Hey everyone,
I heard someone complain recently about how no one wants to buy her books. More specifically, this bitchfest revolved around how people email or tweet her to ask for free books when she’s worked years on them on how this is completely unreasonable.
It is.
But so is the bitchfest.
If you want to sell books—and large numbers of them—then you’re going to need to shift your mindset from being an author to being a businessperson, place yourself in your reader’s shoes, and then understand how to talk about your books in a way that appeals to them.
If this writer asked me for advice, I’d have said:
- Sure, it took you years to write the book. That is not the reader’s problem and to be honest, no one gives a damn. In fact, as a reader, often even you don’t give a damn. I picked up a New York Times bestselling novel recently, hated it, and didn’t even finish reading the whole thing. It’s not my problem how long it took the author to write it, it’s my problem whether or not I want to spend my hard-earned money and limited free time on something that I feel gives me enough value, entertainment, information, etc. (Also: Learn to write faster.)
- If someone is reluctant to pay the $2.99 or $9.99 or whatever it costs to buy your book, you have not communicated the value of it properly. Your readers should be thanking you for the low price of your books, not moaning about them. And you can see an example of this in my own reviews—readers frequently tell me what a steal my books are and beg me to release print versions (working on it).
- You’re speaking to the wrong kind of market. I’m going to assume that you’re marketing your books, otherwise this whole conversation is moot anyway. So, how are you talking about them? What kind of people are you speaking to? If you, like me, sell books on freelancing, giving talks to broke college students is a mistake (even though this is widely peddled advice). Because like it or not, the college student would sooner drop £300 on a handbag than £3 on your book. Instead, you should be talking to a ready and willing crowd of writers. Do it online. Offer them actual value and watch your sales grow. This goes for all kinds of books, by the way, including fiction. (It’s only how we define “value” that changes, not the strategy itself.)
Anyway, there’s a whole lot more that I could say about this, but these are the key areas that writers forget and thus lead to lost sales.
They’re super easy to fix, too.
In fact, in the last three months, I have 4-xed my own nonfiction book sales with no paid promotions, no social media, and no front-end selling. I’ll talk more about the strategy of that in a future post, but in the meantime let me remind you that you cannot get to the strategy if your mindset is all screwed up.
Fix the mindset and the strategy will automatically follow.
Cheers,
Natasha