Self publishers need to have a good marketing plan to sell books and should be written prior to writing your book and in place a year prior to publishing your book. It’s one thing to write a book, but an entirely different thing to write one that’s saleable, viable, and marketable. In today’s publishing environment, a book’s success depends greatly on a strong marketing plan.

Mail a press release to all the trade journals in your field over and over again; you can use the same release. Invest in press release submitting software and set aside time every week to send out a press release online to the press directories. Make sure your press release spells out the ‘who, what, where, when, and why.’

Learning to write and use powerful optimized press releases can often drive tons of traffic to your website while providing multiple back links that can lead to increased page rank and numerous top ten search engine rankings for your targeted keywords. Using press releases can be a very effective marketing tool if used properly. Press releases can generate thousands of dollars in sales when picked up by national trade or print media.

Using press releases for marketing or promoting your book or book’s website has become increasingly popular as publishers discover the powerful benefits of using press releases. Make sure you have at least one good press release, written in AP style, which you can send out for the lifetime of your book.

Place free ads periodically for your book’s website on Craigslist in different categories to drive even more traffic to your website. Make five telephone calls a day that relate to marketing your book. Make sure to promote and market your book each and every day, both online and offline.

When you get a nice write up or feature about you and/or your book, have it laminated and set it up on an easel at trade shows. Create an online contest and list it in online contest directories to drive traffic to your website. Every day it’s important to focus on a variety of marketing approaches.

Submit articles to online article directories that focus on your book’s topic to drive customers to your website. Find a non-exclusive distributor with a good reputation to carry your book for the book store trade, as well as for other retailers. Contact non-bookstore booksellers and offer to leave books on consignment.

Offer to trade writing a monthly column in a trade publication in your books’ genre, in trade for display ads on the same page. Contact any companies, corporations or organizations that might use your book for promotions; offer significant discounts for volume orders or for thousands of copies offer a specified amount above book production costs. If your book solves a problem, focus on this in your marketing.

If your book fits a specialty market, find a store that fits the genre and offer to leave books on consignment; many publishers have sold thousands of books this way. Get as many testimonials about your book, as possible, from experts in the field relating to your title, not customers; use on your fliers and back of books.

Remember to make sure your book is listed in Books-in-Print; don’t assume it’s already listed. Make sure your sales letter or flier is first class; this is your formal presentation of your title to the prospective buyer.

Use your book promotion and book marketing dollars wisely; go after the free and cheap resources daily. If you apply yourself every day and you promote your book like crazy, you can achieve that ultimate goal of selling thousands of copies of your book, many self publishers have. Yes you can market and promote your book on a shoestring budget, just be careful about your marketing dollars.

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Approximately 20% of the cost of your book is the paper. The type of paper you select can affect the price but more importantly it will affect the perception of its value to your customers. This article will give you a better idea how paper is classified in North America and should make talking with your printer a little easier.

There are a great many types of paper. Some are acid free archival quality. Some are made in part of recycled paper. Some reproduce photographs better than others due to the coatings applied. Here is where you might save a little money. If you are publishing novel or other book with few illustrations consider an uncoated archival paper. It might also be a little heavier which will add thickness to your book and reduce show-through. (If the paper is not opaque enough the text on the other side can show through.) Unless you’ve written a modern War and Peace, a little extra thickness can be a good thing.

Your paper decision will depend to a great extent on the printer and her presses since some presses work best with specific types of papers. And you don’t want any surprises when the book goes to press so it’s usually best to use a paper that your printer is familiar with.

I usually ask the printer for several samples that meet the project requirements and that she is familiar with. This way I’m not married to any particular paper and the printer will know what to expect from the paper on her press. Make your concerns known to the printer when she does the quote and listen to her recommendations.

Don’t be surprised if the samples you get are few. Generally a printer has a couple of business options. They can offer lots of paper choices and charge a higher price or a couple of choices and a very competitive price. Face it, choice costs more no matter what business you’re in.

