Sunday, February 19, 2006

Reasons Not to Write: What's Yours?



What's your excuse for not writing? I've certainly got plenty of my own.

The above cartoons courtesy of Sam Morrison, author of 101 Excuses Not to Write, and blogger at http://www.101excusesnottowrite.blogspot.com.

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Business Books vs. Agents or PR Services

RainToday.com recently asked business book authors how many copies of their first business books were sold. Here is what they found:

4,500 -- Median number of copies sold where the author did not use a book publicity or marketing service.

5,000 -- Median number of copies sold where the author did not use a book agent.

10,000 -- Median number of copies sold where the author used a book publicity or marketing service.

12,000 -- Median number of copies sold where the author used a book agent.

What does this mean for you? Perhaps nothing at all, perhaps a lot.

It says that business book authors benefit from hiring a publicity service and even more by hiring an agent. What it doesn't say is how much the PR services cost the authors versus the money they received from book sales. But, then, most business book authors don't care about the book income since they expect to earn income from increased speaking and/or consulting income.

Why did hiring an agent increase sales for business book authors? If the author had an agent, then he sold the rights to a larger publisher who had better distribution and maybe better marketing than an author who chose to self-publish. Better distribution will almost always result in greater sales. Better marketing will as well, if it really is better marketing.

Click on RainToday.com to read the entire study.

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Instant Books from Your Blogs -- WOW!!

It's now possible to create a PDF ebook out of your LiveJournal and DeadJournal blog entires. Check out the service at LJBook.com. Once you've produced your PDF ebook, you can use Lulu.com or another POD firm (see list of such firms at http://www.bookmarket.com/ondemand.html) to produce printed books one at a time.

For your WordPress and Blogger blogs, check out http://www.blogbooker.com.

Blog Booker
blog comments powered by Disqus