While books by celebrities are almost sure-sellers, here’s a list we at 9Lives4YourBook have developed for how do other books get sold in the 21^st Century. Books will sell when:

1.  They entertain. Novels and short stories account for new growth in adult readers. Nearly 15 percent of US adults read literature online in 2008, so with the continuing sales of Kindles and the iPad shipping of within weeks, the number of fiction readers will continue to grow.
2. They hit a nerve.  Freakonomics and Tipping Point are two examples. They  capture the reading public’s imagination. Freakonomics makes economics, called “the dismal science, interesting, perhaps because it relates to everyday things people live with or see in the news. Tipping Point similarly demystifies marketing in a readily understandable way. But few publishers can predict when a book will hit a nerve.
3. They address a specific customer base. For example enthusiasts for a less-than-common sport or businesses will pay for high value information not easily available otherwise.
4. You sell them at the back of the room as a speaker or workshop leader. If you get audiences interested, excited, and inspired, they will want to take your message home.
5. You give away a great deal of related content free. Betting that takers will become buyers because a high enough percentage of people will have the ingrained sense of reciprocity and that what they get will be impressive enough, they will want more. For example, best-selling Dummies author Janine Warner finds giving away all manner of templates and other useful items helps her sell training videos on her site –http://digitalfamily.com.
6. You vigorously social market to the point others recommend your book to their friends.
7. You use them to sell another service or product such as consulting and coaching. A book helps establish you as an expert and experts are having a resurgence these days. Edelman’s 2010 Trust Barometer found people are now more willing to pay attention to experts than to friends and peers in Social media sites. You can think of your book as the best business card you can have.

We welcome your ideas and comments and note our new What’s New and Developing page.

Next Week: Tagging – What It Can Do For You

Don’t know how to proceed with a book you have already written or one you plan to write? I can help. You can contact me directly for a free consultation at paul@9lives4yourbook.com.

From conversations with several advertising and marketing experts I respect, I believe there is a way for authors to obtain income even on our pirated books, as long as we own the digital rights to our books. Here’s why.

Your book could well be in the hands of tens of thousands of readers already who might not go into a bookstore any more frequently than they visit a museum.  But from this point on, you can have access to the minds of everyone who downloads your book from a file sharing site. You can upload your own eBooks onto the file sharing sites and take advantage of the opportunity to sell and embed tasteful and useful commercial messages in them.

Your eBook should be preferred by users of these sites because you can provide the most recent versions with a more recent copyright and you can add access to bonus material from you – the author – that pirated versions cannot.  

One choice you have is to sell display advertising directly relevant to your book’s content. Of course, too many display ads can make your book look like a magazine and could turn off some readers, but there are less intrusive ways to embed commercial messages that have minimal risk of offending readers and even may be welcomed by some.  

Think of the product placements you see in movies, video games and on TV.  Correspondingly, wherever a product or service is relevant to the content of your book, you can insert images and hyperlinks to video and audio information. Selling placements like these to a third party who pays you could become a regular source of income for you, perhaps even more than you would have earned in royalties from the sale of your book.

Another way to generate product income is add content to the end of each chapter in which you direct readers  to your own product or service at a moment when readers most apt to be motivated to click a hyperlink or place a phone call.

Crafted and designed well, these types of commercial messages need not look like magazine ads. We at 9Lives4YourBook would be happy to help you explore the potential placements in your eBook as well as guide you in the task of marketing placement opportunities to third parties.

For example, perhaps because of your familiarity with the content, you may already have untapped access to companies related to the content of your book. Since many authors don’t have ready contacts, we project a need for author representatives who will solicit and manage in-book advertising.

Next Week: Are the Publishing Giants Committing Hari Kari?

      And How You Can Win From It

Don’t know how to proceed with a book you have already written or one you plan to write? I can help. You can contact me directly for a free consultation at paul@9lives4yourbook.com.

Several months I read about digital piracy of books in a New York Times article. Concerned I checked to see if our books were on the file sharing sites the article cited. They weren’t. Then earlier this week I ran across a new discussion on the topic  in a LinkedIn group.  So I checked again and saw the following jaw-dropping results on just one of the sites:

 Title                                                                  Users Downloading

Best Home Businesses for the 21st Century - 10800

Changing Directions Without Losing Your Way- 2100

Entrepreneurial Parent - 16500

Finding Your Perfect Work  -  8700

Getting Business to Come to You - 6500

Home Businesses You Can Buy - 5800

Home-based Business for Dummies - 8400

Making Money in Cyberspace - 4800

Making Money with Your Computer at Home -18800

Middle-Class Lifeboat  -  2800

Secrets of Self-Employment – 2500

 Secrets of Successful Self-Employment audio -10300

Sitting with the Enemy - 8200

Teaming Up – 19900

The Best Home Businesses for People 50+  - 1000

The Practical Dreamer’s Handbook – 19900

Why Aren’t You Your Own Boss? - 7700

Working  From Home  -  10500

 This totals 154,500 being downloaded that day. I do not know if these numbers are accurate but checking another file-sharing site, I found similar numbers. Research indicates the “hot spot of piracy is males 18 – 34.” This corresponds with the relatively smaller number of downloads of one our most  recent books, The Best Home Businesses for People 50+.

