How To Launch And Promote Your Own Business Book

The Concept

The original concept for Proposal Development Secrets: Win More, Work Smarter, and Get Home on Time was to determine whether a low-cost e-book aimed at the A/E/C industry would outperform a higher cost book by testing it.

I knew a similar niche business book priced over $20 could reasonably sell one copy per day. I surmised one $20 copy per day could amount to $70 per week. Could you generate more revenue with one priced at $3.99? My hypothesis was you could because the lower price may increase demand enough to outperform the higher-priced book.

I saw it as the classic price elasticity of demand question. How much greater would the demand be at a lower price? As I explained to Mark Buckshon, whose experience with his Construction Marketing Ideas book served as an inspiration, I wanted the book to be an impulse buy. Naturally, he thought I was crazy. But that?s the idea I decided to test.

So, I had a question I wanted to answer. I formed a hypothesis. Now, I had to put the pieces into place so I could test it.

Defining The Audience

Here?s where we switch back to Mind Marketing. You can?t create a need. Either the need is there or it isn?t. For example, you wouldn?t be very successful at selling snowboards to elderly women. I?m sure there are one or two elderly women that really shred, but there is not enough of a market there to make it worth your while. So, first I had to define a target market that had a need. Therefore, the book was written for a very specific audience: marketing/proposal coordinators in the A/E/C industry. I feel I know how that audience thinks, having first hand experience of being ?one of them? and managing them.

When you think about the thousands of A/E/C firms out there, there are clearly thousands of people who

You?ll also notice that my book starts out explaining whom it is intended for. This was deliberate. It defines, for me and the audience, what this book was to be and who the buyer was.

Giving The Audience What They Want

Like I mentioned, you can?t create a need. The need is already there. So, once you?ve defined the audience you have to figure out what their need is. You are selling the solution to their need/problem/challenge.

Covers sell books. So, it?s very important to create a cover that will make people want the book. The title of the book is an important part of the cover. This is where you say, ?hey, you have a need and the solution is in here.?

I knew the book was going to be about proposals, but I didn?t have a name for it. I decided to focus on what I believe the audience needed. I came up with several titles and tested them with a few people (refer back to the scientific method). The winner was Proposal Development Secrets: Win More, Work Smarter, and Get Home on Time.

I thought early on that the one thing marketing coordinators want more than anything else is simply to ?get home on time.? ?Win more and work smarter? are really ancillary concepts. They are just there so it?s not disgustingly obvious what I?m selling. Just imagine what the boss would say if you were reading a book simply titled: ?Proposal Development: Get Home on Time.? You?d have to read that book in secret.

Choosing The Cover

One of the things I knew about the audience was that it would be predominantly female. Therefore, I needed an image of a female on the cover. I needed the image of someone the audience could see themselves as.

Another aspect of the audience was they would be younger, more junior, marketers.

Since ?get home on time? was the theme, the cover image had to convey this concept. I was lucky enough to find a picture of two young business people lying in the grass. Obviously, they?ve done their work and are now relaxing. I bought the rights to use this photo from iStockphoto.com.

So, the first thing you see on the cover is a woman. Then you see the title.

The Hype

Before I announced the book, I wrote a few posts about an exciting announcement. Even though my audience is not huge (by blogging standards), getting people excited always helps. I was using the knowledge gap to get people curious about the book.

Also, a few bloggers and trusted friends had seen the book before hand and knew it was coming out. And they were more than happy to mention the book as it came out.

Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing

I decided to publish the eBook exclusively through the Amazon Kindle Store because:

1. It was easier

2. I got a 70% royalty rate, meaning I got about $2.78 for each book sold.

In addition, publishing the Kindle book cost pretty much nothing but my time. Publishing a paperback will at least set you back a couple hundred bucks (after all is said and done).

The Secret Release

This exclusive arrangement with Amazon also allowed me to give the book away for five days. I opted to give it away for three, letting my subscribers know only after the first day had passed. So, my subscribers had two days to grab the book. Many of them did. Giving your product away to your most likely buyers sounds insane. But this helps in two ways. First, I like to reward my subscribers by getting them exclusive and free stuff (here is the link if you want in). Second, because they received the book as a gift, they were much more likely to reciprocate the favor by posting a review on Amazon. In addition, since they like my writing, it was reasonable to believe they would enjoy the book.

This approach provided the ?social proof? needed to launch the book. Those initial ?sales? convinced others to buy the book in the initial week. This social proof was elevated by several positive reviews the book got from readers who had received a free copy.

After the book went from free to paid, it shot up to the #8 best selling marketing book in the Kindle Store (it later reached #7 with the paperback). This was quite a surprise to me. I was outselling most of the top business authors.

What I learned afterwards is you don?t have to sell a lot of books to outsell top authors. Think about this, let?s compare book sales to CD sales (which we hear on the news is a dying industry). How To Win Friends and Influence People was published in 1936 and has sold 15 million copies. Michael Jackson?s Thriller was released in 1982 and has sold 65 million copies. Ace of Base, Usher, Iron Butterfly, and many others outsell Dale Carnegie by a lot! One of the most popular, if not the most popular, business books of all time sold little more than 100,000 copies a year. Proposal Development Secrets: Win More, Work Smarter, and Get Home on Time sold 3,000 in a year. In addition, Amazon recalculates their top sellers every hour. It also highlights the new books that are ?hot sellers? (i.e. moving up the charts). With the right launch and the right book, getting in Amazon?s top 10 is not an insurmountable task.

The entire first month after the launch, I was selling around four books per day. That?s about $10 per day, roughly equivalent to my baseline of $70 per week.

My Conclusion

I had tested my hypothesis and I thought I had proved a low priced eBook could at least match the performance of a paperback. Boy, was I wrong. But more on that in part 2.

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Source: http://www.helpeverybodyeveryday.com/marketing-101/1633-how-to-launch-and-promote-your-own-business-book

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