The challenge of getting people to buy your book!

Make Easy Money with Google has been out for a bit more than a month now, but I think it's still trying to find its way to its audience. Let me tell you, the hard part about writing a book isn't writing it, it's getting people to buy it! Seth Godin, author of various business bestsellers like Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable talks about this in his recent Advice for authors blog entry. There's a lot of truth in what he says. I especially like his third point, there is no such thing as an effective book promotion by a book publisher, because it's true: most publishers simply have too many books in print to devote more than a small micropercentage of their time and effort to promoting all but the “blockbuster” hits (think Harry Potter and various other books by big-name authors). For a book to sell, the author has to actively promote it.

This, of course, is where many authors fall flat on their face. Selling is an art, and few people are truly good at it. Those who are can make a phenomenal living selling just about anything, it seems. If you know me, you know that selling is not my strong point. And, according to Seth, I shouldn't even have bothered to write the book because I don't have a “permission base” of thousands of people hanging onto my every word. How depressing!

Well, not every book is going to sell millions of copies. I've been lucky to have written a book that has obviously helped others already, and that makes me very happy. If you've bought the book, I thank you, and I'd love to hear what you have to say about it. There's a good selection of (mostly positive!) reviews up on Amazon now, but feel free to add your own observations and comments there as well.

Of course, I wouldn't mind it if you told your friends about the book, too. Positive word-of-mouth is always the best publicity. Despite what you might think, this is a book for a non-technical crowd. Retirees, stay-at-home parents, students — anyone looking to do something on the Web and maybe making a bit of money at it will find it useful.

And if you're walking by a bookstore… Every time I visit a Chapters or Indigo store (I live in Canada — think Borders or Barnes & Noble if you're in the United States) I make sure to find the copies they have of my book (it's unfortunately on the E-Commerce shelf of the Business section, not the best placement) and make sure they face out so that the catchy cover gets seen. I even try to get the store to put the book out on one of the tables, though in reality most of those spots (you probably didn't realize this) are actually paid for by publishers in order to promote specific books, so that's not always possible. But I can't possibly visit every bookstore, so feel free to do the same at your favorite bookstore!

Alright, enough selling. I'd love to get the book featured on Oprah, but there's no angst in it, so I doubt that will happen. The book will have to succeed on its own merits. Just like most things.

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