Monday’s planning tip for authors

Stephanie Chandler’s recent book, The Author’s Guide to Building an Online Platform: Leveraging the Internet to Sell More Books, offers numerous ideas for authors planning their first book or writing project. The strength of Stephanie’s book is its “first person” perspective as a published author, as well as an information-marketer, plus the numerous interviews that Stephanie includes with a variety of published authors. Among the aspects of the book that related to planning were these:

Choosing a book title that targets a market and offers a promise. Stephanie Chandler’s title reflects many of the characteristics of successful titles that we’ll be discussing this Friday in the August Published & Profitable end-of-month call. These title characteristics include:

• Target. “Author’s Guide” clearly indicates who should be interested in the book.
• Purpose. “Building an Online Platform” describes the book’s topic.
• Promise, or benefit. “Sell more books” indicates the benefit that readers will enjoy.
• Uniqueness. The focus on single, under-served topic positions the book apart from the numerous “how to get published” books that fail to address this single, important, subject in detail.

Realistic author expectations. One of the best quotations in the book comes from marketing guru Dan Kennedy, author of Entrepreneur Press’s No. B. S. Guides. Stephanie’s interview with Dan Kennedy contains a revealing quote that summarizes the way many successful authors view recent n excellent overview of the best perspectives I’ve seen of trade book publishing:

…the book itself is nearly irrelevant and financially valueless, unless used as a means of carrying out a comprehensive, sophisticated promotion that drives people into a single place–what we call a marketing funnel–that converts them to customers giving you money repeatedly or continuously.

Format for expert interviews. Another value idea that Stephanie included in her book was the way she conducted her interviews with published authors. Each interview is based on the same 11 questions. By creating a list of 11 questions, Stephanie created a structure for the interviews that greatly simplified the task of conducting the interviews and compiling the results.

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Relevant events: August’s end-of-month call for Published & Profitable friends and members will be held on Friday, August 29th. The call’s focus will be on choosing the right title for your book. In addition, Published & Profitable will interview Stephanie Chandler on October 28.

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