You’ve written a book and had 250 copies printed, you’ve sold two to your in-laws – now what do you do to get the rest of your $1,000 investment back?

Here are some 8 proven methods to enhance your sales

1) The Chain Book – Start you own bookstore utilizing “The Chain Book”. In 1932, a starving author wrote a book about fisherman and a haddock. Although the book was beautiful he had no sales, so he decided to start a club to allow everyone to make money. To start with, he put 24 similarly broke author’s names on a list and sent them a letter explaining his new book club. He instructed them to send a copy of their book to the person whose name was on the top of the list. Then each person was to remove the name of the first person from the list, add their name to the bottom and send the new list to the others on the list. Within just a few weeks 6000 books would arrive at their door to start their own book store – if no one breaks the chain of the book club.
2) Start a Writers Workshop – Teach a class for the workshop and force the student to purchase your book as a textbook and then revise it annually, so it can’t be sold to the next years students. Include lots of blank pages for class notes.
3) Share your vision – Proclaim your own religion or philosophy, become tax exempt and claim your book was a vision from God to be distributed to the chosen as a bible. Share the good news for a small tax-deductible donation. Salvation available for the truly devout.
4) Christmas Book Club – contact a grocery store and sell them on the idea of using the book as a shopper’s premium. For each $50 spent in their store, the manager would put in an “Order” for a chapter of the book for that customer. (The number of chapters could be negotiated with the store). When the shopper attains all the chapters of the free book, the loose pages would be delivered to the store where a display of beautiful covers would be for sale to complete the offer.
5) Build a Busy Bee Book Club – Parents would bring the child to the store on his birthday, along with his friends, to build a special book. For $25, each child would be given a blank cover that could be filled with pages from your book. Of course the child could color and decorate their own book to their specific taste. Special fonts and binding would be available for a small extra cost. For very special children, paid craftsmen could build the book and a professionally colored covers could be installed. A special handwritten note would be included in the jacket telling them to have a happy birthday for an extra charge.
6) Limited Edition Copies – Obtain an “exclusive” list of customers from your local phone book.
Send each a letter explaining how they are part of a “select” group of people who have been invited to purchase a Limited Edition Copy of your book. Of course these books are signed and numbered by you and shipped directly to the customer for a premium price. Extra non-exclusive copies would also be available for use as Christmas or Birthday Gifts at a lower bargain price.
7) Plant a Tree and a Book in Lebanon – To help with the reforestation of Lebanon, you would pledge a percentage of your book sale profits to be used to plant Cedar trees in Lebanon. Explain with a lot of book sales, plenty of water, and two or three hundred years, a wooden ship building industry could start again because of these fine patrons.
8) School Book Fund Raisers – Busy students are happy students, put them on the team by sending them home with ten books, of which the parents must purchase 9 that can be resold for $8 each. The tenth book could be kept at home or used for a fun Christmas gift. Extra sets would be available for the student overachiever.

For other great ideas and promotional items, Clarence Holm will soon be releasing his latest book with pre-sale pricing now available. Contact Clarence for group pricing discounts.