I find this blog post from the Society of Authors in France interesting because it’s what many of us perceive as the main points of debate on self-publishing.

Here’s what I agree with in this post:

- Every Author needs help. It’s real work – you can’t do it all yourself.
- Every Author is afraid of selling. We all get over it, and the faster you do, the more you’ll sell.
- Hire an Editor. I don’t care if it’s me or not, but almost nobody can edit their own work. (I should know – I’ve tried for years and it always sucks when I edit my own stuff.)
- It’s true that more people are reading eBooks, and for some, that’s definitely the way to go. (BUT: see note below.)
- Write because you have something new, groundbreaking or truly useful to say, not because you think you can make money writing about a particular topic. It is twisted but true that writing just to make money will make you poor.
- Finding alternative or unusual markets for your self-published material can be your greatest success. In fact, any truly great self-publishing success that I’ve personally experienced or witnessed has happened in this way. Don’t think bookstores – they are rarely profitable.
- A new breed of professional is definitely developing (ahem – such as Yours Truly) who is all about helping self-published Authors get their stuff out there.
- All self-published Authors need to get serious about selling from a quality website which includes an affiliate marketing plan.

Here’s what I don’t agree with:

- You don’t lose out on anything such as editing, graphic design, or quality printing if you self-publish. Anything is available to anybody these days.
- eBooks are not a direct alternative to printed book publishing. They are a different market altogether, and anyone considering the eBook route should perform market research to see if an eBook is appropriate for their market and materials. (See a future post for details.)
- You do not lose out on marketing, publicity, distribution, or reviews in the press if you self-publish. (Who ever said a traditional publisher got you all that stuff, anyway? All Authors end up doing tons of work in this area whether self-published or not. You may need help, but it’s no harder than for a traditionally-published Author.)
- Being self-published does not mean that you are not going to be of interest to agents. It means that you are going to have to approach them differently, but they will probably be just as interested if not more, because they know they’re working with an Author who is committed and hungry.
- Shipping your own books is rarely practical. There are plenty of fulfillment providers that will do this for you, and I can recommend a great guy who ships for me worldwide if you need one.
- Self-publishing does not rule out any opportunities to sell foreign rights. I don’t know where anybody got that idea, actually.
- I don’t know why an Author would want to sell their eBook to a publisher. The bulk of the cost of self-publishing is in the printing, so once that is out of the picture, why wouldn’t you self-publish?
- Here I go again, but print-on-demand is not usually the way for most Authors to publish their books. (For my reasons, just read some of my old posts.)

Every Author wants to produce the best book that they can. For some of us, self-publishing seems difficult to navigate, and we’re worried about being forced to accept sub-standard results. We worry about things like learning to sell and how we can afford to launch a national marketing campaign. The reality is that if we are treating our books as a business, we won’t have any trouble selling it. This means doing proper market research, writing very well (ie. saying something really valuable), and performing due diligence on things like quality graphic design and product creation.

In conversations with plenty of authors, self-published or otherwise, I have heard many of the same concerns over and over again. But with help, anything is possible. Always remember that another Author has been there before you, and if they did it, so can you.

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard an author say to me lately, “With all that my publisher is making me do to promote my book, I’m not sure why I needed them at all.”

Check out this very revealing and plain-facts Globe and Mail article (with the appropriately defeatist title, “Publish, and Your Book Will Probably Perish”) about the modern world of traditional publishing. Every single complaint in this article has a painfully obvious cure in self-publishing.

Basically, the article describes how when tough times happen, major publishers are no different than any other company. They usually cut back on the last activity they should ever skimp on: sales. The reason for this is simple – any entrepreneur will tell you that sales are usually the most expensive part of any business, whether it be in publicity, customer acquisition, payment for sales services, or more generally, in marketing. Accountants see dollars going out the door, and they look for the biggest column. That’s the one they chop.

One fiction author is anonymously quoted as saying, “[there has been a] …steady erosion of [publishers'] services toward creators. … [They] no longer edit or proofread as they once did, buy advertising, employ a sales force … and tour authors as they once did” – and this at a time when the books they publish have climbed in price to “the edge of affordability for most readers.” Hmm. Sounds like the only difference between a self-publishing author and a traditionally-published author is now the imprint on the title page.

Self-published or not, there is (let’s be frank here) plenty of work to promote a book and get copies sold. I’ve said before that authors often imagine that a traditional publisher will take on a significant portion of the cost involved in the promotion, thereby relieving them of the work. It’s just not true: a major publisher won’t even look at your book unless you can demonstrate that you’re really prepared to do the legwork required to promote it.

