How to Publish Another Book
Posted on February 18, 2008
Once you’ve established yourself as an expert or talent in a particular area, a great way to generating additional sales on your first book is to publish a second. (Of course, this assumes you have exhausted every marketing strategy for your first book project). The second time around, you will have a warmer market, a better understanding of the industry, and a working knowledge of strategies that work for you.
To help you determine the subject of your next book, consider what specialized markets might be interested in your platform. For example, after The Monks of New Skete wrote How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend (Little, Brown, 2002—Revised Edition), which has sold over 500,000 copies, they went on to write The Art of Raising a Puppy (Little, Brown, 1991).
And you never know—your second book might achieve more success than your first. After the sales of John Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill, tanked, the publisher refused to publish his next book. Grisham’s second novel, The Firm (published by Dell) hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, with Tom Cruise playing the leading role in the film version. Following The Firm’s extraordinary success, A Time to Kill moved onto the New York Times bestseller list as well.
Understand the “New Factor”: Our society is obsessed with the latest, newest thing. This pining for new products and new packaging seems to be wired into the human condition—especially the post–baby boomer generation. This helps explain why a new book or product can be more easily promoted through the media and why publishers jump when an author achieves notable success, extracting as many books and ancillary variations of the successful book as possible in order to ride the “new wave” to profitability.
This post is an excerpt from the FREE Become a Best-Selling Author eBook, 60 Effective Strategies for Selling More Books. Download it here.
Posted in Publishing
