But for many people, the idea of reading a book is great effort. They have to be really “into” the book to finish it (not like myself who is determined to finish it regardless). Most people read a chapter or two and if it’s not working for them, they are done.

You’ve probably heard all kinds of branding ideas, but here is a fresh one that you may want to consider. I found “Driving Reflections” at the Christian Retail Show last summer. To quote the web site, “Driving Reflections are windshield biblical passages, Bible verses, and messages for your car to see while driving. They offer powerful affirmations based on the truth of God’s Word.” Go to the web site to see the whole idea.

They are also branching out into many other topics than just the faith market, so regardless of your book topic (money, counsel, weight loss, thankfulness, etc.) there is one that would compliment your book.

And here is the good part… you can order them customized with your own words! What message are you trying to send in your book? What affirmation? Encouragement? Knowledge? The site says…

• Minimum quantities start at 50 units, 16 messages per unit, includes card holder with non-slip pads, package insert and clear bag.
• Set-up Fee to convert your messages and art set up – as low as $100
• Consulting available to create your messages – quote upon request

The driving reflections that are already designed resale for $10 and are about half that for wholesale. I gave them to all my family this year as Christmas gifts and everyone loves them. And when friends ride in the cars they always ask about them.

Or if customizing them is a bit too spendy yet, there are many topics, with more being created all the time from peace of mind, love and relationships, and courage and faith.

So… I know I sound like a commercial for them. Truth is I don’t get anything out of this deal except for the fact that I (1) met the owner and loved her and saw her vision; (2) loved the product; (3) have customers that love the product.

I think these are great to have available at your book table when you do signings or “back of the room sales.” Include one with your book when you give your book away in a drawing. And definately consider creating your own custom messages with quotes directly from your book that people can put into practise when they read it on their way to work each day.

Don’t you just love promotional ideas? Do you have any to share?

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Lisa and Joel Copen have a variety of experience in founding a nonprofit that receieves over 80,000 visitors per month, music and sound editing, web design, and book marketing and publishing. They look forward to your ideas to make the series of ebooks on book promotion a practical tool to help you sell more books!

We’ve all been to the typical office supply stores and have seen the acrylic stands where you stick a brochure in. But did you know there are hundreds of possibilities for snazzier displays? One of my favorite companies I use is Beemak Plastics, Inc. at www.bemake.com .I don’t make any money from telling you their name, I just like them. As you look through their web site or flip through the paper catalog, it wil start the brainstorming process.

What would you like to announce to anyone who is glancing at your book?

• Maybe a favorite quote?
• A special on the sale price?
• You are a local author?
• A percentage of the sales goes to support a charity?
• A suggestion of people who your book would be a great gift idea?
• What about a flyer with a tips sheet on the topic of your book?
• Maybe your book on CD?
• Or even a box where people can drop their business cards to win a free prize?

Appearance can make all the difference, so don’t forget to take the time to think beyond the book itself so you can present it in the best way possible. And nothing against your local supply store, but a plastic stand really doesn’t have to cost $8. With the money you will save ordering from a specialty store, you can buy book holders for all the shops in town who want to promote your book on their countertop!

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Lisa and Joel Copen have a variety of experience in founding a nonprofit that receieves over 80,000 visitors per month, music and sound editing, web design, and book marketing and publishing. They look forward to your ideas to make the series of ebooks on book promotion a practical tool to help you sell more books!

As a writer, do you really need a web site, even if you are just writing articles offline? Yes!

 Here are 5 simple reasons why and where to start:

(1) People need to be able to find you. If they like your article in a magazine they will often Google you or look online at the magazine’s web site to see how to contact you. It’s good if you have an email, but you don’t want that on the magazine’s web site or you will soon be bombarded with spam. And it may sound silly, but if you don’t have a web site and are trying to market yourself or your business in some ways, it’s assumed you just don’t know what you are doing.

Anyone who has a business either designs or hires someone to design a web site for them. Would you have a delivery service without a vehicle or a restaurant without a menu? That’s you without a web site. Just do it.

(2) The good news is that you really can do your own site. Gone are the times when we had to hire web designers at $75-$200 per hour (and yes, I was a web designer, so I am allowed to say that.) Now you can whip up a presence on a blogging service like wordpress.com – for free– and have the added benefit of being “pinged” and getting your fresh content out there. (FYI: If you don’t know what “ping” means, don’t worry about it. Just know when you hit the “publish” button WordPress will take care of letting the search engines know about you.)

