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The best way I have found is through speakers bureaus, and the best one of those is speakermatch.com. This company will ask for your areas of expertise, experience, location and price range and they will match you up with companies and event planners that are looking for someone like you to speak to their group. It works like a charm. I signed up one of my authors last week and within an hour there was a nearly perfect match that offered $2500. I’m sure they won’t all be that quick and easy, but it just goes to show you that if you don’t put yourself in the public speaking market, it is that much harder for people to find you. Speakermatch is a pay service but if you get only one paying engagement a month you should come out in the black easy.

More people are using social networking than ever before and you can be on the cutting edge of this technology if you’re not afraid to get out there and “mingle.”

That’s right–mingle. Go around from site to site. Spend some time talking to friends and contacts. Don’t just post a simple “I wrote a book…click here to learn more” message and think you are utilizing the power of social media. You’re not. If that is all you are planning to do, don’t waste your time. Because that’s what it will be–a waste of time.

Facebook has walls…LinkedIn has groups…Twitter has retweets and topics of interest…your site might be a good one for StumbleUpon… Participate, don’t just send something out and expect something to happen. You need to be active in order to be successful.

You need to actually mix with the crowd…talk about what everyone else is talking about. Talk about what’s hot–use Google Trends to find out what’s hot today. Talk about it. Relate it to your subject if you can. Then look for an opportunity to bring your book into the conversation.

When you are able to mention your book without looking like you are a traveling salesman, tell them a little about it. Why they should buy it. And by all means, WHERE they can buy it. Say something like, “it’s at most bookstores and Amazon.” Or try this: “you’ve been to my website, right? That’s www.mysite.com…you can get my book there. I’ll even sign it and send it out myself.”

Look for live chats where you can chime in on a subject that is related to the topic of your book. These provide a great opportunity to sell books. One mention on a live chat, done properly in a not-too-commercial-seeming way, and contributing valuable information to the topic of discussion, can result in several sales, sometimes right away and sometimes days or weeks down the road. And remember–every sale counts.

Participating in social media sites is the key to transforming your book into a social contagion phenomenon!

Use Social Media to Sell Books Online

One of the great things about using social media, and especially if you let me help you promote your book through my partnership with Yovia, is that this is one form of marketing that, properly done, always gives you more than you pay for.

What am I talking about? Well, if you graph the clicks and conversions of your book marketing campaign using standard online advertising methods, namely ad buys on various social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc., you will see your graph basically drop to zero after your ad spend is over. That’s just the way online advertising usually works.

If, on the other hand, you decide to let us handle your book marketing, you will see a different result when your ad spend drops to zero. The graph will show a drop in

Your activity stays up when your ad spend goes down

activity for sure, but not to zero. Some level of organic activity will continue as a result of people spreading the word. When you harness the power of social media, you get people talking. They don’t stop talking when you stop buying ads.

Ad placement on social media sites is part of what we do to help you promote your book, but it is only part of the picture. We use blog posts and techniques to get other people passing your information around to their friends. Once this starts, it is hard to stop it. Especially if the content we are passing around about you book is good. In fact, it had better be good (see this blog post for more on the value of good content).

Stay tuned for more tips on promoting your book with social media. It’s the best way to sell books!

Whatever the content, it needs to have value on its own. Don’t make all your content “teasers” for your book…giving people a small taste of the story or information and trying to force them to buy a copy to learn more. Give them something they can take away…something of real value. You don’t have to give it all away, but make them feel satisfied that they came to your content. Give them a reason to come back by creating content regularly. Get their email address and send out a weekly or monthly newsletter…in each issue you can give them a reason to come back to the site and a reminder that you have a book they can purchase.

Make it easy for people to share your information by putting a social bookmarking button on your site such as AddThis on each post. This makes it easy for people to send your post to their friends. It is critical that you make it easy for people to share your information…that is how you “get people talking” and use the power of word of mouth (or word of mouse) to spread the word.

You can place ads, you can send out mailers, email, you can get booked on Oprah, you can camp out on the top of the tallest building in town until you sell enough books, but nothing gets you sales like good ol’ word of mouth.

(That Oprah thing, though, would be really good to get the word of mouth started…)

So other than Oprah, how do you get word of mouth going?

As an author, there are lots of things you can do. One is public speaking. People are more likely to buy your book when they have actually seen you in person and maybe shaken your hand afterwards. And if the book is good, they will likely tell their friends.

Notice the italics in that last line:             if the book is good.

Ah, therein lies the rub. If you want people to talk about it, it had better be worth talking about.

The same principle holds true for social media. If the book, or your website’s other content, isn’t good, nobody is going to talk about it. Or if they do, they won’t say nice things.