Graphic designers will talk endlessly about lovely paper that they have seen and used. As a group we like to think of ourselves as paper experts, but the truth is very few are. Although I don’t consider myself an expert I love the feel of fine paper and appreciate its use in books. For novels I like paper that has an interesting texture. Text without pictures is best with an off white matt paper. The colour is a little less jarring than a bright white sheet and it will usually show pictures acceptably so long as great detail isn’t required. Paper for colour printing needs to be smoother to take the ink properly and whiter for better colour reproduction.

Now it will make life much simpler to go with whatever the printer recommends but it’s also nice to know what your printer is talking about. So let’s take a quick tour of common terms in the paper industry.

Paper comes in seemingly unending, confusing variety. Not only is the paper coated, uncoated, sized on one or both sides; it is matt, cover, offset, antique, text or newsprint and comes in a cacophony of weights and measures. Let’s try to make things a little simpler.

Paper in North America is usually divided into four broad types, newsprint, offset, matt and gloss. Newsprint is the paper used in newspapers; cheap, thin and short-lived. It does come in a variety of grades depending on how white it is and how heavy (thick). Offset is an average quality paper commonly used for printing of all sorts. Matt is a higher quality paper, usually smoother so it will take the ink more consistently. Gloss is exactly what it says. The very smooth surface takes ink very accurately and produces more vibrant colours. Each type is subdivided into grades normally referred to as book, coated and cover, depending on quality and thickness. There is quite a bit of overlap in these terms and you could easily find an offset-gloss that is better for your project than a matt coated. The industry isn’t consistent in using the terms and often dispense with them entirely in order to market a paper with a more or less descriptive brand name. You won’t find all grades in each type, for example there is no point in a cover stock for newsprint

Paper can also be classified based on the manufacturing method. Paper that has not been heavily calendered (this is a process of smoothing and flattening on large machine rollers) has more of a textured surface. It is usually thicker and is commonly referred to as antique. Machine finish papers are calendered to give a smoother surface and are usually thinner. The smoothest finishes are attained by coating the paper with a mixture of clay and glue then callendering. Depending on the type of calendering and the clay mix they can have a matt or gloss finish.

OK so you should now be thoroughly confused, but at least you have heard some of the industry terms even if they don’t have the meaning you might expect. Here are some examples of paper that might be used for various projects.

Letterhead: 50 lb offset (approximately the same as 20 LB bond, commonly referred to as book weight)

Flyer printed on one side in 4 colours: 45 LB gloss

Flyer printed on both sides in 4 colours: 60 LB gloss

Book jacket printed one side in 4 colours: 60 - 70 LB gloss

These examples show weight in pounds, unfortunately in North America text and cover paper is weighed differently. For example, a manufacturer might have an 80 LB text and an 80 LB cover stock. The cover stock is much thicker than the text because the standard sheet size that is being weighed is smaller. The 80 Lbs. refers to the weight of a standard number of sheets of a given size (this quantity is usually called a ream). Some manufacturers now show European measurements in addition to North American, so the 80 LB text might have a weight of 118 grams per square meter and the 80 LB cover a weight of 216 g/m2. It’s obvious from the European weights that the cover stock must be almost double the thickness of the text stock.

I’ve heard a number of different reasons why paper weights were based on different sizes of paper. I think the most likely is that the machines designed to print the inside pages were different that those designed to print covers. As a result what we think of as cover stock was supplied in a size that worked well for whatever manufacturing process or machine was used and it was simply weighed in the same way as text paper. Sheet size may also have something to do with the paper manufacturing process. If you are a fan of ‘which came first’ arguments then the paper came first and the press came later. However the press came before widespread use of machines for paper making so I still vote for the press size as the dominating factor.

The weight per square meter is a European standard. You can see a very concise article in Wikipedia on paper size. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size) The system is based on a sheet of paper one square meter in area with an aspect ratio based on the square root of two (longer on one side than the other). Various paper sizes are obtained by halving the sheet on the long side to create subsequently smaller paper sizes of the same ratio. It’s been around since early in the twentieth century (actually conceived in the eighteenth century) and it’s a much better system. Only Canada and the US have not adopted it. (Insert your snide remark here.)

