Tag: Writing (Page 14 of 16)

Reason #65: You Don’t Know Why People Buy Books

/ Mike Nappa

A Sales Team reason for rejection

Here’s a pop quiz for you: Consumer behavior experts identify 14 “justifiers” that people use to convince themselves that it’s OK to buy something. How many of those can you name?

Ready…Go.

Done so soon?

Here are the correct answers, based on Pamela Danziger’s consumer buying research through Unity Marketing:

Quality of Life
Pleasure
Beautify Home
Education
Relaxation
Entertainment
Planned Purchase
Emotional Satisfaction
Replace an Existing Item
Stress Relief
Hobby
Gift for Self
Bought on Impulse
Status

How many justifiers did you come up with? All 14? 10? Five? One?

Chances are, even if you got some right, you simply guessed at what they were. Chances are also good that my Sales VP is intimately acquainted with the majority of the items on this list. She has to be, because those justifiers are keys to her getting people to buy your book.

Hm. There are 14 primary reasons people use when deciding whether or not to buy your book. And my Sales VP is very interested in how those reasons are displayed in your book. And you want both my Sales VP and the eventual reader to be very interested in buying your book….

So, class, what does that mean, in practical terms, for the aspiring author who wants to avoid rejection? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

The obvious answer is twofold.

First, you should make sure your book offers something that makes spending money on it justifiable to a reader.
Second, you should make sure your proposal shows my Sales VP why she’s justified in spending money to contract your book.

Sounds easy, right? Well, that dear reader, is your next test…

What You Can Do About It

1. Grade your book in all 14 areas.

After your manuscript is ready, but before you’ve written the full proposal section for it, take the list of 14 “justifiers” above and rate your book in each category. Does your book clearly, and emphatically help a reader improve her quality of life? Give yourself an A+ in that category. Does your book miss out on helping a reader beautify his home? Be honest, give yourself an F in that category.

Go through all 14 justifiers to see where your book’s strengths lie—and remember it’s OK for your book to miss out on several justifiers. The important thing is to find at least three or four A+ ratings on your list. Those then become part of the “Reader Benefits” statements that you’ll include in your proposal (see Reason #34 for more on benefits). When you highlight those benefits of your book in terms of how they motivate readers to buy, you’ll get the attention of my Sales VP (and my Marketing VP as well!).

2. Keep track of why you buy.

For the next three months, keep a record of every book or magazine you buy. Write down the title that you bought, and then in a column next to it, write down one specific reason why you bought it. If it seems to fit into one of the 14 justifiers categories, fine. If not, write down in your own words what motivated you enough to spend your hard-earned money on it.

After three months, organize your list to reflect which justifiers were most influential on your book-buying decisions. Then ask yourself, “What can I learn about book-buyer motivation from what I see in my own buying habits? And how can I use that information to help me convince others to buy my book?”

3. Read a few good books on consumer behavior.

Sure, this seems like a lot of homework for you when all you really want to do is write a great novel or the next awesome business book, but trust me, it’s worth it. Just keep a consumer behavior book on the back of the toilet at home and get that education a few minutes each day. The investment will pay off. If you understand why people buy, you can help explain to a publisher why they’ll buy your book.

There are many good books on this topic available today, but two that I’d recommend are (obviously) Why People Buy Things They Don’t Need by Pamela N. Danziger and Buyology by Martin Lindstrom.

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #66: Other Books We’ve Done Similar To Yours Didn’t Sell According To Expectations

/ Mike Nappa

A Sales Team reason for rejection

In my first acquisitions editor job, I quickly learned the importance of internal comparisons when presenting at a publishing board meeting. Regardless of what type of book I was advocating, somebody on my sales team would always ask, “What have we done in the past that’s like this book? And how did it sell?”

If I was able to make a favorable comparison (“This is like our XYZ book, which sold about 28,000 copies last year”) then I was in good shape. Ah, but if somebody was able to make an unfavorable comparison (“This sounds a lot like our QRS book, and we just got 2200 copies of that book returned from bookstores last month!”) I knew I was in trouble.

Believe it or not, this has to do with biology as much as it has to do with psychology. According to neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer, the amygdala is “a brain region that, when excited, evokes negative feelings. Whenever a person thinks about losing something, the amygdala is automatically activated. That’s why people hate losses so much.”

If your book evokes comparisons to, and memories of, the losses my company incurred on previous books, that excites the amygdala in the mind of my Sales VP. After all, he’s had to count up those losses—and explain to his boss why we’re having to write off that author advance and all those marketing expenses because his sales team didn’t sell enough copies of that book.

And so, this is another case where you are (possibly unfairly) judged by the fact that someone you don’t know, who came before you at my publishing house, caused our company to lose money on a previous book.

