I have completed the secod draft of my next non-fiction book, tenatively entitled, “Practical Money Making-Surviving Recessions, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement”. It is not quite as long as the longest pop song title in the world, but it is up there in terms of number of words. When you are self-publishing, you are already swimming against the tide in the internet ocean. You are competing with book chains, their websites, other authors, other bloggers and apathy.
One of the best ways to get your book noticed is to make it unique. I’ve tried to do that with some of my other books on poker, on Rett Syndrome, tax preparation and dice and have had moderate success. This new book is going to be interesting because the title is going to be so long.
The theory behind it is that the book will be easily picked up by search engines when readers like yourself try to find out information on making money. As Morris Rosenthal had pointed out once, it is a lot easier to be found if you are in a unique enough niche but the problem is can you make a profit from writing a book in that niche?
RIght now we are in state of flux. Some of the change is good and some of it isn’t so good. There are a lot of people out in the United States who are losing their homes, their retirement, and don’t know what to do. If they have special needs children or people that care in their house, it is even harder for them. I hope that my book will at least give them direction, some inspiration and some pointers as to what they might be able to do to help extract them from their situation.
The problem I run into as a publisher, is that when it comes to money or savings or income, the internet is swollen with people trying to cash in on the words, pages or anything to get views. A lot of it is spam, get rich quick schemes. Some of it is legit and quite informative. As others have stated, you have to get creative to become a clear signal from all the noise that is generated from the internet.
I tell people who are trying to self publish to try and come up with something unique but accurately defines their book if they are trying to market it. There is a lot of information on trying to find key words that are easily searched. If you tend to go with these words the risk you run into is that you will be caught in the blizzard of spam and other people trying to cash in the same way you are. One of Kim’s rules of being profitable is trying to do something different that the other person isn’t doing. Even if it is only slightly different because the market is so large, it still pays to try to do something to give it your brand.
In hard times, people really want honesty as well as money. A lot of people feel disgusted because their investment brokers, their former employers and their government have betrayed their trust. It pays to be honest if you are writing non-fiction and that in itself should help generate word-of-mouth sales and buzz to sell your book.
For fiction, I suggest you put up samples of your work. Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. There isn’t anything new under the sun and if you are worried, pay for a copyright before you post it. The only way that you will be discovered of creating the next Hobbit or Harry Potter or Dean Koontz book is for you to be out there. In keeping with my being brutally honest, fiction is A LOT harder to sell than non-fiction.
The reason is that fiction is very subjective in taste and what you find boring I might find exciting and original and vice versa. Non fiction is basically the facts and straight information. People usually don’t care who they get the information from.
Tying that back in from where we started, one way to stand out to shout “Hey I have the information you want at a moderate price” is to have a title that people can find or at the very least is unique.
The way I figure it, if they can’t remember the title, remembering “Kim Greenblatt” might be easier.
Don’t forget to post sample pages of your non-fiction on your website or blog. Listen to the feedback you get. Before you invest too heavily in your time and effort, make sure that there is a market – as well as an undogly long name-for what you are trying to do!
Kim
Kim Greenblatt
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