Don’t get stuck on a particular make of paper. A printer might quote a particular make of paper for a job because she knows it will work and has the stock or knows it’s available. It’s quite possible that another printer would have to special order the same paper and be unable to get it in a reasonable time. Printers are the paper experts and unless you have something very special in mind, go with your printer’s recommendation.

I’ve said earlier that gloss paper takes ink more accurately and gives more vibrant colours, but don’t discount using a non-glossy paper for your book cover. I’ve seen some wonderful colour work done on uncoated and matt paper and it might give you the perfect feel for your book.

I strongly recommend that you use archival acid free paper. There is a greater variety of this type of paper available today than at any time in the last 50 years. Books made in the late 19th century and onward are generally poor in paper quality. This is one area where technology has failed us. While supplying enormous quantities of inexpensive paper to feed the information age, we limited the information’s life span to a few years. Books made two and three hundred years ago can be in wonderful shape where books made just 50 to 80 years ago are almost universally yellowing and growing brittle with age. Many books printed from 1850-1900 are beyond repair.

I hope this article helps a little. Paper is a complex subject, not because it’s difficult but because it has a long and distinguished history.

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As an author I spent years looking for free marketing techniques which would help me to sell my books. As a struggling beginning author, I had no idea at first how to even get started. Almost 2 years after the publication of my first book I can say with confidence I have found six techniques which have garnered me book sales, and will work for you too. I’ll even let you in on a technique that I found garnered me no sales at all!

1. Offer a monthly newsletter that has useful content besides just information about your books. I have found that having a newsletter that offers something to both potential readers, and either aspiring or already published authors has increased my newsletter membership and sold more of my books.

2. Offer free reads. There is one thing that as both a reader and an author will make me stand up and pay attention; offer me something useful for free. People love getting something for free! My only piece of advice regarding this is just make certain that what you are offering is high quality. If you offer a story you wrote 10 years ago that does not reflect your current polished writing style, this is not going to get you book sales for your current books. Either write something new, or do polish up something you have already written, so it reflects your current style.

3. Have at least one of your free reads available through your publisher. Some publishers give writers the option of offering stories for free. Potential fans and readers do scan book catalogs for free reads, and sometimes publishers will advertise the free reads as well. If someone reads the free read you made available through your publisher, and they liked it, they are going to be much more likely to come back and purchase the books you have for sale.

4. As further incentive for someone to sign up for your free monthly newsletter, offer at least one free read (Or do like I did and offer two or three!), either a serial where you post a chapter a month (I’ve found this to be very helpful when it came to making sales!), or a novella. I started out checking my member list every day for new members and then sending them my freebies via e-mail, that is until I found the Files section in my yahoo group! Now I have all of my freebies in the Files section and all new members can just go there and download all my freebies to their computer. This saves time for you, and your new subscribers.

5. Write articles similar to this one on different aspects of being a writer, and the publication industry. Once you have done so, publish them in a few free high profile article directories such as E-zine Articles.com (my favorite), or Articles Factory for example. Because of the danger of duplication within the search engines I don’t suggest publishing duplicate articles at more than two places at a time.

6. Get your books reviewed. I can’t stress this one enough as it is one of the most important ways to get the word out about your books. There are many places online you can have your books reviewed for free. Do not pay someone to review your book! There are some very reputable organizations out there such as Coffee Time Romance (who incidentally review all different genres and even non-fiction; not just romance) and The Romance Studio to name two.

Strangely, the one technique which did not garner me many book sales that I am aware of, and which many beginning authors try is sending bookmarks with information about their books to book conferences. I’ve even heard some horror stories about authors who had friends that were at the conference talking about how they saw the other person’s bookmarks laying on the floor, or in the trash. If you can afford to have pens, or calendars or other more original/different items that are more likely to be picked up and taken home made, then by all means do so and send these items. From what I’ve heard though, bookmarks aren’t getting picked up anymore. If you follow the six techniques I’ve listed here, you will find your book sales do increase, and you will have many happy new readers as well!