Yeah, some people screw things up for everybody, don’t they?

What You Can Do About It

1. Pay attention to what my company sells well.

If you’re already done your homework in the areas of market competition and differentiation (see Reasons 45, 46, & 47), then this should be easy for you. You should already know what my company sells that’s related to what you’re trying to get us to buy. So use that knowledge to point our attention toward the books we’ve been successful with, and to let us know we should expect a similar kind of success with your book.

For instance, you could say, “After seeing the success you and your sales team were able to create with ABC book, I am enthusiastic about working with you to repeat that kind of outcome with my new book as well.”

2. Make positive comparisons with popular books outside my company.

First, let me be clear on this point: DON’T compare your book’s content to the content of a previously successful book. That’s simply copycatting someone else’s ideas. If you say, “Freakonomics was about unique economic theories, and so is mine!” that just tells me you don’t have original ideas. (Yawn.)

When making positive comparisons, what you want to do is show why the audience that bought a previous book will also want to buy yours. “Freakonomics created a thirst for more accessible, interesting information about economics. My book delivers five unexpected principles that will satisfy that thirst in readers of all ages.” You see the difference?

3. Be an artist.

It’s been said that an author is simply an artist who paints with words. If that’s true, a lot of writers are still using crayons.

One way to overcome a negative comparison to a previously unsuccessful book is to make your writing such a work of art that people have a hard time saying yours is like anything else that came before it. This goes back to issues of quality and excellence (see Reason #1), but if you can create a work of art in words, that’ll go a long way toward erasing the memory of past losses in the mind of my Sales VP. As Seth Godin says, “Consumers say that all they want are cheap commodities. Given the choice, though, most of us, most of the time, seek out art.”

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #67: You Can’t Identify Specific Sales Channels Through Which Your Book Will Sell

/ Mike Nappa

A Sales Team reason for rejection

Let me ask you a question: How do you get “there” from “here”?

If you’re like most people, you map out a route that will, hopefully, get you from point A to point B in the shortest, straightest way.

Well, in the world of my Sales VP, point A is your book, and point B is the buyer who will pay cash money (or credit) for it. And the map my VP uses to get to point B is filled with what we call “sales channels”—the roads of commerce we’ll travel to get some coin for your great book.

You’re probably already familiar with the superhighways on this map—you know, the Sam’s Clubs and Barnes & Noble chain stores. And you probably know those retail roads are clogged with the traffic of all the books trying cram into those places. Your best bet for success, then, is being able to show my Sales VP a few other, potentially profitable avenues to take when selling your book.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Previously I mentioned to you my friend, Mikal Keefer. Well Mikal once wrote a children’s book about a disabled child playing wheelchair basketball. As part of his research for the book, he contacted a wheelchair manufacturer and learned all about the distinctive engineering required to make a child’s wheelchair basketball-worthy. At the same time, they learned about his cool new, affordable kids book.

Fast-forward a bit, and next thing you know, copies of Mikal’s children’s book were being included in the pocket of every wheelchair this company rolled off the assembly line. As Mikal told me later, “I had a very happy publisher.”

So what about your book? How will it get from point A to point B? Do you know? Have you given it any thought at all? If you’re like most writers, you’ll just leave that part of the equation to my sales team and hope for the best.

But then again, if you’re like most writers, you’ll also get rejected.

What You Can Do About It

1. Be aware of typical sales channels—and show how your book will succeed in selling through them.

Here are some of the most common sales channels that my sales team are working with every day:

“Big Box” retailers like Sam’s Club, Target, and Costco;
National Chain retailers like Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Half Price Books, and so on;
Independents (locally-owned bookstores);
Rack Jobbers (independent wholesalers that manage the inventory of other retailers, such as grocery stores or drugstores);
Library Associations;
Internet retailers (including Amazon) and wholesalers;
Book Clubs;
School Associations;
Business Associations;
Charity groups,
Direct to Consumer; and
any niche channels on their radar (like the aforementioned wheelchair manufacturer).

Which of these channels will your book sell through? When it’s time to predict the future sales of your book, my Sales VP will contact his key salespeople working in each of these channels. He’ll ask how many copies they can sell in their channels, then he’ll add up their numbers to get a total first-year projection in unit sales for your book.

The more channels in which your book can travel, the better it looks in the eyes of my Sales VP. And if you can add-on brand new sales channels my VP hasn’t thought of yet? Well, that’s even better yet.

2. Interview a retail book buyer.

Yes, this is homework. But it should be fun and it will broaden your understanding of the book industry immensely.

First, create a list of questions that are both sincere and not stupid. For instance, “What does a book buyer do during a typical workday?” is a sincere question. “Why doesn’t your company stock my book?” is a stupid one. Limit your questions to between 5-8 total, so that you can conduct your interview in about 15 minutes max.

