Part Two: Sales Targets & Solid Foundations
Part Three: The Marketplace, Your Product & You
Part Four: Branding - Why Your Book Cover Matters
Part Five: Top Five Marketing Dos & Don'ts
Part II
Sales Targets & Solid Foundations
Part II
*SIDE NOTE: By 'traditionally-published' I mean published by one of the big, well-established publishing houses—the kind of house that's willing to unleash an entire marketing team behind your book series, the kind that's going to get you in magazines, on all the big web sites, on TV, youtube, and put you on extensive book tours. So, for the sake of this series, I'll be counting all the small ePress publishers as independents.
- Pick your target market (smallest, most focused sub-genre on Amazon). Mine was Sci-Fi/Genetic Engineering.
- Find four best-selling books by four different best selling indy-authors within that target category. These should be books that you think your readers will also enjoy.
- Study these authors. See what they're doing to market themselves—this includes their online presence, who they picked to edit them, who designed their covers, and in some cases who published them if they went with a third-party publisher.
- Lastly, research how many books they sell, by month, by year and by total sales. There's a few ways to do this. The easiest is to look them up on a sales tracking site. You can also estimate their sales by their Amazon ranking. If they're ranked between 2k and 3k, then they're selling around 1000 books a month. If they're in the top 1000, then they could be selling a few hundred copies a day. Top 100 ranking means they're selling thousands of copies a day! Use this data to determine your sales target and time-frame to reach that goal.
Next Week: THE MARKETPLACE, YOUR PRODUCT & YOU
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