily get used books, and exchange and share your own collection of books with other readers, in the most inexpensive way. You can also gift books for various occasions with their selection of gift baskets and gift certificates. This online exchange provides you with a never-ending supply of books. So why would you pay for books when you can easily access them for about $1 a book?Once you sign up as a member of this online book exchange, you get an unlimited number of book exchanges a full year. Membership is just $ 25/year. Isn't that incredible? Besides this - this is a place through which you can send book gifts to your friends and relatives. The book baskets at Novel Action are a wonderful alternative to traditional flowers or other perishable gift items, because books can last for a lifetime. Membership gift subscriptions offer the book lover a full year subscription at NovelAction.com. This can be your new online book gift shop for any occasion -- Christmas, Birthdays or even retirement parties. Books are arranged in an attractive manner in these gift baskets, along with bookmarks and a personalized gift message. These gift baskets can be the ideal gifts for travelers, vacationers and the retired. The book gift baskets come in large and small sizes, and there are even baskets shaped like baby bassinets and suitcases for greater personalization. These gift baskets are memorable and fun; one of the best mementos you can present your loved ones. You can be assured that your recipient will surely treasure the gift for years to come.Novel Action offers a number of benefits and features for all its members. Book lovers can browse through an incredible collection of hardcover and paperback books. Exchanging books is hassle free and inexpensive, with excellent customer service provided by the Novel Action staff. Once you exchange books at Novel Action you are assured a flat rate of shipping ($ 4.80 for about 12 paperbacks). You also won't have to wait long to receive the books, as Novel Action assures rapid delivery -- within 24 hours of receiving your exchanges. Among other features offered by Novel Action are the custom e-mail alerts that you can receive for specific authors, genres, and books. Book lovers can access all these features with no transaction fees. With Novel Action you just enjoy and read books of your choice that you order from the comfort of your home. If books are your passion and you want to connect and share with other book lovers, then Novel Action is just right for you. Don't forget to see their book gift baskets and gift certificates. Go ahead and be a part of Novel Action!!
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