Next, call the headquarters of your favorite bookstore chain and ask to speak to a secretary in the book buyers’ department. Tell the secretary you’re doing research for an article for your website or for a report for your writer’s group, and ask if one of their buyers would be available for a 15-minute interview about his or her job. Then conduct the interview—and apply what you learn!

3. Brainstorm unexpected sales channels for your book.

Of course, in order to be successful in publishing, you’re going to have to figure out how to succeed in the traditional sales channels above. However, you can add-on success by exploiting unexpected sales channels. So gather a few friends and brainstorm where those channels might be. Is yours a gift book on marriage? Maybe it’d sell in all the wedding chapels in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Is yours a medieval thriller novel? Maybe it would sell on a medieval fair circuit that thrives during the summer months. You get the idea.

If your non-traditional sales channel can generate 1,000 copies or more in sales, that’s something my VP will notice—and may reward.

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #68: Your Book Costs Too Much To Make

/ Mike Nappa

A Sales Team reason for rejection

Try this little experiment.

Go to Amazon.com and search in the books category for “greatest song lyrics of today.” Are you surprised by the results (or lack of them)? By the fact that Amazon can’t even recommend similar searches to find a full book of today’s great song lyrics?

I’m not.

Here’s why: If you were to publish a book of, say, lyrics of the top 100 songs in the past 10 years, it’d cost you a fortune. You’d have to pay a print license fee (akin to a royalty) for every single song for every single copy of the book you printed—whether the book actually sold or not. That kind of project would not only be a pain to compile, it’d cost so much to make that it simply wouldn’t be worth the investment.

Similarly, let’s say you wanted to publish a 3-D pop-up book with paper glasses attached. Sure, a remarkable few publishers could afford to do that kind of special format book (Disney comes to mind), but for most publishing houses the costs of design and printing would simply be prohibitive. I remember talking with an editor at Simon & Schuster once about a kids’ book that had fold-out pages (to create a panorama) instead of bind-in pages. She loved the concept and the author’s creative story to go with it…until the printing estimates came in. The book was a great idea, but it simply cost too much to make. Rejection.

What about your book? Does it have particularly expensive content? Does it require special illustrations or tricky design and significant investment in reprint permissions? Does it have to have special format printing or some other unique, but pricey element?

If it does, that’s probably a pretty cool book—and it probably will be rejected. Yes, some of those kinds of books do get published—but they are rare. Especially for a writer early in his or her career.

For you, then, a cool-but-pricey production or content concept will probably result in a lot of effort that generates just another rejection letter.

What You Can Do About It

1. Strip away the bells and whistles.

I know one publishing CEO whose mantra is, “People will read content on a napkin, as long as that content is compelling.” And he’s right. If your content is superb, people will read it regardless of the vehicle attached to it. So if you’re creating a cool new project and thinking to yourself, “Wouldn’t it be cool if this book also did…”, then stop and think twice.

As they say, the only thing required is what’s required. So stick with creating excellent content first, and after you’ve made yourself into a successful author, you can try adding the bells and whistles later.

2. Be more than a gimmick.

Related to suggestion 1 above, this suggestion is for those of you who are more excited about a movie’s special effects than you are about its story.

What you want your book to do is generate repeat readings, to keep bringing people back to your pages time and again. Even the most novel of innovations becomes mundane after awhile. (Remember how cool—and pricey—the DVD player was when it first came out in force? Now it’s a forgotten relic found mostly in pawn shops and thrift stores.) So don’t rely on a gimmick to sell your book idea. Gimmicks always get old, especially to a publishing pro who’s seen a lot better than what your gimmick can do.

Instead, plant your hopes firmly in the garden of your inescapable content and you should do just fine.

3. Be aware of cost-increasers associated with your book.

Full-color art always costs significantly more than two-color or single-color printing, and it practically dictates printing presses from overseas—which increases shipping and warehousing costs as well. Excessive reprint permission fees (for song lyrics or maps or graphics or excerpts from other authors’ works) can add up pretty quickly. Special formats for a book (unusual trim size or shape, out-of-the-ordinary binding) also jack up the printing costs for a book.

Pay attention to these kinds of things when shaping your new book product. If you can, eliminate any cost-increasing features that are required to produce the final product of your book. Doing that also eliminates what may later become an obstacle when my Sales VP is judging the ROI (return in investment) for your book.

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #69: You Want Too Much Money

/ Mike Nappa

A Sales Team reason for rejection

Looking back on it now, I should have just kept my mouth shut. After all, they always say the best negotiators are the ones who speak least, and last.

But what did I know? I was a young whippersnapper, fresh off a string of successes, ready to move and shake and all that other stuff that makes an agent feel more important than he (or she) really is.