(3) Create some profiles so people can find you. If you set up a blog or web site, that’s a great place to send people to who are looking for your fresh content, latest publications, profile and how to hire you. But if they just Google your name, the odds are that they may not find you on the first few pages, especially if you have a common name (and millions of names are “common” on the Internet.) So go to web sites like Amazon.com, Goodreads.com, Facebook.com, Squidoo.com, linkedin.com, and even Myspace.com and mess around to create a profile that at least sends people back to your site. The size of these social networks help them rank high and people will be able to find you more easily.

(4) Start writing articles to give away. Yes, I know, if you are a paid writer that sounds less than appealing. But there are some perks:

• Magazine/newsletter editors often have extra space in their publications or online content and may put in some keywords to find an article or expert writer on that topic for the space they are trying to fit. I’ve been there and found articles/writers from their free articles online; I’ve also been a writer whom magazines have found because of my free articles.
• You need to become known as an expert in your niche field, and that takes more than 2-3 articles on your topic each year in hard-copy magazines. Marketing on the web with articles can help make it impossible for people to get away from you when they type in keywords you have taken over. And there are thousands of keyword phrases no one is writing about, for example, “marketing in the catering business article” is a term that, according to an keyword service, not one web site has targeted. Same with “article on direct marketing personal selling” Hmmm…  With just a few clicks you can know what phrases in your niche aren’t being clicked on. See my blog “faves” for my favorite service where I get this info!
• You can find what topics are most appealing by how many clicks they get and then query magazines on these topics. It seems it’s never the topics you would expect that have a lot of hits. Articles sites like www.ezinearticles.comand ideamarketers.com are great ways to get your content out there and then build on it for your queries.

(5) If you’re a writer you are assuming that there are a few other people out there who are interested in your topic. Find them! Go to social networks like Squidoo.com or Ning.com and find the groups. On Ning.com for example, each group you participate in you are given a “page” where you can also blog. Most Ning sites have it set up so YOUR blog posts to the main site of the web page automatically. Once you get the hand of these, start your own social network and be the founder of the hub, creating the ability to be considered the expert. Plus, you can email all the members with a touch of a keystroke. (Gold!) Participating in these networks is great because you can also ask for feedback, quotes, anecdotes  dexamples from people, create a poll, etc. These are all helpful in writing new articles.

In the past, having a web site could seem overwhelming. Learning to program html, uploading via ftp, using meta tags and paying those monthly service fees whether you made 2-cents or not was draining–sometimes to your spirit of the project, sometimes to the pocketbook. Today, with blogs having great template, easy to use programs, and the ability to make them into Widgets and get them on people’s web sites all over… the possibilities for exposure are endless.

 And the sooner you start, the better your odds will be over the next writer who specializes in your topic and finally decides to get online next year. One of the reasons my organization still ranks incredibly high on the major search engines is because I’ve been online since 1997.

Keep me posted on your progress!

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Lisa and Joel Copen have a variety of experience in founding a nonprofit that receieves over 80,000 visitors per month, music and sound editing, web design, and book marketing and publishing. They look forward to your ideas to make the series of ebooks on book promotion a practical tool to help you sell more books!

With the infiltration of Internet venues that harbor and propagate pseudo professional and fraudulent “writers” – even encouraging it by “looking the other way” – there has been a significant rise in plagiarism of the protected works of professional writers. Though hard numbers have not yet been established, this writer, after a great deal of research, estimates that it has risen by as much as 42 percent over the past five years.

This not only affects professional writers but also the people who hire these plagiarizers to write books, articles, etc. for them. So how can one protect him/herself from these covert intellectual-rights bandits of the 21st century? I’m glad you asked. Here are a few ways:

1.) Knowing what plagiarism is is the first step in protecting yourself. So let’s define plagiarism. In very simple terms, plagiarism is when someone uses another’s works without permission. When something is originated in writing, the government acknowledges this ownership, especially when the c inside the circle symbol plus the date and owner’s name are included with the piece. This says that only you have the write to publish, print, copy or change the piece. And anyone else must be granted specific permission from you to do any of these things with your work.