A book is a business. Micro or major, it involves about the same amount of work. If you’re going to do most of the work anyway, why not keep most of the profit? In an economic downturn, authors are actually better off to self-publish than any other time, because all authors are finally calling themselves entrepreneurs. As stated by Margaret Atwood, “The term ‘relentless self-promoter’ used to be an insult in publishing circles. Now it will be a necessity.”

The article seems to suggest (to me, at least) that major publishers are now performing services no differently than many of the print houses now marketing themselves as “publishing houses” – they hand over the book and get out. Too bad: if I had Margaret Atwood on my roster, I’d at least be paying for the wine and cheese party.

I’d love to hear what’s working for you to promote your book. What’s the best stunt you ever pulled, or the wackiest marketing promo you ever dared to do? Tell me, and I’ll talk about it on the air in a special podcast or LIVE at BlogTalkRadio.com.

We’ll be scheduling more BlogTalkRadio shows that target your hottest publishing, writing, and book marketing questions. Besides your hottest promotion tip, don’t be afraid to send me any other cool stuff that’s working for your micro-publishing enterprise.

I’ve had an expression for a number of years that I quote to clients, partners and affiliates as often as appropriate: “Every organization is a sales organization.”(c) This means that no matter what you are part of – your school, your company, your sports team, your scouting group, your religious assembly, your book project or anything else that you have on your plate – if it’s an organization that wants to grow, selling is how that will happen. This expression also means that every activity you undertake can and must relate somehow to your sales and marketing plan – even if it’s a stretch.

Because self-published authors are almost always also self-promoted, self-publicized, and self-sold authors, they must find ways to make a single selling activity work for them in more than one way. This means that they must have a good selling strategy, based on a big-picture view of their market, and they must constantly remind themselves of their “Grand Vision”, or what it is they are trying to achieve.

But when I talk about sales to some clients, they stumble and don’t know where to go with the topic. They don’t consider themselves “sales people”. This is confusing to me, because in fact, many of them are already quite accomplished at selling. They network, they fix things, they clarify, and they communicate. They do so by providing a solution to a clearly-identified problem, and not by pushing something on someone who doesn’t want what they have to offer. That, my friends, is the definition of quality selling.

Just like writing a quality book, quality selling begins in the research. For most of my authors, they are publishing to promote their current business or enterprise, or to raise their professional profile or that of their business. They already know who their audience is and what they want. Or do they?

One of the best all-around selling research techniques that is weirdly overlooked by most people in publishing is the Focus Group. This is fancy talk for “asking people what they think”. It is necessary to perform research by talking to your readers. This is not selling – this is asking. (Which incidentally, is great practice for selling.) By asking questions and stimulating discussion in a group of independent and completely objective people, you are getting the highest quality information that any sales person could ask for: somebody’s real and unbiased opinion.

For one client that I worked with, we did this in a very casual way, by having what we called a “One-Night-Reading-Stand”, where people came by a local coffee joint, and in exchange for a free coffee and a copy of the book, we asked them what they thought. The author was not present, so people were free to speak their mind without worrying about what the author might think. We recorded the entire event as an .mp3 so that I could analyze it later. The author never heard a word of the interview. I made a summary of what needed to be done, and delivered a to-do list to the author later. The participants were never identified publicly, and they ended up being advocates for the product in the market. Everybody left happy, including the author, because he knew what needed to be done to be a success.

This research is what enabled the author to tweak his product and message, and isn’t it funny how he sold out his first printing in 60 days, without having to “sell” anything? Research in this case was performed before the first printing, but this could easily be done at any point in the production process. By networking, fixing, clarifying, and communicating, the author tripled his anticipated sales.

The bottom line: selling more of your self-published books is the same as selling anything. Apply good research, create your own opportunities for publicity (the coffee shop took on the book as a product, and many people stopped to ask us what we were doing that night), network (all the people in the group ended up helping to sell the book – they were selected as “people of influence” for their role in the community that we wanted to target), fix and clarify (the messaging activity that took place that night helped us avoid some less-than-obvious pitfalls and develop clear marketing messages for the book), and communicate (everybody that entered the coffee shop that night left with a bookmark that had a copy of the URL on it, and a handful more to pass on to friends, plus we we turned the focus group into a marketing activity by submitting a press release to the local paper).

Successful self-sold books = a single activity, turned into multiple selling activities.