So you want to write a book — a BEST SELLING BOOK, but what’s the truth about becoming a best selling author? Is it all glitter and roses? Do you just kick up your feet and count the money and TV appearances rolling in afterwards? You’ve probably seen some entrepreneurs succeed with their book and others have books that collect dust. What’s the difference?
I have to admit I was naive with my first book. I thought I would write it and BAM, all sorts of wonderful things would happen on its own. Boy was I sorely disappointed, but it turned into a great learning experience.
Now I can tell you the truth about becoming a best selling author from struggling with that first book to today having 10 best selling books and having helped nearly 100 others get to best seller too.
What a Best Selling Book WILL NOT do for you
Table of Contents
1. Continue to Sell Your Book on its Own
Nope. Sorry Charlie. You have to continue to promote your book if you want it to keep selling. Your book can’t grow legs and go promote itself. It’s also a marketing tool for your business. Just like a hammer is a tool that can’t build a house without your getting involved, your book can’t do anything on it’s own. It needs your help — it needs a strategy (see number 4 below) to keep selling.
I share 2 Big Book Writing Myths That Will Keep You From Achieving Big Profits in an article I wrote for entrepreneur.com.
Now you know to think beyond your book launch to what you’ll do after you hit that Best Seller status. How are you going to use your book in your business?
2. Have Oprah Call You
Ha. I wish. A small percentage of people are discovered because of their book. Most of the time it’s the other way around. People write books, then become well-known because they leverage their book. If you ask most people who seem to have just popped up, they were likely discovered because they got out there and took the steps to make their discovery happen.
3. Allow You to Live Off of Book Sales
Few authors can live off of royalties along. Besides, your main gig is being an entrepreneur, right? If you’re not sure if you’re an author-author or an author-entrepreneur, I help you distinguish the difference here. The fact of the matter is that most authors sell about 250 copies of their book in the first year and about 3000 in the lifetime of their book. Even if your royalties were high at $10 per book, you can’t even keep the lights on at your house for that.
There are more lies about becoming a best seller in an article I wrote here.
What a Best Selling Book WILL do for you
1. More Highly Regarded than “Doctor”
After you become a best selling author, you’ll instantly have credibility and expert status.
When polled, people said that they regarded best selling authors with expertise higher than a doctor. In fact, one of my clients who wrote and launched his book to best seller in 90 days after struggling for 10 years to get it done said he was surprised at how people looked at him differently once he became a best selling author. It was an added bonus he didn’t realize he was going to get. Plus, conference and event coordinators love to book best selling authors for their events!
2. Open the Doors of Opportunity
If you want to get speaking gigs, get featured online, be invited to podcasts, be interviews and even be on television, having a book can hep you do that. If you’re thinking about doing a book tour along with your speaking gigs, make sure you do the revamped strategy for maximum impact and profits.
Need help preparing for your speech? Check out: How to Prepare for a Speech: 7 Important Tips to Make Your Speeches More Effective
3. Saves You Time
This one might come as a surprise because most people complain that they don’t have the time to write their book.
The content from your book should be doing double duty in your social media posts, your email newsletters, your blog posts, guest articles, interview topics, livestreams, YouTube videos and more. Many people think that writing their book is going to take a lot of extra time but the topics and subtopics in your book are the exact things you should be using in your marketing.
It might take a little extra time initially to write the entire book, but the truth about becoming a best selling author is that it will save you time. Any day you are at a loss for what to share with your audience, just open your best selling book to any page and grab your idea from there.
4. Give You a Strategy to Automate Getting Clients
What’s the key to getting consistent book sales that lead to consistent clients? Automating the process so that you can make money while you sleep. Once I created a funnel with a series of nurture emails that could set up appointments for me and automatically take payments for products that didn’t require a sales call, I got emails notifying me when sales came in. I could go on vacation and come home to appointments set up.
Here’s a 5-step strategy — How to Get Clients from Your Book
Your best selling book, written correctly with the proper seeding for marketing, can sell your reader into your program without little extra effort on your part for years to come. It’s a way to get in front of more people than you could if you tried to talk to them one at a time. You also get to impact and change the lives of people all around the world — people you wouldn’t have had the opportunity to talk to otherwise.
What did you learn about becoming a best selling author? Comment below!
Vickie Gould is a book coach, content marketing strategist, best selling author, and speaker. She believes that everyone has a story to share and a journey orchestrated for their positive growth — and that those experiences should be written in a best selling book.
Vickie helps entrepreneurs to share their stories, self-publish and leverage their own business books, grow their following, create more impact and turn readers into clients through her Easy Writer Program, one-on-one coaching and her free Facebook Group, Write Your Biz Book.
She has written 10 best sellers such as Easy Writer (named after her signature program) and Standing in the Gap, and helped nearly 100 others to become best selling authors as well.
