Nothing Sells Itself
As a person with an "engineering mentality," I've always leaned towards the "better mousetrap" philosophy, "Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door." claimed Ralph Waldo Emerson, I generally thought of marketing and sales people as expensive excess baggage.
But during my career, I built some better mousetraps, and the world never showed up. That turned out to be the story of my life. I eventually realized that my disrespect for marketing was actually an ego defense. People with low self-esteem hate having to sell themselves, and can't stand rejection. Were it not for that, I might now be very well off.
So now I've become a self-publishing author. I began this adventure thinking, "Why not me? In today's print-on-demand world, any idiot can publish a book." That's true of course. If anyone has the patience to fill several pages with content, it's easy to have it nicely printed and bound in a shiny cover, and even put up for sale on amazon.com. But that doesn't assure that anyone other than the author/publisher will ever know it exists.
Luckily, there is literally tons (okay, jillions of gigabytes) of free information online about marketing self-published POD works. What a great learning opportunity! Too bad this stuff wasn't available to me years ago, since much of it would be equally applicable to the marketing of any other product. But like "W" apparently found out soon after being put into the White House, "Hey - this is hard work! Really hard work."
However, I am determined to see it through to a successful outcome. I'm not yet quite sure what that means. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, 80% of the 1.2 million books BookScan listed in 2004 sold fewer than 99 copies, and only 2% sold 5,000 or more copies. The average was about 500 copies. But that figure obviously includes a handful of best-sellers, and truckloads of books whose sales could be counted on their author's fingers.
So I guess anything over 500 copies would be "above average" and could be considered a success as far as marketing is concerned.
I'm going to do myself a favor and not think about measuring success in terms of earnings. On that basis, my earnings for the "above average" situation would probably amount to about $2 per hour.
[-=gw=-]
But during my career, I built some better mousetraps, and the world never showed up. That turned out to be the story of my life. I eventually realized that my disrespect for marketing was actually an ego defense. People with low self-esteem hate having to sell themselves, and can't stand rejection. Were it not for that, I might now be very well off.
So now I've become a self-publishing author. I began this adventure thinking, "Why not me? In today's print-on-demand world, any idiot can publish a book." That's true of course. If anyone has the patience to fill several pages with content, it's easy to have it nicely printed and bound in a shiny cover, and even put up for sale on amazon.com. But that doesn't assure that anyone other than the author/publisher will ever know it exists.
Luckily, there is literally tons (okay, jillions of gigabytes) of free information online about marketing self-published POD works. What a great learning opportunity! Too bad this stuff wasn't available to me years ago, since much of it would be equally applicable to the marketing of any other product. But like "W" apparently found out soon after being put into the White House, "Hey - this is hard work! Really hard work."
However, I am determined to see it through to a successful outcome. I'm not yet quite sure what that means. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, 80% of the 1.2 million books BookScan listed in 2004 sold fewer than 99 copies, and only 2% sold 5,000 or more copies. The average was about 500 copies. But that figure obviously includes a handful of best-sellers, and truckloads of books whose sales could be counted on their author's fingers.
So I guess anything over 500 copies would be "above average" and could be considered a success as far as marketing is concerned.
I'm going to do myself a favor and not think about measuring success in terms of earnings. On that basis, my earnings for the "above average" situation would probably amount to about $2 per hour.
[-=gw=-]
Labels: Book Marketing
posted by BoysMind at
7:45 AM
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