Now there are certain nuances that you should also know about. Things such as the fact that someone can include a certain (small) amount of your work in theirs IF they site the author and where it was quoted from. And in most cases, this is a good thing, as it helps promote your works, if the quotes are used in a good light. There are limits to just how much someone can quote. Also, just because someone rearranges the order of words or sentences does not excuse them from copyright laws. You can learn more about these things and more at Western Connecticut State University’s website at the following link: http://library.wcsu.edu/web/about/policies/plagiarism/#question-1. You will learn a great deal about plagiarism there.

2.) If you are someone who hires writers, especially for books or articles, avoid the low-cost writers and stick with the professionals. When it comes to services, to consider hiring a low-priced book writer is only asking for failure and even serious trouble. Unlike shopping for hard goods, like clothes, basketballs and sod for your backyard, you cannot seek out professional services in the same manner – whether you are looking for writing services, a good lawyer to represent you or someone to put new brakes on your car.

You might be able to find a deal on the brakes themselves, though doing so might have grave ramifications, still is it worth chancing things on shoddy or inferior craftsmanship? What about saving a few bucks on a very-low-priced lawyer, and as a result you still end up having to pay a big fine or even worse get sent to jail for something you didn’t do? Would that be a good deal? What if you were to take your lifelong dream of having a book published, but instead you end up with something that even your loving mother or grandmother couldn’t find anything nice to say about it? The answer is, it is simply NEVER the thing to do when it comes to services.

HERE IS MY POINT: The greatest instance of plagiarism comes from pseudo professional writers. And of the 42 percent estimated increase mentioned above, 40 percent comes from these very writers. I do not, in fact, even like calling them writers, as they do not in any way fit the bill. In fact, they taint an otherwise honest, hard-working and professional field. So if you sense some of my irate feelings, such feelings are justly stewing.

Case in point, I received a 350-page book from a client needing professional book editing services. He mentioned that he had paid $4,000 to a book writer to write it. After I stopped choking, I politely told him that there was no doubt in my mind that there was something wrong with his book.

I began to edit this “book” and shortly into it, I could tell there were two different voices. This suggested that there had been two different writers, which raised two red flags that things were not hopeful for my client.

To make a long article short, I investigated and found 45 percent of this book had been plagiarized word-for-word! My client was a businessman with a good reputation. And if I had not caught this, his business and reputation could have been seriously damaged. Not to mention what could have happened to his life over the legal ramifications.

But it took a professional to find this. And it takes professionals to write, edit, proofread, format, market and print books and articles of any quality. Staying clear of the low-priced writer is essential for all but guaranteeing that you will not run into plagiarism issues. What is low-priced? Well, pay attention to what someone offers you. This plagiarized book for my client, who by the way is still working with me to this very day on his ongoing books, took about 8 months to write at $4,000. If you do the math, you can see that this “writer” made about $115 per week. How can a professional, full-time writer ever live on that? That’s below poverty level. So using this system can be very helpful. If someone is offering you poverty rates to write your book or article, what does that tell you? For one thing, they are not a very good writer if they have to stoop so financially low to get work.

Also, know that a 350-page book should take at least 12 months to write if it is to be accurate, professional and of high quality. So if someone offers you such a book in 6 months, run in the other direction. Steeling others’ works is the only way to accomplish this. Also, professional book writers make between $100 and $250 per page. That is a very good rule of thumb.

3.) If you are a writer or someone who hires one and you have some works that you would like to see if anyone is using portions without permission, there is something you can do on-line. Go to plagiarismchecker.com and type in more than 6 and less than 32 words – verbatim – from a passage of your book or article and click the “Search” button. If anything is on the Internet, links will show up in the resulting webpage of the websites that contain your intellectual property. Continue to do this with different sections of your book or article. The more you include (up to 32 words) the better, as this does a more accurate job at detecting only sites that contain your specific work. There are other similar checkers on line, such as http://www.neilstoolbox.com/plagiarism-tester/. This one lets you type up to 50 words at a time.

Though it is an extremely effective way to catch on-line bandits, it is not foolproof, as it of course does not cover offline (brick & mortar) works.

I’m going to continue to research ways to protect ourselves from fraudulent representation of written works. If you know of other ways to detect plagiarism, please feel free to share them with me and I will add them to this article and share this information – with your permission, of course – with the rest of the world, and we’ll all be a little better off for it.

