For any best selling authors — If you had to start all over, which channels would you promote yourself on to gain fast traction?

Have you considered providing the book in electronic format. If somebody wants the book and are willing to pay the shipping fee, they get the paper copy, otherwise, it's a download.

Obviously you need to generate more leads. But then you need to segment your list. Your basic list are those leads who "come aboard" and want to know what's going on. Your qualified leads list are your potential buyers. Between the two, you need a gate. So, they come on your big list. Then they need to get something that qualifies them from being a basic prospect to being a qualified prospect. That puts them on the second list. Leads >> Qualifier >> Qualified Leads. What's the topic of your book? Qualify by things people have said in similar book reviews. This is a lot easier if you are doing non-fiction, but it's possible with fiction as well. In the reviews you'll see people saying things like, "I bought this book because..." What they say after that is the pain point. Use this language, as they wrote it, in your qualifier. For example, in a review for SPIN Selling, someone says, " I don't do "hit and run," one-time sales. Tom Hopkins and Zig Ziglar offer great tactics for those kind of salespeople, but they don't work for me." Another says, "...I had no idea how to sell professionally. I had already read a few books by Tom Hopkins, but felt he was targeting used-car salesmen types. It seems as though Hopkins' techniques relied on "closing" gimmicks when it came down to it. (I must say I did learn some good principles from Hopkins, but his gimmicky style is not for me.) I was instantly attracted to SPIN SELLING when I saw that (1) it was based on extensive research, and (2) it dealt primarily with the large sale. Since I want to start my own corporation after my MBA, and want to have Fortune-500 companies as my customers, I realized SPIN SELLING was for me." See the commonality? So if I was launching a solid B2B sales techniques book, I would make use of this language. First, I would attract them to my basic list with the promise of a corporate B2B sales book. Then, I would qualify further with language like, "Are you looking to build real relationships with your customers, instead of hit-and-run one-time sales tricks? Are you eager to understand the secrets of professional corporate selling?" A Call To Action would follow. Those who respond to this language are qualified leads, as salespeople in other situations would not resonate with that copy. How can you transfer what I've shown you here to your niche? If you're writing non-fiction, as I said, it should be straightforward. If it's fiction, then you can find similar stories and pull from the reviews for those...the things they say they like about the author's style (assuming yours is like theirs), the story structure, the excitement, the thought process, or whatever. Why not just go straight for the qualified leads? Because your net won't be big enough. Better to grab a whole lot of interested readers, which you can make use of later as well, and qualify from there.

1. Paid targeted traffic to a sales page. 2. Free giveaways of one book, hoping to get paid sales of another. 3. Podcast/radio show guest appearances discussing the book's topic. 4. Get an authority talking about your book. 5. Affiliate marketing--get one of your books included as content or bonus in a marketer's solution package, and draw prospective customers back to you through links embedded in the book. 6. Post on relevant forums, blogs, Facebook/LI groups, Quora with appropriate feedback, linking back to your sales page/Amazon page. 7. Book a call with me to flesh out these ideas in detail.

Hi there, A good question to consider is this: are people willing to pay to read what you want to write? Do your interests represent a big enough "market" to create and sustain a livelihood? People who make a living out of publishing online seem to have one thing in common: they figure out where their interests intersect with other people's interests. I'm not talking about generating a ton of link bait. I'm talking about finding a hungry crowd. You can sell a world-class hamburger in a vegetarian neighborhood and still go out of business. You can publish excellent articles and blog posts on the arts and humanities, and still make no money. Here's some practical advice for finding your hungry crowd(s): Go to Medium.com. Do some research. Identify the writers who are already publishing on the subjects that interest you. What kind of following have they built up? How many recommends do their stories get on average? Which stories are their most popular? What's their strategy? Do their stories route readers to an external blog or website? Can you figure out how they are making money? If you do "competitive analysis" on two to three dozen arts & humanities writers, then you'll notice some patterns. You'll notice that some topics sell better than others. Or some stylistic elements or flourishes have enabled certain writers to build an audience quickly. Use your analysis to reverse engineer your audience. You can't make a living publishing online until you have an audience. Lastly, watch this video, and pay attention to the part at the end about left-handed vampire movies: https://kicktastic.com/video/convince-convert-jay-baer/. Hope this helps, Austin

What value do THEY get from subscribing to your newsletter? The answer should be: "lots of value, and I make it obvious to readers in language they care about." I've written two how-to books. In each, I point to a book-specific landing page with resources. For my first (on public speaking as a form of business development), I describe the resources as templates that will save them 20-50 hours of work. In my second book (on managing marketing & creative teams), it's how the templates will help them become a better manager. Throughout each book, I have relevant Call to Action (CTA) blocks that point to the resources—an easy "sell" for how-to non-fiction. If you write fiction, think about what would be compelling. Perhaps your subscribers get first updates about your next book, and private updates about your progress on the writing process (similar to what some Kickstarter campaigns will do). Make it about value to them, and signups will follow. I'm glad to do a call to discuss further. Good luck!