Top Ten Reasons Why Your Book Isn't Selling

Do you believe you are doing everything right, but feel you are still not getting the results you hope for? Marketing a book requires a laser sharp, targeted approach. Listed below are 10 reasons why your book marketing plan may fail.

1. YOU (AND YOUR BOOK) MAY BE INVISIBLE
Recent studies show that an extremely high percentage of buyers state that the Internet is not just a choice - it is instead the ONLY choice. Even those who intend to buy in the 'real' world often do their research on the Internet before venturing out into that real world to purchase products and services.

Buyers must be able to find you. But they will NOT search by your name or your book's title. They will instead search using a very generic phrase like 'children's book' or 'thriller' or 'spy novel'.

Studies show that hardly anyone goes beyond page three of search engine results. So, you must be on one of the first three pages for the GENERIC SEARCH TERM (like 'children's book) that describes your book. Go to a search engine and check this. Type in the generic phrase that describes your book and see if you are on the first three pages of search engine results. If you are not there, you are virtually invisible. If you are invisible, nothing else you do will matter much at all.

2. YOU MAY BE USING THE WRONG APPROACH
Marketing in the Internet environment requires a completely different approach. If you are using methods and strategies proven to work in the real world in the past, these old school strategies will most likely not work much at all in an Internet marketing environment. Even if you are using that old marketing model perfectly, you can still fail miserably in the Internet environment.

The old saying 'Build it and they will come' has been changed to 'Build it and they will likely ignore you'. To achieve sales success, you must have interested traffic, and you must have a lot of it. You must know how to convert that traffic into sales. All the traffic in the world will not matter if it does not convert to sales. Converting traffic to sales is no small task.

3. YOU MIGHT HAVE NEGLECTED YOUR SEO STRATEGY
In the 'old days' (just a few years ago), the strategy was to tell as many people as possible about a product and hope that a percentage of people responded by buying the product (this is called an outbound strategy). But the Internet is search engine driven (requiring a laser sharp INBOUND strategy).

Today the potential buyer begins by typing a generic phrase into a search engine, in essence saying 'Here is what I'm looking for'. Your book site is then indexed by the engines based upon how important it appears to be in regards to the generic phrase entered and in regards to how you stack up against the competition for that generic phrase. This is 180 degrees from the old school, real world model.

Search engines rule this environment. THEY decide who is important and are the equivalent of the traditional Yellow Pages. However you will only be listed in THIS one-of-a-kind gigantic online yellow page directory if you understand and follow the SEO rules given you by the engines. If you don't know and understand the rules, you will be at the end of the listings. And, if you are at the end of the listings, no one is going to find you, as they will likely look at just the first three pages.

Imagine having your business banned from the yellow pages in the real world. Not having a great SEO strategy is the same thing. As far as the searcher – the book buyer - is concerned, you will not exist. This is especially true if the Internet is the only tool the buyer will use.

4. YOU MIGHT NOT BE COMMUNICATING SAYING WHAT YOUR BUYERS WANT TO HEAR
Let us suppose that the buyer does find your website. Now what?

Understandably, many authors like to talk about themselves - but the buyer is not really interested in your history, how you came to write the book, what lead you to write it, how you struggled. They want to know what your book will do for THEM. You must speak to THEIR NEEDS SPECIFICALLY. If you do not do this and do it well, you will have a visitor, but not a buyer.

You must get that desired message to them in under 30 seconds. You must know what THEY really want, and you must provide it more effectively than the competition. If you are not saying what the buyer wants to hear, they will likely never buy your book.

5. YOU MIGHT NOT BE COMMUNICATING A STRONG BRAND
Remember - to the Internet searcher, you are but one of millions. You may look like everyone else. Your book may be 'just another book' to that shopper. What are you telling the visitor that NO ONE ELSE is saying? Without a sharply researched brand, you will appear to be just like everyone else.

6. YOU MIGHT NOT BE POSITIONED PROPERLY
Type the phrase 'children's book' into the Google engine today (May 1, 2011) and you will get over 30,900,000 hits. That is your competition. Every one of those pages is presented to that shopper. Your book is just one of them. You know your book is not like all the rest, but they do not. What have you done to take a strong position in regards to the competition you face?

7. YOU MIGHT NOT BE USING A STRONG CALL TO ACTION
All marketing sites are websites, but not all websites are marketing sites. Your site must be sharp, clean, clear and it must brand you and position you better than the competition. You must provide a logical, step-by-step map for the visitor to follow and you must have compelling calls to action in all the right places. If you do not do this, you will end up with visitors. Remember: a visitor is not a buyer and won't become a buyer without a sharp brand, proper positioning and a strong call to action.