Robert S. Nahas is a professional book writer and president of WriterServices.net He has written numerous published books of his own and for others, and helps aspiring writers and authors achieve their dreams of getting their books written, published and selling well. You can get more information on how to find good book writers for hire, how to get published, find a good agent, find funding… and more at http://www.thesavvyauthor.com You can find more information on R. S. Nahas

So I haven’t really looked at my statistics. I am not a “hot blogger” and though it would be nice to get some fabulous keyword and jump to #1 on Google (like I’ve been taught in my formal internet marketing seminars) I’m not holding my breath.

But I just got onto Feedburner to glance my statistics.  And these numbers surprised me!

The first column is the date, the second it the subscribers for that day.

3000? Then 1400? then nearly 3000 again? I quickly looked up what I’d blogged about that day and guess what? It was the days I posted my articles that I said were free to reprint.

So before I did a little happy dance, I wanted to make sure I knew what a ”subscriber” really was. Feedburner says this:

Okay… so it looks like those numbers are legit. So far I’ve not found any announcement on Feedburner triple their numbers accidentally or anything.

So what did I write that was so amazing? I was just as curious as you so I went and looked! The posts are titled:

• Romantic Ideas for Chronically Ill Women to Romance Her Husband (Jan 16)
• When Your Wife is Ill and the Romance Ain’t Happening (Jan 17)
• A New Twist on Prednisone (Jan 19) — not sure if this hit a news feed somewhere or people with Google alerts clicked or what. It may have been the 16th and 17th catching up. The 19th was a Saturday, so maybe people at home were catching up on their reading?

One thing I know for certain is that my efforts to write articles on a more consistent basis, and use the Unique Article Wizard (see the link down on the bottom right under “My Faves”) I am definately gaining some new visitors. Just 24 hours after I released these 2 articles, with the keywords I was targeting, I was holding the top 35 slots on Google out of 50 (yes… amazing, isn’t it)

So… you never know. Promoting your book is always a work in progress and oftentimes one big experiment. Today I discovered that something I thought “just may work” is actually working. And that is a good thing.

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Lisa and Joel Copen have a variety of experience in founding a nonprofit that receieves over 80,000 visitors per month, music and sound editing, web design, and book marketing and publishing. They look forward to your ideas to make the series of ebooks on book promotion a practical tool to help you sell more books!

• Britney in Psych Ward for Two More Weeks…Though the 72-hour hold on Britney Spears is up, the pop star will be remaining in the psych…
• More proof Angelina Jolie is pregnant
• Eva Mendes enters rehab

[I won't do these headlines justice by giving you the links to the stories. You will have to do your own homework.]

This week as I watched the evening news I heard various stories that were not newsworthy!

• Like the fact that there are now nude airline trips available (What? I don’t even like to share an armrest!)
• A cat that took his own airline ride in a suitcase
• More silly criminals that got caught
• Life on Mars? It looks like Big Foot in the photos is wandering around the planet.

The newscasters had this look like… “This is what I went to journalism school for?”

Even the presidential race has turned into who said something insincere, rude, or with a hidden message. It’s a race to see what radio stations can dig up dirt on tantrums that all the candidates have had at one time or another in the past twenty years (Literally! I heard it!)

So, do we care?

The answer may surprise you… because YES… we should care (at least a little bit).

As an author we often get our heads stuck in books–if not writing our own, then devouring others. We hang out with reasonable people who share our passions and maybe even our faith. When was the last time you bought “OK” magazine or anything that had the word Alien on the cover? Did you get flustered when you had to pay for it and try to offer an explanation to the cashier of “I’m a writer doing research”? (Been there, done that.)

For many of us, however, we are writing books for people who do buy these magazines (gasp!) and do care that Angelina is pregnant again. And consider your book topic closely.

At a writers conference I recently attended a woman shared how she couldn’t seem to create any buzz about her book which was on the topic of morals for teen girls. I can’t think of a better time in our culture than now for selling this book. But who is going to buy it? The tween girls? No, their mothers, maybe even their grandmothers.

I told this author to go and buy all the tacky magazines she could find for women and girls and study them a few days. Saturate your brain a bit so you start thinking like the readers of these magazines think (Plan a time to detox later!) Look at the headlines. Do they say, “10 Ways to Raise a Moral Girl in 2008″? Nah…

With Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton being the “it” girls, I think there are loads of mothers out there desperately searching for some answers on how to avoid their daughters thinking of these girls as role models.

And why shouldn’t are daughters think we approve of these gals as role models? When our basic network television show stops the programming to see Paris walk out of jail, it’s obvious that even adults consider this news and something noteworthy.

