By Books Author Denise Turney

What do you think about this? On average, you have anywhere from 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts a day.¹ That’s a lot of thinking! If you’ve recalled your dreams, you’ve experienced your mind thinking while you’re sleeping, which brings up an important fact.

What Never Stops Thinking

Your mind never stops! Even more, what you think creates situations. Continual thoughts influence how you feel and what you think about yourself and your environment. Your thoughts are powerful!

During a day, you might think about a project you’re working on, a community event you’re interested in attending, how your body looks or feels, a relationship, your finances and what you’re going to do over the weekend. Furthermore and although you might not consider it, there’s something you think about a lot and it’s having a huge impact.

Can you guess what it is?

It’s YOU!

How Long Have You Been Wrongly Judged?

Many of the thoughts you have regard YOU at some level, in some way. This means that what you think about yourself is absolutely critical. It impacts everything you feel, do, talk yourself in or out of, believe and more.

If you’ve spent years striving to achieve a goal only to consistently face a seemingly impenetrable wall, your perceptions about YOU could be what’s actually creating the wall. How you see yourself can empower you or rob you of goodness.

Here’s a test. Take a few minutes to reflect on situations and people who you feel happy, safe and loved around. Could be a loving parent, a trustworthy friend, a pet, a certain holiday or a favorite vacation spot.

Is The Thought Door Opening or Closing You to Good?

Are there certain words or phrases that spring to mind when you reflect on these people and situations? For instance, do these descriptors pop up:

• She’s such a good friend
• I can always rely on him
• That’s got to be one of the most beautiful places on earth
• It’s so much fun attending those events
• As long as I’ve had my pet dog, she’s been loyal and so loving

Regardless of how busy your schedule or how fatigued you are, there probably isn’t much resistance when it comes to thinking about being in those situations or with those people or pets. The door is always open.

Do the opposite. Reflect on people and situations that you experience fear-based emotions (i.e. anger, disappointment, anxiety, frustration) when you are around them. Again, this could be a neighboring bully, supervisor who enjoys criticizing you, violent ex-partner, a house that keeps breaking down or a computer that regularly stalls, causing you to lose valuable data.

Linking Thoughts and Emotions

Which descriptors automatically surface in your mind when you’re around these people or are in these situations? Are any of these familiar:

• Never should have bought this house. It’s nothing but trouble.
• This is the last time I’m eating at this restaurant. The service and the food are bad.
• She can’t stand me. Being mean to me brings her joy.
• He’s so unpredictable; he scares me.
• If I had the money, I’d swap this computer out for another one.

Focusing on the above phrases and descriptors, how do you feel? Do you feel like you can trust these people and situations? Furthermore, does life feel good and open to you when you simply think about these people and these situations?

Uncovering Hidden Sabotaging Thoughts

Believe it or not, you’ve probably felt and thought a range of both about yourself. Hiding judgments and perceptions about yourself doesn’t clear out the perceptions and judgments. It just pushes them down, out of conscious mind, and far enough away so you get lost as it regards knowing why you feel the way you do and why you stop yourself from living fully.

To live more fully, pay attention to what you think about YOU.

Simply notice what you think about yourself. Easy ways to do this are to:

• Write in a journal (do this daily or 3 to 5 times a week)
• Type the first thought that pops into your mind in to a spreadsheet when you waken (you’ll start to notice repetitive thoughts and might start to see how those thoughts link to your emotions)
• Sit still in the morning and before you go to bed and just watch thoughts pass like clouds across your mind

Promise Yourself

Beyond noticing what you think about yourself, commit to love yourself. Back to a good friend and situations that cause you to feel joy, peace and safe — start talking to and about yourself in ways that empower you, that help you open to more good. Be a good friend to YOU!

Why is this important?

What you think about yourself builds your self-identity. A strong, love-based self-identity offers the courage to go after what you really want. Additionally, a strong, love-based self-identity lets you know you can overcome challenges, get through trying situations while walking in peace and shift into higher levels of living.

Forbes shares that, “Having a solid sense of self is essential to your overall well-being, mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health – fueling your recognition of your worth.”² The periodical goes on to say, “Lacking a strong sense of self can make it hard to know what you want – forging feelings of uncertainty or indecisiveness for important decisions.”

Thoughts and Your Self-Identity

Self-identity keeps you stuck or it can set you free. For example, if you see yourself as an impatient truck driver who should be thankful to simply have a job that pays the bills, you might never become a patient, caring chiropractor, even if that’s what you truly want to do.

The way you see yourself (what you think about YOU) determines what you achieve. Whether you live the life you came here to live or not is truly up to you.

It’s been said that nothing changes in your world until you change (on the inside). In fact, there’s a school of thought that the “outer world” is merely a reflection of your inner world. Neville Goddard, Alan Watts, Lisa Nichols, Tony Robbins, Dr. Wayne Dyer and others have shared these truths for years.

