Self Publishing - Marketing
The hardest part! Wander into any bookshop and see the welter of choice.
How is it possible to make your book stand out from the crowd?
My guess is that very few self-published books, especially works of fiction,
achieve any substantial sales at all via the bookshops. Just getting
the retailers to accept your book is a major hurdle.
The skiing book referred to above succeeded because it was produced
for a very specialised, localised market. I had a substantial
list of people who had strong links with the ski school but I was
also confident that people in the Cairngorm area would be interested in
what was a slice of local history. In the event,
local shops sold about half of the 800 volumes, the rest were
distributed via mail order. I was able to get free
publicity from local papers, TV and radio stations.
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