You can generate a lot of free word-of-mouth publicity by using your own Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and YouTube accounts. Make sure you get the word out by holding a contest and getting people to send sales your way…give away a free copy of the book each week to one friend that puts in on their social media sites. Maybe even buy an iPod and give that away instead. Create a widget and have all your friends post it.

We can help you, through our partnership with Yovia, to speed up the process of  ”spreading the word” about your new book. Contact us today to see what we can do.

If you have questions, please feel free to comment.

This has been a great barrier over the years, as finding a publisher for your book can be quite a challenge. Many now-famous authors were rejected by agents and publishers repeatedly before finally getting published.

With the advent of POD (Print On Demand), it is now possible for anyone to be a publisher. Of course, just because it can be done cheaply doesn’t mean you will do it right. There are page design, cover design, ISBN and Library of Congress numbers, copyright issues, and many other factors to consider. There is a whole area of law that covers publishing…there are many things to be concerned about.

But let’s say you have a book ready to publish, or already published. Whether you have a garage full of books, or have used a POD provider to create the book (thus you don’t have to stock them), you are faced with the same problem: How do I sell my books?

A book distributor is one way. That will help you get the books in the bookstores. But with almost 200,000 books published each year in the U.S. alone, there is no guarantee that stores will want to stock your title. In fact, if you don’t put some kind of marketing campaign behind it (that means spending money), I can pretty much guarantee you that just having a distributor won’t help you much. Believe me, I speak from experience.

A publicist, some money for ad purchasing in the magazines book buyers read (Publishers Weekly, etc) and a great website can all help. But social media can be used to great advantage in promoting a book–it can conceivably perform much better than traditional marketing efforts and will almost always be cheaper. I can show you how.

Watch this space for some tips on how to promote your book using social media.

SEO is Search Engine Optimization. It isn’t the be-all, end-all of web design, but it is pretty important. When trying to improve your search engine rankings (so your site can be found by people not looking specifically for you) you need to use all the tools at your disposal. SEO is one such tool.

Don’t believe the people that will tell you that it is an art, and only a few people know how to do search engine optimization well. It is something that you can learn. But there is an element of art to it.

The art reference comes from the need to anticipate what people will type into the search engine of their choice when they need to find information on a particular product, service or topic. You must figure out what they will be looking for, and how they will look for it. THEN you will know what keywords you must try to rank for.

Once you have a good idea of what keywords you might stand a chance of highly ranking for (the most popular keywords may already be taken by major sites with years of experience and content behind them–don’t go for those keywords), you are ready to take the next step.

You can get a lot of good information on that next step in a book called Search Engine Optimization: Your Visual Blueprint for Effective Internet Marketing. Grab a copy and get ready to wow yourself.

Chuck E Cheese and Friend

The spooks were out in force last night. I took a group of ten kids aged five to 11 on a tour of the neighborhood and we were out for about an hour and a half. It seems like the last few years have seen more and more people blowing Halloween off entirely, at least as far as handing out candy to trick-or-treaters goes. There were a few houses that went all-out this year, but we might find only one or two other houses “open for business” on the street.

Nevertheless, the kids all came home with huge stashes of candy and I had to confiscate all of it to keep them from eating themselves into oblivion before bedtime.

The most unique thing anyone in our neighborhood handed out was Chuck E Cheese’s tokens. That guy probably owns a franchise and wants all the kids to come in and play for free. I doubt he would do that to get them to drag me in there to buy pizza for them all. And more tokens.

What did your kids come home with last night? Please leave a comment.

Answer? No. But 16 million dollars is enough to put a lot of radio stations out of business. And that was the verdict. It came down today.

Baby Einstein Graphic

If, like me, you purchased one or more Baby Einstein DVDs in the period between June 5, 2004 and September 4, 2009, you are eligible for a complete refund or exchange.

Is it because the DVDs have a tendency to spontaneously combust? No.

Is it because they have small parts that can choke your 3-year-old? No.

So why the refund offer? It’s primarily because of one woman’s dislike for the Baby Einstein philosophy. Susan Linn believes that the company, now owned by Disney, claims that the DVDs are “educational” material for toddlers and she maintains they are not and has pushed hard to get the FTC to shut them down. Linn also claims that watching anything on a TV screen is bad for babies.

You can see Linn talking about her complaint on YouTube here.

The latest response from the company is here.

Personally, my children loved the music on the Baby Einstein CDs and one of them loved to watch the little puppets that were used along with the music on the DVDs. One of them didn’t care for it much.

I think it should be up to the parents to decide what their children will and will not watch, and will and will not listen to. People like Susan Linn need to get a life and maybe use some of that energy to do some good in the world, rather than trying to dictate what other families should do.

Here is information on the refund if you decide to send your DVDs back.

What do you think? Leave a comment and tell us.