By Books Author Denise Turney

You’re going to have to free yourself of magical thinking if you want to start selling more copies of your books. Why? Wishing that you’d sell more books won’t get you book sales. It’s not enough just to want to sell your books. You have to take smart actions. This might help. Think of selling books as another artform, of sorts, a measurable artform.

Furthermore, selling books is a mix of online and offline marketing and promotion. That is, unless you plan to only focus on selling books through a single retailer like Kobo, Apple Books or Amazon. If you want to go wide, you’ll want to list your books with a wide range of online and offline bookstores and retailers.

Work with Book Distributors to Start Selling More Copies of Your Books

Another action that you’ll want to take is to list your books with a broad range of book distributors. Ingram, Baker and Taylor, Bella Distribution, Heritage Group Distribution, CBL Distribution, Casemate and Publishers Group West are among dozens of book distributors. If you’re new to the book world, distributors get your books to online and offline bookstores and other retailers.

Because of the role that they fill, book distributors are as close to a must as you may get if you want to go wide and start selling more copies of your books. Therefore, entering into a contract with legitimate book distributors is an early step in the book sales process. Want to keep yourself honest? Create a spreadsheet and track which book distributors you contact, including the date and form of outreach (email, telephone, snail mail, etc.) that you use to introduce your books to distributors. Follow-up with distributors you haven’t heard from.

Before you reach out to book distributors, create a marketing strategy. For example, your marketing strategy might highlight social media marketing efforts, including the number of social media followers your literary accounts have. Other items you could include are scheduled book signings, public speaking events, scheduled book club discussions and the numbers of books you’ve already sold.

Although these aren’t part of the 13 easy ways to be start selling more copies of your books, they are keys to early and ongoing book success. For starters, write a great story. If you’re writing nonfiction, do sufficient research and lay discoveries out in an easy-to-understand way.

Due Your Due Diligence

After all, it’s what’s inside the front and back flaps of your book that readers most want. So, nail the book writing part. To ensure that you pull this off, make sure that an experienced and talented book editor reads your manuscript before you publish it. Another tip is to run a spell and grammar check on your manuscript, even before you send it off to a skilled book editor. Working with an editor who is familiar with the type of book you wrote (mystery/suspense, romance, science fiction, etc.) can yields great results.

Next, create an engaging synopsis, book title and book cover. Don’t skimp on these actions. They will play a direct role in your book marketing efforts and your book sales. Here’s another tip that I want to share with you.

Years of book marketing has taught me the importance of researching book editors, book publicity specialists and book marketing services before a deal is inked. The last experience that you want to have is discovering that you just paid two or three times more than you needed to for editing, cover design or book marketing services. You also don’t want to ink a deal with a specialist who does shoddy work.

Hence, do your due diligence. You’ll thank yourself later.

Easy Ways to Start Selling More Copies of Your Books

And, now for those 13 easy ways to start selling more copies of your books. Steps shared in this article deal with promoting a book that you want to market and sell online and offline.

1. Create a website that you’re committed to updating at least weekly – Years ago, you could have simply designed an author website to sell books on and walked away, letting the website pull in book buyers. Those days may be over. To keep your author website relevant, update it no less than once a week. Ways that you could do this are to add a daily writing tip or fact about a character from one of your novels to the author website. Or, you could add a quote from one of your characters to your author website. Just commit to updating a data point at your website once a week or more. And, add strong meta data like targeted keywords to your website.
2. Start a book blog – At this blog, you could write about book conferences, book festivals and book signings that you’ve recently attended or that you’re planning to attend. You could also share insights that are related to your latest book. Another step that you could take is to post feature interviews with other writers at your blog. As with your author website, the point is to keep the blog updated. In fact, you could link your blog to your author website and keep both updated with this one easy step. That’s what I do at chistell.com. This single, easy step pulls in thousands of potential book buyers a week at chistell.com.

Additional Ways to Start Selling More Copies of Your Books

1. Send postcards and direct mail to bookstore buyers – Even further, build relationships with bookstore buyers. These relationships can make it easier for you to get your new books into bookstores months from now. To keep these relationships healthy, consider sending book buyers (including library book buyers) holiday greetings.
2. Reach out to military exchanges through organizations like RangeMe to see if you can sell your books at military stores.
3. Teach a course at a local college. Ask if you can sell and sign your books at the end of the course.
4. Schedule and conduct podcast and radio interviews – Yet don’t just conduct interviews. Make sure that you interview on podcasts and radio stations that pull in your book’s target audience.
5. Design a literary newsletter – Building a newsletter can help you to develop your own mailing list. Consider adding a free newsletter subscription form to your author website. Items to include in your literary newsletter are diverse, ranging from feature author interviews to book reviews to upcoming book events to discounts to holiday messages. Sign up for The Book Lover’s Haven to get a feel for more of what you could do with a literary newsletter.
6. Attend book events – It’s true. You could sell thousands of copies of your books online, without leaving home. However, it’s also true that getting outside and attending book events is a great way to introduce your books to new readers. In fact, you could sell dozens of books at book conferences, book fairs and festivals.

Even More Ways to Gain Book Sales

1. Use Sign-Up Sheets – When you attend book events, bring sign-up sheets with you. Let people know what you’re using the sheets for. As an example, you could use a sign-up sheet to grow your literary newsletter subscriber list. You could also use a sign-up sheet to email in-person event attendees information about your books, including how to order copies of your e-books.
2. Feature your books on book promotion websites. Again, do your due diligence before you pay for services at book promotion websites.
3. Do newsletter cross-promotions with other authors whose books are in the same genre as your books.
4. Newsletter book market services – Pay for newsletter book marketing services. Make sure that you work with newsletters that have a high open-rate. It may not do you much good to pay for an ad in a newsletter that boast 10,000 subscribers but only has a 3% open rate. Also, work with services that have tapped into your book’s target audience.
5. Zone in on Social Media – Just 10 to 15 minutes a day on social media can increase your book sales. Test different social media sites to discover which sites generate the best return for your books. Also, pay attention to what days of the week and times of the day are best to post book marketing material. Examples of this material are book covers, book reviews and book quotes.

Amazon Ads and Selling Books

Other actions that you could take to start selling books are to add your book cover, book title and author website URL to your email signature line. Definitely ask family and friends to tell people they know about your books. Reaching out to school book buyers is another way that you could generate book sales.

If you’re promoting a book that sells on Amazon, consider taking out Amazon ads, namely sponsored product ads. You could also build an Amazon store to introduce your entire line of books to readers. But don’t just start Amazon ads. Budget for the ads. Study relevant keywords. Be patient during this process, as this isn’t a quick process. Take your time and find dozens of relevant keywords. You also might find success with relevant Amazon ad categories.

Stay Motivated

It could take one to three weeks to start seeing results from your ads. So, keep your daily spend low or no more than $5 a day when you start working with ads. Download and review monthly reports until you start to notice which keywords, categories and similar products are working to bring in book sales.

Above all, don’t be dreamy about this. In fact, don’t be dreamy about any part of the book marketing process. It’s work. There’s nothing magical about it. Before long, you’ll witness the link between your efforts and the results that you’re seeing. Should a step not yield good results, consider altering a part of the action or replacing the action (in-store book signings, discussion board link shares, etc.) with another action.

Keep at it. There are readers waiting to read great books!