Why Books Don’t Sell

Why Books Don’t Sell
February 7, 2018 Maggie Lynch

The number one complaint I hear from fellow authors is that their books aren’t selling. That’s why I’m offering a FREE course to look at the top 5 issues you can fix immediately to help discoverability.

It’s one of those ah ha moments when a new author puts up the book she has worked on–sometimes for a year or more–and it sells a few copies quickly to mom, sister, brother, and a couple of best friends. Then crickets.

What’s even worse is if the same thing happens on the next book and the next. I saw some sad statistics last year about indie author sales. That is the average self-published author makes less than $500 on their book. Granted, among the 1/2 million indie books put out every year, a good portion are not intended to be a commercial success. However, there are also many books–good books–that are put out and also fall in that less than $500 per year income category.

There are many reasons poor sales happen with good books, and I could spend a year talking about that on this blog. However, I have a FREE video course for you that covers the top five reasons why books don’t sell with specific things you can check on YOUR book to see if it needs some tweaking.

Image for video course. Why Books Don't Sell: How to fix issues and increase discoverability

Why a video course? I’m trying to keep up with the way people want to learn. We are all busy and students who want the information live all around the world. This allows people to get the information at the times they are available and to go through it at their own pace. Also, being in video, it allows someone to come back to it again and again. I know when I take video courses, I can only take in so much new information–even when it’s useful. Sometimes I don’t get around to implementing the suggestions until a few months down the line when I have the bandwidth to handle it.

When I began giving workshops on self-publishing topics back in 2011, it was always face-to-face. I did that a lot until around 2013 when I found that people just couldn’t make the time to come to an all day workshop or travel for a couple hours to the venue. In 2013 and 2014 I started doing my workshops online with discussion forums and written handouts. Around 2016 students topped attending those as well. Again it wasn’t about the information, it was that the course was time limited. Things would happen in their life and the two weeks or a month scheduled for the course would disappear before they really had a time to interact.

In mid 2016, I made the commitment to put all of my courses into video so people could take them whenever they wanted, come back again and again–even years later–and not feel like they had to stick to a fixed schedule. So, this is the first of those video courses.

This one has a total of seven modules. The first six are all solid instruction (about two hours total). You can also download the transcripts and the slides to refer to during the instruction or later. The seventh module talks about the other courses I offer. Yes, those others DO cost money. I’m just being up front with you. As much as my altruistic side would love to make everything I teach free, I can’t afford the time it takes to create these and give them away for free. It takes significant time away from writing my novels and my nonfiction Career Author books.

Even if you decide to never take a paid course from me, you will always have this one to return to whenever it’s needed. So, I hope you check it out. https://aww-on-the-go.teachable.com/p/why-books-don-t-sell-how-to-fix-issues-and-increase-discoverability Of course, if you are really happy with how your books are selling it means there is nothing for you to learn here. You already have it dialed in. For everyone else, I suspect there will be at least one thing that may be helpful to you.

Enjoy!

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