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Every literary agent and agency operates somewhat differently; they may have a different emphasis, style or approach, but all follow a basically similar pattern. Some agencies may specialize in building and managing their clients’ careers, while others concentrate on making individual books into giant, blockbuster hits. However, when it comes to selling books, agencies take similar paths.

Contacting An Agent: Most writers initially contact agents via e-mail. Agents like e-mail inquiries because they’re easy to answer. Responding by e-mail saves them time, which is critical because most of the queries they receive are about books that the agents don’t handle or are not interested in handling. A declining number of holdouts prefer to receive query letters sent via postal mail, but they’re in the minority. So check each agent’s Web site to see if it states how the agent prefers to be queried. Potential clients can also initially contact agents at conferences and other events. For information on writers’ conferences, see Writer’s Digest (www.writersdigest.com) and ShawGuides (http://writing.shawguides.com).

Many agents won’t accept unsolicited telephone queries, and if you call, their screeners generally won’t put you through. So, again, before you contact agents, check their Web sites to see how they wish to be approached. If, however, you do get through, most agents will ask you to submit something in writing: a query letter, a book proposal or your entire manuscript, if it’s written. Agents want written submissions so they can get a sense of the writers’ ability to express themselves clearly. Written submissions also let agents see how well writers are organized and their skill in presenting themselves and their ideas. Agents get a lot of their new clients through referrals from their existing clients and their publishing contacts.

Think Like an Agent: So you’re looking for an agent. Where are you going to find one? First of all, ask yourself this simple question: Where do agents go? To be more specific: What conferences do they attend? Where do they speak? What organizations do they belong to? Although we certainly aren’t suggesting that you follow them around, we do want you to start thinking like agents think. If you do, it will improve your chances of being at the right place at the right time. Research the literary and publishing scene in your local area. See if, when, and where any writers’ associations, publishers’ groups, and literary clubs meet. Are any nearby bookstores, libraries or cafes conducting interesting programs or hosting book signings? Are local colleges or universities offering lecture series featuring writers, agents, and/or publishers? Since many writers teach, investigate whether any well-known authors are teaching courses that you could attend in your area, even if it’s just to sit in. Go where book people congregate and make contacts.

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You have spent hundreds or perhaps thousands of hours writing your masterpiece and now you want the world to read it. You also want it to generate an income for you that is proportionate to the work you put into it. So, what should you do with it? You can send a manuscript of it off to dozens of publishing houses with the hopes that one of them thinks it is worthy of their label, or you can have it published yourself through a Print on Demand, POD, publisher. The pros and cons of POD are:

The negative aspects of using POD instead of a large publishing house.

1) It will not have the label of a large publishing house on it.

2) It will not be distributed by a large publishing house to nationwide book stores.

3) You will not receive a royalty on sales amounting to maybe 3% of the profit per copy sold by a large publishing house.

4) You will not make the bestseller list of a large publishing house.

The positive aspects of using POD and having your book published yourself.

1) You can have your own publisher’s label put on your work if you like and it can still have an ISBN.

2) Your work can be made available to all of the online bookselling marketplaces and book stores nationwide through a POD global distribution service for about $100. They all receive regular notifications of new book put in print and in most cases, they will buy directly from a POD publisher directly and list the book on their marketplace. Since you will have established a price for them to buy it at (wholesale), you will get a known royalty per copy when they do buy from your POD publisher.

3) You will receive a royalty (that you decide) on the sale of every copy purchased by online marketplaces and book stores nationwide. Follows from (2) above.

4) You can make the bestseller list of any online marketplace that your book sells through based on your actual sales through that marketplace.

5) You can purchase copies of your own work through your POD publisher and become an online bookseller yourself which will yield the highest profit margins possible for you.

6) As an online bookseller yourself, you can set up your own website and sell your book through it.

Regardless of which sales scenario you choose, you are going to be doing the marketing and promotion of your book yourself anyway, why stop short of selling and mailing it too? Stuffing it in a padded envelope and shipping it to customers cannot be worth giving up over 90% of the profits after all the other hard work you have already done.

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