Healing Starts with YOU!

Knowing this, the greatest thing you can pull off is to love yourself. See and feel yourself living the life you want. Actually, see yourself doing and being in situations you want to be in now – not seeing yourself more patient, more loving, more courageous, more insightful, etc. in the future, but seeing yourself that way right now.

Sure. It might take a few days, but you should start to feel and see shifts happening on the inside and outside. Keep at it. Seek support through open discussions with trustworthy people who love you, therapy, books, etc.

Loving yourself is very powerful. It’s also the only way to heal.

Resources:

1. https://tlexmindmatters.com/#:~:text=It%20was%20found%20that%20the,thoughts%20as%20the%20day%20before.
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/womensmedia/2022/06/16/heres-how-your-personal-identity-and-sense-of-self-affect-your-growth/?sh=14198feb69bf

By Book Author Denise Turney

The pull you feel – that inner tug moving you toward success may never fully go away. Why? You were born for success. Depending on your childhood, it might have felt natural to approach new tasks as if you were going to succeed.

 As a kid, you might have believed and felt that you’d never fail at anything. That’s why you explored so much, learned as much as you did and flexed your creative muscles. Within six years, you may have learned to roll over, stand on your own, talk, walk, read, run, climb, ride a bike, do a somersault and more. Learning was fun because you just knew that you were going to succeed.

Make Learning Fun Again

Now learning might not be as fun. You’re older and you’ve experienced setbacks, disappointments and, the sting of – failure. What you might not notice is that you’ve likely had more successes, maybe even a lot more successes, than failures, which leads to the first point.

To see how easily it is to open to success, get a sheet of paper or open up a spreadsheet. List successes that you have been a part of over the last year. Let your mind go. Recall as many successes you were involved with as you can. Take your time.

This exercise can help you prove to yourself that success does come easily for you. Stay free of judging the successes, categorizing them as simple or hard. Simply list the successes. If you find the exercise particularly enjoyable, go back two years – revisiting prior achievements.

Come On, Get Curious

Next, step away from the past and get curious about a major success you’d love to achieve – a goal you’d love to manifest in the approaching days. Consider the purpose that’s linked to this specific success. In other words, get clear about why you want to succeed at the goal.

For instance, will achieving the goal help you fulfill a promise you made to your younger self? Will achieving the goal help you strengthen people who are now experiencing a challenge you’ve overcome?

Finding out the purpose (or the why) that’s associated with your goal can prove to be incredibly empowering and motivating. Additionally, it could remove mental barriers you have about you being successful.

Linking Success to Greater Gains

As a start, if you think you don’t deserve to have the success you want, linking the achievement with how it benefits others could send you above the self-judgement barrier. Depending on what you’re aiming to do, you could help military veterans heal from mental injuries. Or you could stop human trafficking in the town where you live.

Regardless of the goal, people are watching you. In tangible and intangible ways, your success will inspire others. In fact, you may never know everyone who your wins will impact.

See if you can think of 50 ways that others would benefit if you achieved the success you want. This short exercise will help you to see how big the impact of your goal is. As you continue doing this exercise, you might increasingly start to see and feel how much good is linked to your success.

Start Taking Action

To recap, remind yourself of how much success you’ve already been a part of. Then, discover the purpose that’s linked to a current goal you have. And see how many ways fulfilling the goal will benefit others.

After this, it’s time to take action. Research what you want to do, looking for shortcuts, ways to save time, money and energy. Also, identify step-by-step actions that you’re going to take to get from where you are now to where you want to be. Write down necessary resources too. These resources might include grants and other funding tools, administrative staff, marketing tools, etc.

After you list the actions and resources you need, take at least one action that you listed. Don’t wait. Take action. Just thinking about what you need to do does not count. Keep at it, action-by-action, until you complete all steps required to fulfill your goal.

Measure the results of each action, identifying where you need to make changes. Stay focused. Steer clear of magical thinking. To stay empowered and motivated as you do the work that gets you closer to your goal, read books, articles and research material about your goal and how your beliefs about your ability to succeed affect outcomes.

By Self Help Books Author Denise Turney

Decision – It’s the one act that’s fueled with power. Regardless of the situation you’re in, you have the power to decide, to choose. Also, whether you recognize (or accept) it, throughout the day you’re making decisions.

Decisions That Are Creating Your Life

The sooner you accept that you are, indeed, developing your own life decision by decision, the sooner you can change your life. Here’s a test. When you wake up, write down your first impulses. It could be the impulse to go to the bathroom, revisit an emotional experience from the previous day, exercise, check your mobile device or eat or drink.

Years could pass before you clearly recognize that you are choosing to have these impulses, and not only that, but that you’re choosing to have these impulses when you experience them. Fortunately, your desire to own the power of a single decision is enough to motivate you to focus until you become aware of the choices you make.

How Do You Feel When You Wake Up?

