How to sell your book faster Part 2

Selling books is not easy even for famous authors. If you ask them, they’d tell you they know their books can perform more than it ever did.

If your market now happens to be Nigeria, you know you’re in for hard work!

So I will now share this additional tip to selling more:

Promote, promote, promote and then promote again.
Believe me, strategy is key to promotion. When I went on radio about my book, I recorded sales directly linked to that event. It was more like a trial for me. When my wife went on TV, she started getting orders immediately. She ran out of hard copies and had to order another. Now this is mostly from people who had known about the book but for reasons I can’t explain, didn’t buy. Many new contacts also came along. What promotion does is that it brings you or your product to the fore of other competing thoughts.

Humans especially Nigerians have many concerns, if your book must feature prominently on their minds, you must be seen and heard, repeatedly.

Now, using traditional media is a fantastic way to promote your book. New media is awesome, it just appears so noisy now, we need to do some traditional media to stand out.

In promotion, one thing I learned from foreign book promotions is: they never seem to stop promoting.

I bought an e-book on music production last weekend which I’d been seeing the ad on Instagram and Facebook for more than 3 months now. I don’t know what their ROI is but those guys are tenacious. You may not have the financial capacity to run many months but a portion of each sales you make can be ploughed back into ads.

You’ve not started selling till strangers and unknown people start buying your book!

Never stop promoting!Use (non-crappy, authentic) testimonials.

I experienced an upward surge in book sales when I was promoting my book in a certain community with testimonials of people others knew within that same community.

So, this is what happened. I got some of them to read, some bought, others for free, and got them to send in their true feelings about the book. Believe me, I got more sales from that community just because they recognise the names.

The crappy testimonial:
I saw a weight loss programme ad and decided to check it up. As interesting as that product could be, the testimonial appeared doctored, the person speaking appeared to be under duress. In the end, as far as I was concerned, it was crappy and I refused to give it any shot whatsoever!