Two Questions to Answer For Your Best-Seller by Al Lautenslager

It's Tuesday, an that means it's time for our guest contributor. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce you to Al Lautenslager, a public speaker, author, marketing consultant and Guerrilla Marketing coach. Among his books, you may be familiar with Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days which he co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson and his new book, The Ultimate Guide to Direct Marketing. Today, Al will be talking to us about what it takes to make your book a best seller.

Before we get to his post, I wanted to thank everyone for the get-well wishes. I think I am finally past this bug, but it has moved on to the rest of my family. Thankfully, we all seem to be over the worse of it.

Also, for those who wish to follow the project of my book, The Samson Effect, making it to the silver screen, you can check it's IMDb page to keep track of what's going on.

And now, on to Al's Post...


Two Questions to Answer For Your Best-Seller
By Al Lautenslager


The best books are acknowledged with best-seller status. Notice that status is not one designated as best-writer. More and more people believe that there is a book inside of them and yearn to write, yearn to create, and yearn to see that book on the shelf of bookstores. None of this yearning includes the selling and marketing of the book. Selling and marketing a book makes it a best-seller, not just the writing.

Asking those yearning, two basic questions, sets the proper marketing perspective which eventually turns into the proper selling perspective which eventually causes books to fly off the shelf but it's not automatic and it's not always easy.

Here are the two questions that every best-selling author can answer and any wannabe best-selling author ought to be able to answer:

1. Who is going to buy your book?
   
   
2. Why should they buy your book?
   

These two questions sound like common sense but the development of the answers is not common practice.

In business, communicating the benefits, what's in it for the prospect, is paramount to a sale. The same goes for book marketing, "What's in it for the reader?" In business, the next logical question to answer is what benefit am I going to get from you that I wouldn't get from the competitor. That is, by definition, the competitive advantage. The competitive advantage of your book is what the reader will get from your book that they won't get anywhere else and that is why they should by your book. Developing this and honing this takes time, great thought, challenging and sometimes testing; much like a business develops their marketing.

Many times these two questions are flushed out in the proposal process but the communication of the answers is a continuous process. In Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days, the benefits were: fresh, real world examples that matched the readers' businesses, action plans accompanying each chapter that guided the reader to implementation, and teaching readers to market without spending money, to name a few. The competitive advantage or the one that other marketing books didn't offer was the particular real world examples with the action plans. These all are very apparent now and when reading the book but when planning the marketing of the book, they were not as apparent. They needed developed. They were tested with potential book buyers and readers. They were honed to the point that it is easy to state them as done here. They were communicated over and over and over on the way to the book reaching best-seller status.

It is now going on 4 years since the first edition of Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days was released and the book still sells well. Communication of the information stated above and getting the messages to market is never ending. Selling and marketing a book is not a flash in the pan. A good book can be sold and marketed for a long period of time. Knowing who is going to buy the book and why they will buy it turns into a continuous marketing message that results in continuous sales, more products, more books, more related ways to generate income, all making a true, "best-seller." Dig deep for the answers, ask purchasers why they bought the book, and continually test the market.