Those studying the empirical sciences, pioneers¹ like Sigmund Freud, John Henry Brodhead, Ivan Pavlov, B.F. Skinner and Mamie Phipps Clark, discovered some of the mind’s power, particularly regarding the power of the unconscious mind. Discoveries of how the unconscious mind functions pulled a thick cover away from the ability to understand oneself and each other.

Before you continue, it might be beneficial to learn more about your subconscious. Why? The mind never stops. Even as you sleep, it’s working.

Which is why you wake up feeling different emotions. Depending on what your subconscious focuses on as you sleep, you may wake up feeling energized, hopeful, loved, confident, depressed, angry, unloved or afraid.

Good-Bye Past

Here’s the thing. Past experiences and memories are huge reservoirs that the subconscious taps into to make present-day decisions. Well shares that the subconscious “keeps your experiences, concepts, insights, and perceptions long after your conscious mind has forgotten them. From here come the feelings and notions that rule your conscious self, behaviors, habits, decision-making, and mindset.”²

Sure. This brain functioning removes a lot of work from your conscious. It also puts you on autopilot, which goes back to early impulses you feel when you wake up.

Pay attention and you’ll see that your life experiences as well as emotions you feel – repeat.

Becoming Aware of Patterns and Repetition

If you’re serious about awakening and experiencing the power of a conscious decision, you might find it helpful to write down the first thoughts and feelings you have when you wake up. A simple journal is enough to jot down the thoughts and feelings.

Do it for a month and see if you don’t spot patterns, repetition. Also, write down your night dreams. After all, it’s during night dreams that your subconscious speaks. You might be tempted to think that dreams, thoughts and impulses are coming from outside you.

They aren’t. Instead, they are coming from a part of you that you have disassociated from. Now you don’t recognize it, but your lack of recognition or willingness to accept what you’re doing doesn’t stop the whole mind from putting the power of a single decision into action.

And not just once or twice – but hundreds or more times every single day.

Oh. The power of a single decision.

What Is Your Mind Doing?

Because the mind is split, you’ll have to find ways to become aware of what your whole mind is doing. This can allow you to make better decisions, the type of decisions that develop the life you want, a life filled with joy and peace.

In addition to writing down your first thoughts and emotions when you wake up and writing down your dreams, to become aware of what your whole mind is doing:

• Write down repetitive actions, thoughts and emotions you experience during the day and before you go to bed. Simple journaling could reveal a lot of this.
• Be honest with yourself. Refuse to lie to yourself.
• Let the idea that sacrifice is good – go. Just let it go.
• Say good-bye to repression. When you repress thoughts and feelings, you hide things from yourself. What you hide is still at work in your subconscious. Keep repression and you could enter a state where you engage in behaviors but don’t know why you do what you do. Speaking is behavior. What you choose to say is behavior.
• Speak positive affirmations throughout the day to reprogram your mind. The more emotion that’s attached to the affirmations, the better. Creating your own positive affirmations could also be more effective than reciting affirmations someone else made.

How To Start Thinking Differently

Here are more actions you could incorporate into your day to become aware of how your mind works. Even more, these actions could help you reprogram your mind so that what you think is increasingly beneficial:

• Visualize yourself experiencing the good that you want. Daydreaming doesn’t count. Use your conscious mind to visually experience what you want to happen. Be diligent and persistent. However, don’t press. Stop should feel anxious, fearful or discouraged.
• Breathe deeply one to three times a day. Simply stop and take in and release 10 deep breaths one to three times a day.
• Engage in three love-rooted activities that cause you to feel joy and peace, a welcomed lightheartedness, every day.
• Try a new approach, activity or path at least once a week. Again, pause or stop should you feel fearful, anxious, pressured or discouraged.
• Read about people or talk with people who changed their lives in good ways. This will build your memory bank with “real” life experiences that show the power of a single decision.

The Power of a Single Decision

The power of a single decision might be realized with just one thought. Depending on how your mind functions and your programming, it could take weeks, months or years of decisioning to experience a major shift.

Time doesn’t diminish the power of a single decision. To gain more from a decision, take smart actions. It’s like rubbing sticks together to start a fire.

As you start to experience the power of a single decision, you’ll see the importance of desire. Plainly stated, if you don’t really want what you have decided to pursue, you’ll probably quit. Therefore, avoid hiding thoughts, impulses and emotions from your conscious.

Become aware of what you really want.

Continue to discover how your mind functions, your whole mind.

Then, speak love-rooted affirmations, visualize, meditate and journal to reprogram your mind. Keep at it until your thoughts, emotions and impulses change, until your life in this world changes.

Believe it or not, you’ve already done this. Look back and see how much you’ve changed since you were a kid. Those shifts didn’t just happen. Your mind created the change.

You can do it again, changing and improving your life with the power of a single decision.

