We Want It Yesterday
By Jerry D. Simmons | March 7th, 2007 | No Comments » (Click to add yours!)
Must be the age we live in, but everyone wants everything yesterday. Authors publish books and expect instant sales, retailers want books to fly off shelves today, not tomorrow. Where does it all end? Selling books is difficult at best, remember there are no guarantees, it takes patience and hard work. As our parents used to say, nothing is free, you have to earn it in this world.
Books that go into stores have an extremely small window to sell copies or else they are returned to publishers. A low percentage of sale for an author can signal the end of a career. There are so many titles and such little time, how does an author survive? Being smarter than their competitors, learning something about the business, how it works, and understanding what they can do as authors to prevent the kind of situations that result in low percents of sale.
We all want success as authors, and we all want to sell more books. The only reasonable way to do this is build sales slowly with focus on small markets expanded gradually outward away from their hometown. This is one of the biggest advantages for Independent Authors, time to build sales, learn their market, and get to know their audience and how to reach them.
The risk is that authors lose patience and their confidence wanes in an attempt to sell books quickly. They buy marketing services, look for shortcuts, and in the end spend more money with little in return. Selling books is not easy, don’t be fooled by the get rich quick schemes, your best weapon as an author is your understanding of the market and what it takes to sell books. Tell your friends and writing colleagues that selling books, as we know it today, is changing, maybe not tomorrow but the next day.
This blog is unedited, please disregard mistakes in spelling and grammar.
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