SMART Selling Your Book


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Once you captured your dreams for selling your self-published book and you know why you want to sell that masterpiece, you need to set a goal. To be realistic in your expectations, you will want a thorough understand of where you are currently in your life. This is where the Dice of Life and the 5 L’s of Life can be useful as presented in a previous blog post. Now is time to explore your dreams and establish your goal.
Explore Your Dreams
Exploring your dreams and desires corresponds to the first E in the DREAMS Cycle ™. This involves examining your dreams and how they fit with your purpose. This will assist in determining what you want to achieve. My dreams for selling my book were the following:
  • Become rich.
  • Become a bestselling author.
  • Get positive reviews of my books in newspapers, magazines, television and social media.
Become rich
To me, becoming rich means earning a million dollars. This comes from my youth where you could win a million dollars in a lottery, and the entertaining Barenaked Ladies song, If I had a million dollars. Of course, a million dollars won’t get you as much today considering the cost of living, but I would be more than satisfied earning a million dollars from my book sales.
To determine how many copies you need to sell in order to earn a million dollars, you can estimate that you as the author will get about 10% of the price of the book through traditional publishing. This varies greatly but it is in the right ball-park as per the article by Mack Collier. Assuming you sell your book at $15, and that you make $1.50 per copy, you would need to sell 667,000 copies top make a million. For self-published books, if you sell the book directly to your readers, you can keep much more of the money per copy. For a $15 book, with a cost of about $7 per copy to self-publish, you could make $8 per copy. In that case, you only need to sell 125,000 copies. No matter what, that is a lot of copies.
My purpose for selling my book, as mentioned in a previous post is: “I sell my book so that I can entertain people and demonstrate that I have what it takes to be a real writer.” There is no real link to making money here; I just want people to enjoy my book.
Become a bestselling author
Can anything be more gratifying for an author than seeing their book on The New York Times Best Sellers list? Not only does it come with the sales, but the prestige is awesome. There are other bestselling lists such as the Publishers Weekly list, the Amazon list, and the USA Today list. In Canada, you have the Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, the Toronto Star, and Amazon.ca. Getting on any of these lists is a great achievement.
What does it take to get on these lists? According to Bookpromotionhub.com, you will need to sell 9,000 copies in a week to be on the New York Times Best Sellers list. To reach top 5 on Amazon, you will need to sell about 1,000 copies in a day. Even in Canada, you need to sell about 5,000 copies in a week to reach bestseller status. The crux in these bestsellers list is that it is based on a short period of time. BookNet Canada and Readers’ Digest have some wonderful articles regarding becoming a bestselling author.
Depending on the lists, sometimes you can also be a bestseller in a particular category, such as sports psychology or children’s humour. For example, on Amazon, you have a ranking of the top 100 Dystopian book under the category of Science Fiction, which is under the category of Science Fiction & Fantasy. My book, Frankenstein’s Science Project, is under Children’s Book – Literature and Fiction on Amazon.ca.
From my point of view, I want to entertain as many people as possible, although I am more interested in the long term rather than the short term required to get on a bestsellers list.
Get positive reviews
Reviews are a way of knowing what people think about your book. You can get some verbal feedback as people comment on your book, which is always nice, but written reviews are more enduring. Traditional reviews were written by critics for newspapers and magazines, but the product review world has opened up dramatically with the advent of the internet. Now everyone can be a critic.
There are various platforms for reviews. Newspapers and magazines still exist, but they are quite elitist and few books can be covered this way. Today, however, the views of actual readers seem to be more effective is providing feedback on a book. The major platforms for reader reviews are Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, Google Books and even libraries. There is no need to spend money to get reviewed on these platforms, you just need to get someone to actually read your book and write a review. Easier said than done for a self-published author.
There is an alternate way of getting reviews, which is to pay for them. There are many providers of this service such as Kirkus Indie, IndieReader, Self-Publishing Review, and BlueInk Review. There is a lot of discussion and controversy regarding paid reviews. Here are some interesting articles: Are Paid Book Reviews Worth It?, The Indie Author's Guide to Paid Reviews, and How Self-Published Authors Can Get Professional Book Reviews.
Personally, I am looking for honest reviews from people who actually read my book and I am not really interested in paying for this.
  
Establish Your Goal
Once you’ve explored your dreams and you get a sense of what it will take to reach your dreams, you need to come down to earth and establish a goal that is right for you. To make it more likely to reach that goal, it should be a SMART goal. SMART is another one of those acronyms and it stands for Specific, Measurable, Action-Oriented, Realistic and Time-Constrained. Some people use Achievable instead of Action-Oriented, but I find that Realistic covers the “Achievable” concept.
A Specific goal is one where it is very clear what you are trying to achieve. Saying “I want to become a writer” is not very specific as it could mean so many things. A Measurable goal is one with something that you can tick off and say it has been achieved. A goal that states that “I will sell many books” is more difficult to measure than “I will sell 500 books”. An Action-oriented goal is defined with an action verb as opposed to something that happens. “I will sell 500 books” is more powered than “500 copies of my books will be bought”. In the former case, you take action. A Realistic goal is one that is aligned with the Dice of Life and the 5 L’s of Life. The goal needs to be Time-constrained to create a sense of urgency and ensure you take action. It is also preferable to have a goal for something you can control. For example, getting Oprah to interview you is out of your control. You can influence Oprah, but that is much more difficult than saying that you will get interviewed on TV.
As my focus is not on money, my goals for selling my book are related to selling a certain number of copies and to getting reviews.
In order to set the right goal related to selling a certain number of copies, you need to realize that on average, a traditionally published book will sell 250 copies in its first year and 3,000 over its lifetime. For a self-published book, the average number of copies sold is 250 in a lifetime. Kameron Hurley has a great article on her numbers. As I don’t think my book is any better than the average self-published book and knowing how little time I can dedicate to selling my book, a realistic quantity for me is too sell 200 copies. The formulation of my SMART goal is the following:
“I will sell 200 copies of Frankenstein’s Science Project within 2 years of the published date.” This is actual sales and not for copies distributed freely.
With respect to getting reviews, one article, The Top 10 Things All Authors Should Know About Amazon, mentions that it takes 50 reviews to get noticed on Amazon. My rule of thumb is that 5-10% of people will write a review of a product. In my case, if I sell 200 copies and distribute another 50 free copies, then a realistic goal would be to get 25 reviews. The formulation of my SMART goal in this case is the following:
“I will get 25 reviews of Frankenstein’s Science Project on Amazon, Goodreads or Google Books within 2 years of the published date.”

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