So how could you pitch, say, radio programs? Change your pitching titles, but consider the audience. If I was pitching a Christian radio show my my titles would be a little softer than it I was trying to get on a secular morning show.

Think of topics one couls slant a book on morals for girls: How about:

• “5 Ways to Get Your Daughter Out the Door Without Showing Her Belly Button”
• “6 Secrets Teens Girls Don’t Want You to Know About Their Clothes and Self Esteem”
• “I Was a Slutty Teen. Now I’m a Moral Mom. How to Get Your Teen to Gain Morals Early in Life”
• “Is Your Tween Hannah Montana or Brittney Spears? How to Teach Teens to Think For Themselves and be Smart Before It’s too Late!”
• “Too Much Skin on Aisle Four! How Can Moms Expect Their Kids to Cover Up When Even They Can’t Go to the Grocery Store Without a Tank Top Two Sizes Too Small?” 

And then remember… prom season is coming up! 

• “How to Convince Your Teen to Dress Like a Princess for the Prom, Not a Slut”
• “How to Go Prom Dress Shopping With Your Daughter–Fight Free!”

And consider the fact that all of these would be a bit controversial which would mean callers could call in! You could even provide the hosts with some call-in ideas like, “What was the funniest thing your mom wouldn’t allow you to wear?” “When Mom says no! What did you sneak to school to wear that your mom wouldn’t have let you out of the house with?”

If you wanted to go all the way, you could design a shirt and throw it up for sale over at CafePress.com or have a few that go along with your theme like  http://www.teesforchange.com or http://www.jensideas.com which have positive sayings.

One book that I picked up at Costco hit this theme, Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank: A Slightly Tarnished Southern Belle’s Words of Wisdom. Sadly, the chapter on dressing six-year-olds was “laugh out loud funny” because it was to true! Believe it or not, I didn’t even get to wear the color black until I was thirteen– and then I got my first pair of black slacks. My mom and her mom both considered black an “adult color.” Sometimes I think they had the right idea.

As an author, we have to read these publications, Time Magazine, sure but Soap Digest too. If these magazines were not giving their audience what they wanted they would not still exist. And if you have a message in your book that needs to be heard, you may have to package it a bit creatively so that people want to read it.

So! Go buy the magazines! No apologies necessary. Just pick up some Fiddle Faddle and a root beer while your there and consider it all reasearch.

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Lisa and Joel Copen have a variety of experience in founding a nonprofit that receieves over 80,000 visitors per month, music and sound editing, web design, and book marketing and publishing. They look forward to your ideas to make the series of ebooks on book promotion a practical tool to help you sell more books!

Author Greg Stielstra says,

I believe the best way to understand the marketing process, the way messages are sent, received, acted upon, and spread, is to think of it as fire. I explain the process in PyroMarketing: The Four-Step Strategy to Ignite Customer Evangelists and Keep Them for Life.

PyroMarketing is a new way to think about marketing—one that acknowledges and accommodates human nature and society’s new realities. But more importantly, it takes the mystery out of word-of-mouth by reducing it to a systematic approach anyone can follow. PyroMarketing involves four simple steps:

Imagine that you are lost in the freezing wilderness (the marketplace), must start a fire to survive (actual sales of your product or service), and that you have only one match (the finite nature of your marketing resources). You may get only one shot at building your fire. So make it count.

PyroMarketing involves four simple, but effective steps.

Perhaps nothing shows the author’s committment to spreading the word than the fact that you can listen or download the entire book at his website as a podcast. This is an excellent book, and though it has some examples of Christian marketing, it’s a book for anyone to read… and learn from!

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Lisa and Joel Copen have a variety of experience in founding a nonprofit that receieves over 80,000 visitors per month, music and sound editing, web design, and book marketing and publishing. They look forward to your ideas to make the series of ebooks on book promotion a practical tool to help you sell more books!

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The Who, What, Where, and Why of Christian Book Promotion & Marketing
By Athena Dean

So, do you think every Christian needs to read your book? If you do, let us stop for a moment and get real. If you think your book is going to end up in WalMart, on Oprah, and on the NY Times Bestseller List…really, I hate to rain on your parade, but you really are setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment. It will help from the start to have realistic expectations and recognize clearly who your real market is. You must ask your self these defining questions…who, what and where? Then you must prove the why.

If you cannot narrow down your who into a specific people group, the narrower the better, the more difficult you will find marketing and promoting your book.

WHO?