A website is a website is a website. Anyone can build a website. A book marketing website, on the other hand, should be a results-producing machine.

8. YOU MIGHT BE BORING THE BUYER
No, you are not a boring person. But do remember always that the attention span of the searcher is very, very short. There are millions of competitors, just one click away. You have 30 seconds to present the brand, the position and the primary reason why someone should buy YOUR book.

9. YOUR APPROACH MAY BE SELLING, RATHER THAN TELLING
When fishing, no one jumps into the water, jams the hook into the fish's mouth and tries to force it to bite the hook. This is what many selling strategies are like.

If you yell in people's ears, attempting to jam your really great hook in their mouths, don't be surprised when they run away. (Think about how you feel about spam, pop up ads, Twitter-blab and commercials). No one likes to be sold.

Instead, in this environment, you must (much like fishing) offer irresistible bait instead. The fish will then come running, they will tell all their friends and they will bite willingly.

10. YOUR EXPECTATIONS MAY BE SET TOO HIGH
Don't put up a website and believe people will magically just show up. They will not.
Don't put up a website and expect people to buy, (if and when they visit). They will not.
Don't put up a website and believe you are finished. You are not.

In the real world, building a successful business takes years and a great deal of effort. In the Internet environment, building your online store will take just as long - perhaps longer. It will require just as much work to make it succeed - perhaps more. The Internet is not a magic bullet. It is a different style of business. A real world business may have a few competitors just down the street. Your Internet business has millions of competitors, all right next door, just one click away.

In this environment the whole world is your potential buyer base. But this will not matter if you don't learn how marketing really works in this environment. If you are not getting good results, don't complain - instead, get some help.

Looking for some real help? Click here

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Book Marketing - Selling Your Work In An Internet Marketing Environment

If we can believe the numbers, somewhere around 800,000 self published books hit the market last year. Imagine this:

You walk into a library. The library contains over 300 million books.

'Show me everything you have in the way of children's books,' you say to the librarian.

The librarian hands you 38 million index cards.

'Oh, wait a moment,' you exclaim, 'I only have time to look at 20 or 30.'

Now the librarian, whose name happens to be Ms. Searchengine, decides which 20 or 30 of the 38,000,000 cards she believes to be important and hands them to you. The rest simply disappear from your vision. The other 37 million plus books become invisible to you.

This example seems extreme, but the numbers are close to being correct. There are over 300 million sites on the Internet. People, not knowing an author's name or title, will search using a generic phrase such as 'children's book'. Some search engines will return over 38 million hits for such a phrase. And most searchers will only look through the first 20 or 30 search engine results before stopping.

If you are the author of a children's book, this is very close to what you will face when attempting to get some notice for that new book you have slaved over. How does one overcome this mind-numbingly difficult situation?

Niche marketing.

Yes, I know - the very phrase 'niche marketing' has become a cliche. It's been overused. It has never been overdone.

In the past, marketing was primarily a game of numbers. As marketing professionals we came to expect about 1/2 of 1% rate of return. If we sent 1000 postcards bulk mail to a list, we could expect that about 5 people would respond to that mailing (assuming they had shown no prior interest in the subject of the mailing). If we instead used a targeted list (for which people had previously shown an interest in the product being presented), the numbers went up.

Many people panic when they first hear about a rate of return of just 1/2 of 1%. 'Oh,' they say, 'that means I will need to get 1000 visitors to my site to sell just five books! I only get about 20 or 30 visitors a day! It will take forever to be successful."

While on the surface this may seem to be a depressing situation, the inbound nature of Internet marketing actually makes it much easier to enjoy larger conversion percentages. Why is this so?

If an Internet surfer types 'children's book' into the search engine, what are they interested in?

Children's books.

If your site is optimized for that phrase, they will find you - maybe.

This actually means that not some, but rather every person who that author's site is interested in what that author is offering. All of them. Every single one.

However the real key in inbound marketing is to be found by those who are looking for you - to be one of the first 20 or 30 presented by the search engine for that very generic search phrase. They do not yet know the author's name. They do not yet know the title of your book. That is an extremely difficult task for some.

This is precisely why strategic search engine optimization is so important to anyone marketing anything on the Internet. This is especially true for marketing books. Try to imagine what might happen if 800,000 new hardware stores opened in the US every year. Year after year after year. Yet this is what is happening in the field of book marketing. And that is why you will want to get serious about SEO if you intend to market your book in an Internet marketing environment and this is also why you want to learn as much as possible about the search habits of your niche market.

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