Resources:

1. History of Psychology – Psychology (wsu.edu)
2. How Your Subconscious Mind Controls Your Behavior (well.org)

By Self-Help Author Denise Turney

When was the last time you promised that you weren’t going to worry? How many weeks or days passed before you broke that promise to yourself? Or did you start worrying after only a matter of minutes, if you lasted that long?

Worrying Health Risks

It’s understandable. You have great intentions. After all, who wants to worry? But why can’t you stop, especially considering the health risks associated with worrying. Among those risks, there’s:

• Mood disorders including depression and anxiety
• Headaches and joint pain
• Sleeplessness that could lead to insomnia
• Restlessness
• Chest pain
• Shortness of breath
• Panic attack
• Nightmares
• Chronic inflammation
• Stomach pain
• Nausea
• Unwanted weight gain or weight loss

Here’s How Worrying Hurts

On top of the above risks, when you invest in worrying, you put yourself at risk of developing unwanted habits. If you’re a habitual worrier, you might already be engaging in one or more of these habits. See how many sounds familiar or resonate with you:

• Automatic negative thoughts
• Inability to concentrate
• Poor relationships
• Overwhelming guilt
• Hopelessness
• Resenting those whose lives “appear” worry-free or “better” than you think your life is
• Struggle to relax and enjoy peace and mental still-ness

Each of these robs you of peace and of the certainty that you are loved. Yet, of them all, the habit of experiencing automatic negative thoughts could be the most devasting.

Bringing the Worry Habit to a Halt

Once you reach this point, your subconscious automatically worries. It’s as if your mind searches for something to feel afraid about. Should you prefer to stay by yourself, avoiding interactions with other people, this could be why.

Interacting with others puts you in position to disagree about other people’s opinions and perceptions. Even more, you might have outright disagreements with a colleague, relative, friend, neighbor, etc. These are a few of the outcomes everyone experiences when they socialize.

However, isolating is not the answer. Pay attention and you’ll see that isolating doesn’t stop you from investing in worry. In fact, if you’re a worrier, you likely spend hours each day worrying, even if you live and work alone.

Someone glances at you, eyebrows raised, and you immediately wonder: “Am I talking too loudly? Is there a stain on my clothes? Do they not like me?” Strangers and friends might produce these types of questions within you.

How Do You Talk to Yourself?

Let dreams and goals get sidetracked or even sidelined and, without searching for the cause of the disruption, you might think: “Am I too dumb to make this work? What if I never figure out how to make this work? Why does success keep escaping me? How come nothing I do turns out right?”

If it’s not that, when you look at your bank statement, a surge of fear might bolt through you even if your savings are rising. Step on the bathroom scale and you might do more than cringe when you see the numbers. You might start working to convince yourself that there’s something wrong with your body, your health or your personality.

All of this worrying and no one else is around. In this case, you could be isolating from others and still worry. It’s a mental habit and you’re the only one who can break it.

The way out is to make a crucial decision once and for all – no going back. Just decide if you’re going to worry or not.

It really is that simple.

Are You a Good Life Manager?

Perhaps it’s time to look at it differently. Instead of simply stressing yourself out. Step back and look at how you treat yourself as if it was someone else forcing you to think, feel and behave the way you do.

For example, bad bosses run people away from an organization more than nearly anything else. A bumper-to-bumper commute, long work hours and challenges take a back seat to a bad boss’ behavior when it comes to deciding if you’re going to stay at a job or leave.

Looking at bad boss traits, how many of these behaviors would you assign to a bad boss:

• Overbearing, rarely offering you the chance to look at a situation differently
• Poor communicator, often keeping secrets about important details
• Making assumptions without asking questions and digging deeper
• Expecting others to see things the way they do (as if everyone is using one brain)
• Pushing team members to overwhelm
• Getting angry when workers chit chat or take a break from work

Do you treat yourself in any of the above ways? Be honest. Do you push or worry yourself into states of overwhelm? How often do you make assumptions, even about yourself, especially negative assumptions?

The Love Shift

Consider shifting gears and treating yourself with respect and with love. Commit to investing in loving YOU. More ways to free yourself of worrying follow:

• Live free of creating catastrophes in your mind. Look back over your life and see if what you worried about didn’t resolve itself without turning into a catastrophe.
• Get up and walk into a different room
• Shift your gaze slowly from one object to another, landing on two to three different objects, until you feel fear decrease
• Walk outside in nature in a safe place at least 45 consecutive minutes a day
• Breath deeply when you feel yourself investing in worry
• Empower yourself with enough deep sleep at night
• Meditate – train your brain to enter states of peace – let yourself enjoy peace
• Perform yoga
• Listen to soothing music
• Accept that you cannot predict or control the future (even if you predict the future “sometimes”, you can’t control everything)
• Write down what you’re choosing to worry about. After you do this, write actions that you will take to deal with the situation. Then, let it go.
• Talk with a friend
• Seek professional help from an experienced, ethical and licensed psychotherapist

What Are You Going to Choose?