If your who is all Christian, all women, all men, or all teens, then we’ve got a problem. Your goal should be to target your message to a more specific people group, like:

• New moms
• Single moms
• People in sales
• Military wives
• Cancer survivors
• Homeschoolers
• Christian writers
• Teachers
• The grieving
• Bereavement counselors
• Child abuse survivors
• Teens struggling with addictions
• Women struggling with eating disorders
• Christian counselors
• Runners or hikers
• Pastors or church leaders
• Wives of veterans
• Parents of terminally ill children
• Caregivers
• Senior citizens
• Stay at home moms
• Dog lovers
• Cat lovers
• And so on

The more clearly you can define your market, the easier it will be to find ways to advertise and promote to them.

If you are a fiction writer, make sure you include an issue in your story. Do not just have your main character become a Christian, but create someone struggling with abortion, infertility, domestic violence, infidelity, prodigal children, AIDS, homosexuality, etc. This will help you niche market your fiction title much easier since there are many support groups in the church and secular world reaching out to those dealing with issues, giving you a greater potential reading audience, again, because it is targeted.

WHAT?

Once you’ve determined the who and hopefully narrowed down your market to a niche group of potential readers, it is time to take a look at the what:

• What magazines or newsletters or newspapers or catalogs might they read?
• What radio stations do they listen to?
• What TV shows do they watch?
• What websites do they visit?
• What keywords are they typing into an internet search engine?
• What blogs do they read?

These days you see magazines, catalogs, websites and newsletters targeted for specific people groups. Many support groups have newsletters to keep in touch with their membership and typically the cost to advertise is low. Also, the chances of getting your book reviewed are much better in this type of publication than in a huge, well known publication…especially if your book offers great benefit to their readers.

All too often, authors gravitate towards the well known, full color, slick magazines like Christianity Today, Discipleship Journal, Charisma and the like. But beware…to advertise in these publications is not only extremely expensive, but typically very unproductive because the audience is so broad. You could easily spend thousands of dollars and get about as much return as flushing your money down the toilet would!

Take a few moments and come up with a list of keywords that relate to your topic. Then go to a few different search engines (http://www.google.com; http://www.dogpile.com; etc.) and type in each one of the keywords on your list. You will be amazed at all the resources you will find on the internet…and many of them are looking for important books like yours to add to their list of links and recommended reading.

The essential opportunities to look for are resources that are focused on meeting the needs of your particular people group. Whether it is a daily or weekly radio or TV show, a catalog, or newsletter, or an e-zine, blog or website, do some research to see what you can find that is dedicated to your prospective readers. Those are the kinds of websites, publications and media resources that you will want to prayerfully add to your marketing plan.

WHERE?

So where are you going to find these prospective buyers? Another reason to get as specific as possible is that you will find that the more specific the people group is, the easier it will be to find events and happenings where they might gather. Whether it’s in cyberspace, or in your physical locale, people who share similar interests or challenges tend to gather on a regular basis. This is good news for you if your book is a resource that will meet their needs.

Online

• Message boards
• Forums
• Chat groups
• Opt-in newsletters
• Targeted websites
• Blogs
• E-Zines
• Social networks (myspace.com; facebook.com, etc.)
• Teleclasses
• Web Conferences

Offline

• Support groups
• Seminars and conferences
• Bible Studies
• Book Clubs
• Conventions (annual, regional, etc.)
• Civic groups
• Churches
• Monthly membership meetings
• Christian workers conferences
• Christian Education conventions
• Street Fairs / Festivals

You’ve zeroed in on your niche market, but now begs the question…why should anyone buy your book? What do you have to offer them?

At this point the best thing you could do is get some valuable feedback. Get a group of your supporters together for a creative inspiration session. Brainstorm a list of places where you can find those who need to hear your message. While you’re at it, ask your focus group these important questions:

• What does your book offer?
• What problem does it help the reader solve?

Spend some additional time listing all the benefits of the message and then take a break. After a snack, come back together and go over the list, highlighting the most compelling and exciting benefits. These are the ones you will want to use in your sales copy in advertising, back cover copy, and a short description for a catalog.

WHY?

The truth is, people are selfish. That’s our sinful nature and there’s no getting around it…that said, most don’t really care why you wrote your book, what they really want to know is what is in it for them. Why should they take the time to read what you have to say?

