Inventing Your Own Book-Selling Strategy

Sun Tzu once said, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

Most authors and entrepreneurs are familiar with tactics.

• Start a Blog site

• Create a Book Trailer

• Run a Virtual Book Tour

And so on . . .

Tactics are action items we write down on lined yellow legal paper and check off as we complete. Strategy, on the other hand, is less straight forward. The dictionary defines strategy as:

"a plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining a specific goal or result: a strategy for getting ahead in the world."

Another way of understanding strategy is that strategy bridges the gap between your goals and your tactics. Here are some examples:

• Strategy refers to basic directional decisions, that is, to purposes and missions.

• Strategy consists of the important actions necessary to realize these directions.

• Strategy answers the question: What are the ends we seek and how should we achieve them?

Once your book is written and published or self-published, you will be faced with the question of how to sell your book. If you are working with a publisher, the publisher shoulders the responsibility of inventing a strategy for your book. At least, that is how it should work, but you will soon find out that in many cases, you need to invent your own strategy.

If you are self-publishing, then the entire burden of promoting and selling your book is up to you. While you will find programs that claim they have a guaranteed "system" for selling books, most likely you will need to come up with your own strategy. Every book is different and what worked for The Secret, may not work for your book.

Since every strategy is unique, coming up with a strategy is one of the most difficult tasks author's face. Below is a sample strategy for an author whose primary target audience is female elementary teachers:

Goal

Sell 5,000 books

Target Audience:

2.4 million female elementary teachers in the US (3.1 total teachers x 79%, the percent of teachers who are women.

Strategy

Launch a three-phase rollout plan as outlined below:

Phase One

1. Focus on author's local market first

2. Author's local market has 15,000 female teachers

3. Sell 500 books

Phase Two

1. Launch in the three largest markets in the US (San Francisco, Chicago, New York)

2. These markets have a combined female teacher population of 100,000

3. Sell 1,500 books

Phase Three

1. Launch nationwide

2. Sell 3,000 books

3. Sell rights of book to a mainstream publisher

The definition quoted above says that a strategy is a plan, method or series of maneuvers to achieve a specific goal. This author's "series of maneuvers" is to first get her feet wet in her local market. She will learn how to talk to teachers, she will create and hone her tactics and she will begin creating buzz about her book.

Next, the author will hit the three largest markets. Like any general waging a war, the author has limited resources, namely time and money. By focusing on the largest markets, the author will get the biggest bang for her buck.

The author's Phase Three plan is to launch nationwide. If the author has achieved both her Phase One and Phase Two goals then her book is beginning to show a profit. With these profits, the author can invest in a large-scale plan to sell her books nation-wide. Even more important than the cash flow is that the author now knows how to sell her book and she knows that people want to buy her book. Her confidence is strong and she is willing to invest both her time and her money into selling her book on a larger scale.

The sample strategy presented here is a bridge between the author's goals and the tactics she will use to achieve those goals. Authors are fiercely independent people and when an author is armed with a strategy he or she "invented," the author has a better chance to succeed than by simply "plugging" into a system that worked for someone else.