The print sales of our books come nowhere close to this. Nor do the eBook sales. If royalties were being paid on these downloads at just a penny a book, we’d be earning at least $1545 a day and we’d be writing new books as fervently as we could. But digital piracy yields no royalties or fees are paid to authors or publishers.  

This makes the Google Books actions seem a great deal!

The books are free on these file sharing sites, but sites make money by charging a membership fee. This fee entitles members to download not only books but also software like Dreamweaver and Turbotax, movies including pre-releases,  songs, and games.  Membership fees vary by site, beginning at $4.97. One site offers lifetime access for $26.00. Another offers free updates and new releases for $1.29/month.

Did I download a book? No. I did not want to contribute to sites that disregard with abandon the copyrights and livelihoods of the individuals and companies who create the books, songs, movies, games, and software they use –let alone risk my credit card information on such a site.

And perhaps that’s the hope for authors in the future — for books to be sold like songs are on iTunes. iTunes is able to compete with file sharing sites but sells millions of songs to people who pay 99 cents each for  songs they could download free at a file sharing site. Presumably they do this because they expect both quality and freedom from viruses, but hopefully out of respect for the people who create the work they enjoy.

Sarah’s and my reaction to this wholesale piracy initially was to feel crestfallen, then angry, and then we began think about what tens of thousands of new readers of our books could mean.  Next week I will share the details I’m working out for what we all can do with so many new readers.

I am not naming or providing links to the file sharing sites because I do not want to facilitate more opportunities for digital piracy.  However, if you are an author and want to check whether your book is being downloaded, email me and I will send you the links. Hopefully your books are not there yet.

Next week: Can There Be a Silver Lining in Wholesale Book Piracy?

Don’t know how to proceed with a book you have already written or one you plan to write? I can help. You can contact me directly for a free consultation at paul@9lives4yourbook.com.

Will Amazon’s announcement to pay authors and publishers 70% royalties be a game changer? This royalty is being offered to both publishers and authors  and  if the sales of Amazon’s Kindle continue to grow, what a carrot this will be for authors weary of the woes of p-book publishing.

Under this program, eBooks must be priced between $2.99 and $9.99. So as an author, how will you come out compared to print publishing royalties that range between seven and fifteen percent? Assuming you have a print contract with a ten percent royalty and your book is priced at  at $16.99, you’ll earn $1.70. Under Amazon’s new royalty formula and if the book is priced at $8.99, you will earn $6.25 or three and that’s one-half times more per book.  

What’s the rub? By publishing directly, you forego the services publishers have provided – advances, editing, and marketing. But what is the reality of these authors today?

Except for established best-selling authors, advances are about where they were when we got our first book contract in 1982. For the most part, editing is outsourced and judging from the many books we read, we know even best-sellers are replete with errors that in the past would have been picked up by a developmental or copy editor, or a proofreader.  Whether your book is published by a Big 6 publisher or you do it yourself, you will need to line up your own editing if you want to avoid embarrassing errors. Authors have learned that if their book is to get sold, it’s up to them. The situation in publishing houses has become such that some book agents have begun providing editing and marketing support to their promising authors.

Even before Amazon’s 70% humdinger, some big-name authors like Stephen Covey and Stephen King have been going directly to eBooks.  Will you join them?

Don’t know how to proceed with a book you have already written or one you plan to write? I can help. You can contact me directly for a free consultation at paul@9lives4yourbook.com.

          This winter marks the time when for most book buyers the word book no longer calls up the image of printed sheets of paper bound together. That time is past.  This Christmas day, Amazon, the world’s biggest bookseller sold more eBooks than print books! Print books are now a subcategory in the publishing industry, referred to as p-Books,.

For people like Sarah and I who have written 18 p-books between us, this is time for reminiscing and nostalgia. As a child, I looked admiringly into the Canterbury bookstore window in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, and wished someday that I might write a book that would be on the shelves and in the windows of  stores like Canterbury. So for me, this passage is not just a change in packaging, marketing and pricing, it’s the end of an era that began long before I was born.

This new era promises opportunity and hope for some, perhaps many. To get an eBook to readers no longer requires the intermediaries aspiring authors once needed to navigate. There was a saying that you needed to first please your editor and the sales department, then your readers, and last yourself. Now you only need to please your readers first and foremost as well as yourself. But gone, too, is the financial and marketing support these many intermediaries provided.  To be sure, there will be winners and losers in this transformation.  For newer writers, this is the new normal; for established authors like ourselves we all need to adapt.