Hopefully you’ve already gone before the Lord to make sure your message is His message, getting rid of anything that draws attention to yourself and embellishing whatever glorifies the Lord. With that done, you need to clearly and articulately encapsulate the benefit your book offers your reader.

If you cannot come up with sales copy of less than 40 words, then you might be in trouble. Let’s face it, people are busy. If you meet someone in an elevator; you don’t have 15 minutes to tell them about your book…you need a sound byte…a “bottom line” describing the problem that exists and the solution you offer.

You should be able to share your sales copy (or “elevator speech”) one on one in 30 seconds or less. You’ve got to be able to communicate what’s in it for the reader and be ready to expound on that as the opportunity arises. Just make sure your copy sounds natural when you say it…if it is too flowery or technical it will sound canned. It needs to be natural yet compelling to those who hear it without so many words that your listener gets lost.

As you consider the troubles you help others conquer, as a Christian writer, you are able to offer a real and enduring solution for the trials of this life. It is true that the solution is surrendering ones life fully to Jesus and becoming a disciple whose only goal is to do His will, but that does not necessarily mean that the Lord is going to solve all of our problems and we will never have to suffer.

Readers are tired of trite, superficial answers to the challenges of this life. We must, as Christian writers, give them an opportunity to go deeper and experience true life by the power of the Holy Spirit as the only solution to the issues they face.

So what are you helping your reader to overcome? Depression? Loneliness? Abuse? Unforgiveness? Anger? Betrayal or infidelity? Fear of the future? Grief over the loss of a loved one? Make sure you use this information in the back cover copy and all advertising and sales material so that your potential readers will relate based on their felt needs and see that you may have some answers for them.

In conclusion, by clearly determining who your market is, what type of media they prefer, where they congregate with others, and why they should buy your book, you have the basics that you’ll need for success. Now you can create and launch a successful marketing campaign to get your message into the hands of those who need to read it.

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Athena Dean, founder of WinePress Publishing and three-time self-published author, has coached hundreds of authors through the daunting task of book production and promotion. Over the last 17 years she has helped bring the degree of credibility for self-published works up to the high level of acceptance in the industry it enjoys today. Athena functions as Acquisitions Manager for WinePress Publishing Group http://www.winepressgroup.com and is currently the President of the Northwest Christian Writers’ Association http://www.nwchristianwriters.org Check out her You Can Do It – Promote and Market Your Self Published Book Blog at http://athenadean.authorweblog.com

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This project allows you to create your best ever collection on any subject. You could do the best recipe books ever, best quotes ever, best authors ever. I created a lens on the best Adoption Scrapbook Album ever (which happens to be my book…)

Squidoo continues to have a very high page rank for Google, so your book’s information may just pop up on top of Google from a Squidoo site when it doesn’t elsewhere, so it’s definately worth the 30 minutes or so it takes to set up.

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Lisa and Joel Copen have a variety of experience in founding a nonprofit that receieves over 80,000 visitors per month, music and sound editing, web design, and book marketing and publishing. They look forward to your ideas to make the series of ebooks on book promotion a practical tool to help you sell more books!

In my magazine, HopeKeepers, we featured an article and at the end of the article gave the author’s bio and web site. Unfortunately, her web site was www.myfirstname-mylastname.com.

When the paragraph was justified, unfortunately her bio appeared to say:

Now… the hyphen was actually in the correct place, but a reader believed the hyphen was there because of the page break (makes sense, someone on my staff should have caught that!) and she typed in the URL www.myfirstnamemylastname.com and bought one of the books from the web page, believing it to be Christian material. Needless to say, this was not our writer’s web site.

I received an email from the reader, who visited the author’s web site believing
it to be Christian material, bought the book and started reading. She was then
appalled that the woman who “supposedly had written for our Christian audience
had written a filthy, nearly-pornographic book.” Thankfully, I discovered the
error, but I wondered about the many times this must happen when people use a
hyphen in their name and it’s forgotten by the time people get to their computer.

Another reason is that as an editor and someone who is looking for authors who may be interested in being chat guests for our web site community, it’s easier for me to locate you. When
I type in your name to a search engine I am going to get nearly ever place online that sells your book. The first place I always try to locate an author is by typing
his or her name into the URL.

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Lisa and Joel Copen have a variety of experience in founding a nonprofit that receieves over 80,000 visitors per month, music and sound editing, web design, and book marketing and publishing. They look forward to your ideas to make the series of ebooks on book promotion a practical tool to help you sell more books!