I had a new book by a favorite author, and it was superb. Not only was the writing well above average, it fit so well with reader tastes and current trends that I could almost guarantee its success in the marketplace. I felt 25,000 in first year sales would be easily achieved, and (God willing!) it might even exceed those lofty expectations.

Apparently my opinion was shared, at least in part, by others because three different companies expressed initial interest in publishing. The first publisher contacted me to begin negotiations.

“What kind of advance is your author expecting for this book?” was his question.

Looking back on it now, I should have kept my mouth shut. Or, at best, I should have simply said, “What kind of advance fits with your budget?” and then negotiated from there. Instead I fired off an email: “$15,000 advance.”

The publisher quickly thanked me for my time and ended the negotiation. I was able to surmise later that his budget was more in the $5000 range. And honestly, my author would have taken that. I was the one who got greedy.

The good news is that this book did eventually sell to one of the other publishers interested in it (for a $7500 advance). The bad news is that I damaged my relationship with that first publisher by demanding too much too fast. Even though I knew his company would likely do a good job creating and selling that book, I also knew his company could never afford to pay a $15,000 advance for it. Yet I demanded that paycheck anyway.

No surprise that publisher routinely rejects everything I send him now. He probably sees my name on the proposal and thinks, “Can’t afford this guy. No sense wasting his time and mine.”

What You Can Do About It

1. Understand how a royalty advance is calculated.

OK, pay attention, because this can be confusing.

Some people think a royalty advance is a reflection of an author’s reputation, or a sign of respect shown to a writer, or a badge of honor to brag about to others in the industry. It’s not. It’s just an added risk for the publisher that’s carefully calculated based on projected income from the first-year sales of a book. There are variations and nuances to this that I can’t really cover here, but the basics go something like this:

First, the sales department sets an expected retail price for your book, the standard trade (wholesale) discount, and projected unit sales for the first year (the number of books they think they’ll sell). Trade discounts can get a little complicated because publishers also figure the ratio between how many books are expected sell through bookstores and how many will sell directly to the customer. Still, most wholesale discounts run between 40% to 65% off the retail price (depending on the size of bulk orders), so when creating a book’s initial budget, using a discount somewhere in the middle—say 50%—is pretty standard.

Next, to figure your advance, your publisher will predict first-year income by multiplying the retail price by the wholesale discount, and then multiplying that result by the projected first year unit sales. For instance, the equation for a $16.99 book with a 10,000 first-year unit sales projection would look like this: (16.99*.5)*10,000=$84,950 first-year income.

Then, your publisher will multiply that predicted first-year income by your royalty percentage rate. If, for instance, yours is a 12% net royalty on that $16.99 book, then their projected maximum first-year royalty payment to you would be $10,194.

That means, under no circumstances will you be offered more than $10,194 as an advance. In reality, you’ll probably be offered about half of that—$5,000—simply because all of the publisher’s numbers are guesses at this point and it’s always wise to hedge one’s bets a little bit. (Hey, what if your book only sells 6,000 copies instead of the predicted 10,000?) They might go up to a $7,500 advance if they like your book a lot, but that’s where you’ll likely top out.

Now, if you’ve done the math and you know that $7,500 is the top of your publisher’s risk threshold, asking for $10,000 or (like I stupidly did) $15,000 as an advance against royalties is simply going to get you yet another rejection.

Dang…and you were so close…

2. Don’t expect your writing career to support you.

Sure, someday maybe you’ll be able to quit your job and write full time. At least that’s the dream, right? But in reality, the only people who do that are a) married to someone who loves them enough to work full time on their behalf, or b) already wealthy enough that they don’t need the money they make from writing.

I know one author who has written quite a few books, even briefly placing two of them on a New York Times bestseller list. Talented guy, well-respected in his genre…and he averages $18,000 a year as a full time writer. Believe it or not, he’s one of the “successful” ones among us!

So don’t stare starry-eyed into the great blue beyond of a writing career and hope that publishing a book or two is the answer to all your financial woes and worries. View it for what it really is for most people: an enjoyable part-time job, something to do alongside a full-time career or in conjunction with a supportive spouse who has a full-time career.

3. Be willing to wait for the back end.

Whenever one of my authors is given the choice between a higher advance with a lower royalty percentage or a lower advance with a higher royalty percentage, I always recommend taking the second option over the first. Sure, a higher advance means more spending money right away, but it almost never pays off on the back end—that is, after the book is out and selling in the market.

If your book is worthwhile and legitimately salable, you want to get a higher percentage of the profits that are generated by it when it sells. Not only is that smart business, it also may be something that helps my Sales VP feel like he’s minimizing the up-front risk on your book. And that could mean a contract for you instead of a rejection letter.

Looking for more? Check out these links: