BARGAIN TABLE - Part Three How not to end up on the bargain table as a remainder book. Help methods for self publishers and first time author, standard print books as well. PART THREE OF THREE (or more) I'm sorry for the delay in posting this part three of the bargain table article. I have been extremely busy. I just finished a two week, eleven city book promotion tour with a friend and am helping with the filming of a documentary up in the Ojai valley and Carmel area of California with my daughter. I'll finish that up in about another week and be back here to update everything and answer your messages then. I want to talk about using common sense in your book marketing. The examples I'm using here go from good to best in the way to promote your book and make a dent in the first printing sales numbers. The first example was an author that got a three book deal for a series similar to John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee books. The thing that worried him the most was that the publisher had only printed one thousand books. That is a pretty small number to print for the first run of any book. He knew he was going to have to help get them sold to build a fan base for selling the next books of the series and to make sure a second printing would be done. He purchased 500 books himself for reviews and gifts with the author discount to get things started. Unfortunately doing this the way he did couldn't help him impress the publishers or make the sales numbers guarantee a reprint because the publisher knew who bought the 500 books and also knew the real sales numbers were very weak at the time. The saving factor for him was a fan base began to build up as the other 500 books were beginning to be sold rapidly and people were asking the bookstores when the next volume would be available. Since the booksellers were asking for the next book and they were almost out of the original, a second printing for that first one was done with another twenty-five thousand copies printed. My next example is the first book from Deepak Chopra. The publisher printed a good first run for him because there was already a following and fan base from seminars etc. so they knew the new age people would be buying them up. It took a little longer than they thought to get them sold, but they did manage to move them. My last example is very unusual. This was a book by Wayne Dyer titled "Your Erroneous Zones". After being told about helping to do the marketing to move the first print run he began to arrange the book signing of it on his own at smaller bookstores in the same cities that the publisher had set up. He made these arrangements in advance keeping to the same dates of the appearances that had been done by his publisher. He had other booksellers order stock for him from these places and paid for them himself in advance. Then he took those same books to the other signing to let the small bookstore have another discount as he signed them. That way he didn't lose but just a small amount on the discounts as opposed to ordering at full price for gifts. After the prepaid books were gone they would take additional orders sent to the publisher to be able to receive their own discount for any more that were needed for customers that didn't get one. For those customers that had to wait for their orders to come in, he simply autographed the advertising flyer for the signing. That much activity is bound to be noticed, and it was. He is now a success. Now, not everyone needs to go through this kind of marketing. It's only when your title is not selling well. If your first book takes off and produces a steady stream of sales you are in luck, and you really only need to keep selling yourself to the world so they can't forget who you are and what you do. Let me talk a little about newsletters. You can advertise inexpensively in most of them and many, many others of them are free to subscribe and advertise in. You'll see most have a huge number of subscriptions and you can run an ad for ten to twenty dollars. The thing you should ask about here is how they distribute their newsletter. If they mail to the entire list you'll find it a great value for you. If on the other hand they only send a notice of the new issue and post it on their web site in the hopes that their subscribers stop by and read that issue, almost none will see your ad. It becomes no better that a listing service that only advertises the list itself and nothing for your book. Let's get into a few things that are free for you to advertise your work or books in and will work out better for you in promoting yourself. One of the things that will help you keep track of your sales is to offer some little free thing from your web-site when a buyer forwards a receipt to you after buying your book. This can be anything from a few of your short stories or poetry selections to a free cookbook you could get and offer from the Kedco Studios site below. Just download the Kedco cookbook and add it to your web pages so your visitors can get it directly from your secret page. Explain to your site visitors that anyone who has bought your book can send you the copy of the receipt or forward the e-mail one to you for the URL in return that will enable them to download this wonderful thing you are offering for free. http://artvilla.com/kedco-ap Simply put a page on your site that is not linked to the rest of it with a download button to click on to get the free book or what-have-you. Then when some person sends you a receipt showing they have purchased your book you can e-mail them the page URL to download the free item. I think this is a good place to end this section. In part four I will get into the details of building your own free web sites that allow commercial sales and advertising. One that will let you take orders for all of your products by many payment methods and give you a chance of being a huge success in your field. I'll show you how to design it to your needs start to finish and give you all of the URLs needed. President Eisenhower said "Pull the string and it will follow you anywhere. Push it, and it will go nowhere". These articles are the string you can pull. If you can follow these ideas and put them to work for your own successful self marketing campaign I've done my job. Sincerely Elaine