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Welcome to Season 2 of The Book Marketing Action Podcast with Becky Robinson, where we give you information that you can immediately implement to increase your influence and market your books more successfully. In this episode, we are joined by Todd Sattersten—Publisher at Bard Press, “Producing One Best-Selling Business Book At A Time.”
Key Points From This Episode:
[01:14] Todd shares about his work in the world and his books.
[02:45] What is required for an author to successfully market and sell their book?
[03:39] Todd talks about the idea that you have to get the problem right and how he thinks the book, The ONE Thing, demonstrates that principle.
[09:54] What’s the difference between selling books and marketing books?
[13:51] Todd shares, as it relates to sales and marketing, tactics that he recommends that apply universally.
[21:01] Todd explained that a business book author who can sell 10,000 books in the first year is more likely to sell even more across the lifetime of the book. He talks a little bit about that data, how he gathered it, and why that number of 10,000 is so important.
[25:09] Todd believes that it’s critically important for authors to invest in a book over the long haul. Can you talk about why and how that relates to the 10,000 copies in the first year?
Action Steps:
- Take a look at your book description. If your book is already out or if you’re in the process of preparing for a book proposal or a book, you can really think through your book with the three questions: 1. What? 2. So What? 3. Now What?
- Create a Sales Plan. If you have a marketing plan, it’s not enough. You also need a sales plan. Todd’s recommendation around a sales plan was to open a spreadsheet and start thinking about the people who can buy your book, and how many copies they might buy of your book, and to not only think about the people who need the answer to the problem that your book is solving, but also the people who just care about you personally and what you’re doing in the world.
Resources:
Learn more about Todd Sattersten.
Check out the book Todd Sattersten co-authored, The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.
Get a copy of the best-seller book, The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results.
Sign up for Todd’s free newsletter for detailed and unique riffs about what he sees going on in business book publishing.
Connect with Todd on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Tweetables and quotes:
I think that if you don’t get the book right, it doesn’t matter how much advertising and marketing you do. The book is not going to be successful. So make sure that you get the book right.
I think your ability to pull the message from the book into the marketing and selling, if you do it right, ends up becoming, I’m not gonna say easy, I’m gonna say easier.
Marketing can do lots of things for the author, it can raise profile, it can create other business opportunities, but just remember, when we’re launching the book, we want to connect it as much as possible to the actual selling of the book and the selling of the product.
The combination of the book, the author, and the audience, they’re so context specific, that we need to build a marketing and sales plan that matches that.
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I am the founder/CEO of the Weaving Influence team, the author of Reach: Creating the Biggest Possible Audience for Your Message, Book, or Cause, and the host of the Book Marketing Action Podcast. I’m a wife and mom of three kids, and I enjoy running, reading, writing, coffee, and dark chocolate.