Book Selling With Purpose

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You have a dream of becoming a bestselling author. Obviously, you need to start selling your book. What will drive you to put the necessary effort to become a bestselling author is your purpose for selling your book.

In the last post of Selling Your Self-Published Book the DREAMS Cycle ™ Way, we explored the dreams you have regarding selling your book. My dreams for selling my children book Frankenstein’s Science Project were:

• ·         Sell a million copies of my book.
• ·         Become a famous author.
• ·         Do a book tour across the world.
• ·         Get reviewed by newspapers and magazines.
• ·         Get on the New York Times bestseller list.
• ·         Become an Amazon Best Seller.
• ·         Become rich and famous.
• ·         Be interviewed by Oprah.
• ·         Become a bestselling author.
• ·         Get my book transformed into a movie.
• ·         Sign autographs of my book.
• ·         Getting on the cover of a magazine.

We cannot achieve all the dreams we desire, at least not at the same time. The DREAMS Cycle ™ will help narrow down your dreams to the ones that really speak to you. It will also assist in identifying the reasons and the purpose for selling your books. The R in the DREAMS Cycle ™ stands for “Reasons and Reality”. This post will focus on the reasons for wanting to sell your self-published book.

Top three dreams

The list created to identify the dreams for selling your book needs to be whittled down to the top three dreams. This is to focus on the most valuable ones. The first part of this step is to combine the dreams that are similar. For example, “get on top of the NY Times bestseller list”, “become an Amazon Best Seller”, and “become a bestselling author” can be combined into “become a bestselling author”. After going through this part, my updated dreams list looked like this:

• ·         Become a bestselling author.
• ·         Do an international book signing tour.
• ·         Get positive reviews of my books in newspapers, magazines, television, and social media.
• ·         Become rich.
• ·         Get interviewed for newspapers, magazines, television.
• ·         Become famous by having my picture on the cover of magazines.
• ·         Get my book transformed into a movie.

The next step is to pare this down to only three dreams. The process I like to use is to make a star beside the ones that speak to me the most. If I have more than three after the first star, which I always do, then I add an additional star to the ones that are even more important. I keep adding stars until I reach the top three dreams.

From the updated list above, I brought it down to three dreams that excited me:

• ·         Become rich.
• ·         Become a bestselling author.
• ·         Get positive reviews of my books in newspapers, magazines, television and social media.

Reasons for selling your book

Each of your top three dreams needs to be explored further to find out the reasons they appeal to you and are important to you. Out of these reasons will emerge a purpose for selling your book. For each dream, explore why it is important. Here is a list of possible reasons you might want to sell your book:

• ·         To make money
• ·         To meet people
• ·         To travel
• ·         You enjoy selling
• ·         To be recognized
• ·         You want a source of income
• ·         To accomplish something
• ·         To prove something
• ·         To do better than last time
• ·         To be part of a group
• ·         To build your self-esteem
• ·         To live lavishly
• ·         To entertain
• ·         To reach people

The “5 Whys” technique, which is often used in engineering to determine the root cause of a problem, can be used to get to the real reason for wanting to sell your book. You don’t necessarily need 5 Whys to get to the core reason; you just need to ask the “why” question until you run out of answers. Sometimes the answers start diverging or they start to become circular. At that point stop.

This is what the “5 Whys” exercise looked like for me.

Dream #1 - Become rich

• 1.       Why is becoming rich important in selling my book? Because I would like to earn sufficient funds that I don’t have to work.
• 2.       Why do you want to stop working? So that I can spend more time writing.
• 3.       Why do you want to spend more time writing? Because I enjoy writing.
• 4.       Why do you enjoy writing? Because it allows me to be creative and produce something that did not exist before.
• 5.       Why do you want to produce something that did not exist before? Because I want to make a mark in this world.

From this dream, I realized that making money was not the real motivator, but that wanting to make a difference was.

Dream #2 - Become a bestselling author

• 1.       Why do you want to become a bestselling author? To be recognized and to touch many people.
• 2.       Why do you want to be recognized and touch many people? I want people to know that I wrote a book and I want the impact of my writing to be as broad as possible.
• 3.       Why do you want people to know that you wrote a book and why do you want a broad impact? Because I need to get validation that it was worth the effort to write a book and I want to feel worthwhile.
• 4.       Why do you need to get validation that it was worth the effort to write a book and to feel worthwhile? Because I have a limited amount of time to realize accomplishments and I want to spend them on the activities that will make me feel happy.

From this dream, I realized that I want to accomplish something that people will recognize me for and that will make me happy.

Get positive reviews of my books in newspapers, magazines, television and social media

• 1.       Why do you want to get positive reviews? Because I want to know that the book has been enjoyed and has entertained others.
• 2.       Why do you want the book to be enjoyed and to entertain? I want to touch and impact people. I also want validation that I can actually write sufficiently well for people to write positive reviews.
• 3.       Why do you want to touch and impact people? I want to make a difference in people’s lives. I also want to know if I am good enough at writing to continue.
• 4.       Why do you want to make a difference in people’s lives and know that you are good enough at writing? Because I believe it is my duty to leave this world a better place. I also want to know if it is worthwhile to continue writing.

From this dream, I realized that I want to make a mark in this world and that I need to get validation that I can write well enough.

When you put all these reasons together, you create a purpose for selling you book. A format that can be used to describe your purpose would be something like:

I sell my book because/to/for __________________________________________________.

From this exercise, my purpose for selling my book would read something like:

“I sell my book so that I can entertain people and demonstrate that I have what it takes to be a real writer.”

This purpose will drive my selling approach. What purpose will drive your sales?