Thread: Any authors on this site?

Any other authors on the fastlane besides MJ and me? If so, what is your experience in approaching the marketing and selling of your book as a business in and of itself?

An observation I have made about most authors is that they find a publisher and let them do the rest. Some find agents, but the success rate varies.

I (my company, the majority was not done by me personally) wrote and self published a series of additional manuals/guidance and eventually moved into text books on the software I developed. I was originally started as a secondary income stream to the software. Our marketing was pretty simple though as we already had registered license holders + email opt ins from major businesses. Depending on the purchased license it was either sent out for free, given away as part of training courses we ran, or purchased direct from our website. We sent a weekly email about such things to everyone on our database (60%+ open rate, so a pretty captive audience).

Anyway, that is my story and of little relevance to any budding authors out there unless they're in a similar position. Depending on the book I would imagine the approach would be significantly different. My initial questions would be... What kind of book is it? What is your projected market? Can you exploit affiliate marketing opportunities? Possibly a partnership with a website/magazine/newspaper on a similar topic? Have you looked into specialist publishers? Or even micro publishers such as lulu which do print on demand?

I would recommend anyone against self publishing unless you REALLY believe in your book, or have an audience to give it away to as part of a promotional deal. Self publishing is prohibitively expensive if you have a run of less than 1000 books (5000 is ideal and only around twice the cost of 1000 in my experience). Then you have to deal with someone like Bowker to get your ISBN. A process that defines the polar opposite of user friendly. And then where do you store 5000 books?! Yikes!