More importantly and regardless of the “reason” you’re choosing to worry (i.e., inflation, aging, school grades), decide that you are not going to worry. Just make the decision. Should you feel tempted to worry (engage in an old habit), set a time limit on how long you will worry.

For example, you could choose to worry about a family or work situation for 15 or 30 minutes. At the end of this time period, stop thinking about what has been concerning you.

Just don’t think about it anymore. Start today. Make the choice to live worry free a new, loving habit. Practice awareness to notice when you’re worrying. Catch yourself early and train yourself to stop and think loving thoughts. As previously mentioned, consider writing down what you’re worrying about and the actions you will take to resolve the situation.

This can’t be overstated. You cannot control everything. Not everything is going to turn out the way you want. If you allow conversations, other people’s opinions, thoughts and perceptions and situations to push you into worry, you could end up worrying nearly all the time.

Not investing in worrying is completely up to you. No one can make the decision for you. Choose to love yourself. Train yourself to live worry free. There’s a part of you that knows the way. Let that loving part guide you.

Resources:

1. The Side Effects of Worrying—and What to Do Instead (chopra.com)

By Middle School Book Author Denise Turney

It’s bad enough that kindergarteners and first graders lose about a month of reading comprehension skill during summer. Older kids, as early as the second grade, fall even further behind in reading. Despite how long your child’s summer break is, there could be impact.¹ A sure workaround is to keep kids reading books during summer.

But how do you pull this off?

Reading Books During Summer Benefits

Incorporate reading books during summer into your personal schedule. If this sounds like too much of an ask, settle on stories you love. That or you could read nonfiction books that strengthen your parenting, career or life knowledge and skills.

The more value you associate with reading, the better. For example, the simple act of reading offers a range of benefits², including:

• Enhanced mental focus
• Improved creativity
• Better empathy, which can make your relationships more rewarding
• Deepening knowledge (it’s hard to think of a course that doesn’t rely on a book or some form of written content)
• Strengthens brain network circuits
• Expands vocabulary

Book Reading Advantages

Read books, especially for enjoyment, and you can lower stress. As you continue reading, your children are bound to notice the positive impact that reading for pleasure has on you. That alone could cause them to link reading books to a beneficial activity.

However, your kids probably won’t see the real advantages of reading books during summer if you simply tell them how much they could gain from opening a book. Instead, your kids need to experience the advantages of reading firsthand.

So first you must get your kids to read books outside of school. To do this, make visiting a library or bookstore part of your weekend activities. Set the intention to make choosing books to read fun. Start early, before your kids begin going to school.

Creative Ways to Get Your Kids to Read Books

That shared, the below options can work regardless of your child’s age. Get the most out of these actions by partnering with your kids, working with them to bring each step from concept to practice:

• Consider visiting the library or bookstore after you finish weekend chores. That way, your kids and you may feel more carefree when you head out to pick out books to read.
• Let your kids fill out their own library card application.
• Sign up to attend bookstore reading sessions. Your local bookstore might bring children’s book authors in to read from their bestselling novels. Attend these visits with your kids and your children can walk away with an autographed copy of a popular children’s book.
• Attending author reading sessions also makes it possible for your kids to ask their favorite authors questions about an interesting book character, setting or plot.
• Let your children choose several books they want to read. After all, your children’s taste in books might be different from yours. What you think is a great story might actually bore your young readers.
• Join in the fun. In other words, instead of sending your kids to their room to read books during summer, read a book with your kids. Actually sit and take turns reading a book out loud with your kids.

Fun Places for Book Reading

Where your kids engage with books can make reading a lot of fun. Because books are lightweight, the options are plenty.

When it comes to picking fun places to read, let your imagination soar. For instance, you and your kids could read books:

• In a tent while you’re outdoors camping
• While sitting in a hammock
• On the back porch during a late, hazy summer afternoon
• Next to your kids’ toy box
• On the living room sofa on an early Friday morning on a day you’re on vacation from work
• As you’re swinging on a park swing set

On out-of-town vacations, you can enjoy reading books with your kids while sitting around a hotel pool. As a reminder, don’t hold back. Allow yourself to get creative when it comes to picking places to read books with your kids.

Identify Times to Read Summer Books

To keep kids reading books during summer, set aside a time when you’ll encourage your kids to read. To make it easy, you could ask your children to tell you the title of the fun book they want to read a few minutes before you encourage them to start reading.

If they don’t suggest a book they want to read, select a book on your own. When your children finish reading, ask them interesting questions about the book. This helps to make reading interactive.

Stay free from critiquing your child’s responses to your questions. Make reading books during summer stress free. Soon you’ll learn the types of books that your kids like most.

Another factor you might notice is how vibrant your child’s imagination is. Who knows? One of your kids might be a writer. Give them several more years and you could be reading books they wrote.

What Happens When Kids Love Reading Books

Should your children come to love reading books during summer and year-round, you probably won’t have to encourage them to read anymore. Other takeaways that could surface include:

• Kids knowing which parts of schoolbooks the teacher is likely to focus on during in-class work and on exams
• Ease understanding what you and other people communicate, whether you’re talking or writing
• Clarity when identifying nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, etc.
• Better understanding of sentence structure

Just one summer of book reading and your kids might find it easier to understand and complete their school assignments. This single benefit can increase your children’s confidence, particularly as it regards academics.

More than that, if you make it fun to keep kids reading during summer, you could instill a lifelong passion for book reading in your children. Long term effects could be passed down through generations. And it all starts with a single book.

Resources:

1. What We Know About Summer Learning Loss: An Update | Psychology Today
2. Benefits of Reading Books: For Your Physical and Mental Health (healthline.com)

By Books Author and Podcaster Denise Turney

These 5 clever book marketing techniques help readers discover your titles. You can benefit from the techniques whether you’re a self-published author, bookseller or a literary organization that uses profits from book sales to support those in need.

New Book Marketing Techniques

If you don’t think you need to continue implementing new book marketing techniques, consider these numbers. The first number surprised me:

• About 2 million books are published globally each year. Include self-published books and the number could be around 4 million books each year
• Estimated net revenue from book sales in the U.S. in 2022 was $28.1 billion¹
• Bookstores pulled in about $8.994 billion¹
• 65% of U.S. book buyers purchase books simply to enjoy reading the book¹
• Global trade book sales revenue is estimated to be $78.07 billion, a slight increase over the previous year²
• Print books make up the bulk of the $78.07 billion in revenue, topping $64.35 billion

Most Book Sales

Top genres⁴ that generate the most book sales revenue are:

• Romance³
• Mystery
• Fantasy
• Young Adult
• Children’s Fiction
• Self-Help, Religious, Inspirational
• Biography, Autobiography, Memoir

Write a book in a top selling genre and you could shorten the time it takes to get your book into the hands of 1,000 readers. And it’s this that leads to the first of the five book marketing techniques.

Research Genres First

Research the genre you want to publish a book in. Do this before you write the book and you could save time, not to mention money. Factors to research include:

• Number of books published annually in the genre
• Average sales “per book” generated by the genre (You might have to research this by self-published books, author and books published by the top five publishers, as the numbers will vary by publisher and author.)
• Seasonal peaks – time of year when books in the genre experience the highest sales

Throughout the book marketing process, analytics are your friend. In addition to keeping your from slipping into magical thinking, analytics can point you in the direction that you should go.

First Two Book Marketing Techniques

Regarding the above analytics, the 1^st book marketing technique is to publish books one to two months before the genre’s peak buying season. One to two months will give you time to get book reviews, a definite influence on book sales.

The 2^nd book marketing technique piggybacks on the first. Prior to publishing your book, build a launch team. Offer these people a complimentary copy of your book. You can build a launch team by:

• Adding a sign-up form to your official author website
• Offer those who sign up to become a member of your launch team the first copies of your new book
• Send launch team members a non-editable PDF version of your book with copyright protections written on the document (make sure that you file the book with the copyright office before you share it in any form with anyone)

Building Launch Team

Keep in touch with launch team members by adding them to a distribution list. Send them birthday and holiday greetings. Also, send them beta reader copies of your future books, bookmarks, postcards and T-shirts.

When your new book is published (as well as future books), ask these team members to post their honest review of the book, adding valuable commentary to the review. In other words, encourage these readers to do more than just give the book a star rating.

However, don’t stop with seeking book reviews from your launch team. Book reviews are so important that they’ve earned the spot of being the 3^rd book marketing technique.

How to Get Those Book Reviews

Net Galley, discussion forums and social media book groups are places you can turn to in order to get book reviews. More ways to generate book reviews include:

• Gifting friends with a PDF copy of the book, asking them to share an honest review after they finish reading the book
• Requesting members of book clubs you’ve spoken at or are a member of to post an honest review
• Sharing the book with colleagues, again asking them to share an honest review

The 4^th book marketing technique needs to be put in place before your book is published. With this fourth technique, take advantage of print fonts. For example, if you’ve written a children’s book, consider using large fun fonts for your chapter titles.

Choosing Meta Data

Effective fonts can engage readers. After all, many readers enjoy a story from an emotional and visual perspective. The same applies to font size. Avoid using fonts that are too small or too big.

Complete the 5^th book marketing technique by adding the right meta data (keywords and key phrases) to your title. Google keyword planner, Publisher Rocket, Amazon ad keywords, etc. are tools you could use to find keywords and key phrases, also known as meta data, for your book.

While searching for meta data, consider your book’s genre. For instance, if you’ve written a mystery, choose one or more keywords or key phrases that have words like mystery, suspense or thriller in them.

Other factors to consider when selecting meta data to add to your book description follow:

• Time period your book is set in
• Story location
• Popular key character descriptions

Keep Target Audience in Mind

Also, consider the story’s target audience. Are your target readers college students majoring in liberal arts, biology, economics or creative arts?

Or is your target audience middle-aged women who have been married for 10 or more years, have two to three children, posses a college degree or high school diploma and are self-employed? Keep these readers top of mind while looking for the right meta data.

After all, it’s these readers you’re using keywords and key phrases to attract. Once you discover the right meta data, add it to websites you publish your book at. Include meta data in your book title and your book description.

To keep book sales coming in, commit to marketing and promoting your titles indefinitely. If you do, older titles you publish could sell for decades. Also, keep writing and publishing new books. There’s little like a new book to build interest in your backlist.

Resources:

1. U.S. Book Industry – statistics & facts | Statista
2. Global Book Sales Statistics – WordsRated
3. 23 Gripping Book Industry Statistics [2023]: Average Book Sales Over Time And By Genre – Zippia
4. 30 Book Genres (List of fiction and nonfiction categories to know) (authority.pub)

By Books Author Denise Turney

If you live in a modern society, you’ll likely experience a mental money attachment when you think about success. Taking the leap from where you are to the success you want might seem easy if you already have lots of disposable income. On the other hand, if money feels tight for you, there could be work ahead if you want to move from where you are to where you want to be.

Important Success Tools

But here’s the thing. Whether you already have what you believe you need to achieve success from a material perspective or not, to maintain or enlarge success, you’ll need similar (if not the same) tools. It doesn’t matter if you have material resources “at your fingertips now” or not. For instance, to achieve, maintain and grow success, you’ll need:

• Inner vision
• Passion or strong emotion
• Strong desire to achieve the goal (this cannot be overstated – you better really want what you say you want)
• Purpose
• Willingness to continue to learn
• Curiosity
• Commitment
• Determination

In addition to the above, you need a willingness to get started. Believe it or not, at some level, you do have access to what you need to achieve success. However, if you merely research, reflect, wish, pray and hope, you might end up only waiting for the success you say you want to magically show up in your life, seemingly out of nowhere.

If You Want Success, Avoid Self-Rejection

Choose this approach and you might end up feeling frustrated, abandoned — overlooked. Hence, one of the greatest acts that you could take is to go after the good that you want and to, time and again, prove to yourself that you are capable of achieving success, cared for, helped and enough.

Visualize success, actually see yourself experiencing what you believe will cause you to feel ever increasing joy, love and peace. Make this a daily practice. Do it until you are convinced that you’re going to get what you want because you feel a strong attraction to the experience.

Avoid self-rejection or telling yourself reasons why you won’t get what you want. Instead, strengthen your inner vision and desire by thinking of reasons why you “will” receive the success. Then, become curious and consider the “reason” or the “purpose” for why you want what you do.

Curiosity Matters When It Comes to Success

For example, what good could come from books that you write? As a start and depending on what you write, readers of your books could renew their commitment to a worthy project. Readers could also move from feeling dejected to feeling motivated and encouraged. Learning how to perform a task, improve their parenting skills, become a better communicator, repair an appliance, grow their own food, etc. are other rewards that readers could gain from reading books that you write.

Using that example, one purpose for writing for you could be to teach or to educate. Discovering the purpose that’s connected to your success is important. After you make this discovery, you could shift from wanting to achieve your goal to becoming committed to achieving your goal. See a lot of value in the purpose and you could become absolutely determined to achieve success.

This determination can fuel you forward when you feel like quitting. Combined with passion, strong determination can keep you open to change, making you more flexible. You might also have a growing willingness to continue to learn.

Willingness to continue to learn is a must, especially after you achieve success. After all, you’ll need to keep learning to build upon your success. It’s this continual growth that may well prove to be among your biggest and most rewarding successes. But first, you have to get started.

By Books Author Denise Turney

Before Amazon, self-publishing and eBooks took off, sending the popularity of indie books up-up-up, authors I knew wrote and published one to two books a year. Back then, you had to hustle (and I do mean hustle) to sell more indie books. Why was it such a challenge?

Here’s a True Story – You can Sell More Indie Books

Book reviewers, magazine writers, newspaper freelancers and bookstore buyers didn’t want to touch a self-published book. It didn’t matter how well written and edited the book was. An author I knew put her entire life savings into her first book, a story she paid to print herself.

As she told her 12-year-old daughter, she had no choice but to hustle and sell the book. There was nothing to fall back on financially. Not only did she post flyers around the city in good weather as well as in rain and snow, she repeatedly visited a local major bookseller, telling them about her book, asking them to carry her book.

At one point, a clerk at the bookstore asked her not to return. She didn’t listen (good for her). Tenacity, persistence and belief in her novel paid off. Did it ever! After several weeks, the book started to sell – really sell. That bookstore that told her not to come back ended up asking her what they needed to do to carry her novel.

Making the New York Times Bestseller List

That indie book landed on the New York Times bestseller list. And this leads to the first proven way to sell more indie books.

Develop a book selling strategy and stick to it. This doesn’t mean that you never change prospects or influencers to help you connect with book buyers. Instead, it means that you actually sit down and write out a marketing strategy. This is not the time for wishing, hoping and engaging in guesswork.

Research your book’s target audience, where these readers shop, seek entertainment, dine and explore. Examples of this include fashion stores, sporting events, local restaurants, nearby colleges and area museums. Use this information to determine the best places to put your indie books. After you gain the facility owner’s permission, hang flyers, leave bookmarks, free book excerpts and postcards in these places.

Also, research competitive prices for the type of book you wrote and will publish. Whether you publish your book through Barnes & Noble, Ingram Spark, Lulu, Amazon, etc., you can raise or lower the price of your book after you publish it. But it’s important that you study the market and set an effective initial price on your book to attract book buyers.

Find Out About Your Book’s Target Audience

Identifying the right target audience and setting the best price on your indie books can pay off hugely. More parts of your book selling strategy could include:

• Days of the week when you’ll write and distribute press releases. No worries if you’re not an experienced press release writer. Not only can you learn to write effective releases, you could hire someone to write your press releases at places like Fiverr, Upwork and Freelancer.
• Specific book fairs and trade shows you’ll attend. Register to attend these events, budgeting for travel and registration fees as part of your book marketing budget.
• Select three to four social media platforms to share details about your book on. Details that you could share include images of your book cover, facts about your book’s characters, great book reviews your story has received, etc. Post about your book on these social media platforms one to two times a day. Diversify what you post, covering images, videos and purchase links.

Actions that you could add to your strategy can grow. The more you learn about the book industry, the more actions you’ll likely incorporate into your strategy.

Foundational Book Marketing Actions

Just remember to stick to the foundational actions that are part of your book marketing strategy. Furthermore, measure the results of your efforts. As an example, use a spreadsheet to track how many books you sell after you distribute a press release or post a video of your indie books on social media.

What you see on this spreadsheet can help you know which days and times are best to distribute press releases, post to social media, send literary newsletters, etc. For this reason, pay attention to the data that you collect.

Who knows? One day, you could use data to decide whether to start your own book marketing business, potentially increasing the income that you generate while working in the book business.

Data is a must while implementing the second way to sell more indie books. It’s a must because, absent the right data, you could spend more money than you might recoup. And what is the second way to sell more indie books?

About Advertising Your Indie Books for Sells

Advertise your indie books. However, don’t simply take out ads, invest in ads that reach your target audience. Another thing – before you take out ads, learn about the ad platform. Learn how the ads work. For instance, are the ads pay-per-click or are you paying for a certain number of impressions. If you pay for impressions, you’re paying to show your book cover to readers.

With pay-per-click ads, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Definitely run ads when your indie books are released. Consider starting with low-cost ads. Even if you take out Amazon ads, start slow. Some ads may take days to produce sells.

To avoid overspending, create a book marketing budget. Stick to this budget. Ad money can spend as quickly as money spent shopping for clothes. Be smart. Start slow, continue to learn about book ad platforms and how to get the most out of the platforms. Also, try new ad platforms, again moving ahead slowly and smartly. Additionally, don’t get emotionally or psychologically attached to ads. Stop ads that aren’t working. Reduce and increase ads as needed.

More Book Sales Efforts

Set a clear goal. This is important. Rather than hoping that you sell a lot of books, determine how many books you’re going to sell each week or each month. This is something that I learned after years of writing and selling books. Hopefully, this tip saves you decades of learning and loads of money.

When you set a clear goal, you take actions that move you closer to fulfilling that goal. The pursuit is no longer vague. You know exactly what you want. Because of this, you pay attention to what you’re doing that’s working. And it becomes easier to alter or stop doing what’s not working.

Depending on how your brain works, you might find it beneficial to write your goal down and leave it close to your computer. I leave my goal on the edge of my computer and on my refrigerator. Continue to hit your goal and you might be surprised to see how easily you start selling more books. There really is something to be said for having a clear goal and working to achieve this goal. A goal is a great and effective target.

You Can Sell More Indie Books

We’re going above three ways to sell more indie books, but here goes. To sell more indie books, carry your books with you. Keep a copy in your purse, bookbag, vehicle, etc. Regarding keeping books in a vehicle, here’s a valuable tip. Store your books in a waterproof container. Do this whether you keep your books in the trunk of your vehicle, your garage, basement or in a closet.

These are a few ways to sell more indie books. Actions you could take to increase your book sales are varied and long. One of the best ways to sell more books is to keep improving as an author. Strengthen your writing, get your books professionally edited, have an attention-grabbing book cover created and write an effective book description. Keep at it. As you do, you’ll discover more ways to market and sell books.