Writing a book is a huge task, but it can be very rewarding. There are various criteria for assessing if your book is a success. Some of these yardsticks are:
Did your book reach the intended audience?
Does your audience find your book useful?
Is the information contained in your book relevant and verifiable?
Can your readers understand the message contained in your book?
These are some of the criteria for checking how successful your book is. However, for a book to be termed ‘truly successful’, it has to provide you with some remuneration from your intellectual work.
No matter what an author’s initial goal of writing a book is, the financial reward is the ultimate benchmark for how successful a book is.
So, how do you make your book a success?
Write Good Content
You must pay attention to your content if you want to make your book a success. The heart and soul of any book is its content. If you want to make your book a success, you must write good content.
Map out your storyline well and flesh it out adequately.
Ensure that your plot has no loopholes that leave your readers with more questions than answers. Be consistent in your language and style. Let your narrative progress in a way that excites your readers to keep reading.
Get professional proofreaders and editors like us at My Sharp Pen Editing Services to ensure that your book has no spelling and grammatical mistakes that could turn off your readers.
Let your language be suitable for the audience you are writing for.
Write on each sub-topic with as much depth as is needed. Whatever genre you are writing on, make sure your book is worth reading not just once but over and over again.
Catchy Book Cover
The first thing your readers will see before they get to your text is your book cover. So, if you want to make your book a success, you must have a catchy book cover.
Your book cover is the initial attraction. That is what makes someone pause and consider buying your book. Have this in mind when you create a cover for your book.
Book covers can be of any colour. However, covers of some of the most successful books in the world have one thing in common: they have a bright-coloured theme or background.
Bright colours like red, white, blue, green etc. are attractive. They catch the eye effortlessly. It also helps if you have a large font or an attractive image on your book cover.
Catchy Title
Titles that are easy to understand help make your book a success. A book title is more than just a name for your book. It is a name that captures the essence of your book. A successful book title is one that at first glance tells your readers what your book is about. The simpler the title, the better.
Vague book titles do not encourage a second glance or consideration.
In a fast-paced world full of books and other kinds of content, readers do not want to waste their time trying to understand what your book title is trying to say, or what your book may probably be about.
Your title should be so easy to read, that even a child understands what it means.
However, while going for a title that is easy to read, ensure that your title actually says what your book is about. It should not be unrelated to the actual content of your book.
Effective Marketing
Having put your book out there, you don’t just want it to sit on the shelf. People have to buy your book, if it is to be considered a success. Just like with any other product, you need to market your book to your intended audience. There are various channels through which you can market your book: online and contemporary media.
You could also market at various times in the publishing process. You could market a book before it is out in the bookstores. This is called the pre-order stage: where you have people pre-order and pay in advance for your book.
Another stage at which you may market your book is during its launch. Attendees could pay the minimum amount fixed for the book, or even more than that if they want to support the launch.
There is also an option of having post-launch marketing where people can immediately buy your book from the shelves and bookstores. Effective marketing has a huge role to play in whether your book is a commercial success or not.
To make your book a success through and through, it has to be commercially successful as well.
Useful Revisions
There are some books, under certain genres, that need to be revised from time to time. Books on current affairs and academic books are some of such books. Revising your books, as and when necessary, helps you keep your content up-to-date and relevant to the readers.
Updating the facts and information in your book to tally with the current data is essential, so that your readers are not misinformed, and your book does not become obsolete.
Remember that in order for your book to remain successful, it has to remain relevant to the audience.
Apart from revising your book, you could also translate it into other languages. With this, you would not only have readers who read the language in which the book was originally written, but you would also reach people across many other countries who read other languages.
Having various translations of your book would help you break into a new market and increase your chances of making much more sales.
Continuous Marketing
When your book is out there and people are buying it, it’s time to relax and let the sales roll in right? Wrong. You need to keep marketing and telling more people about your book. There are people who have never heard about or read your book.
You need to reach out to such people. Don’t limit yourself to the segment of people who have already heard about or purchased your book. In order for sales to keep coming in, expand your audience and reach even more people.
If you had previously marketed your book to only people in a certain country, you could expand your reach to other countries.
You could also market on another social media platform. Continually marketing your book is going to make it not just a one-hit success, but a continuous success that keeps generating passive income for you.
The success of your book is dependent on what you do in the creation process and what you do after creating your content. A successful book must also be a profitable book.
If you have followed these 6 steps above, you are likely to make your book a sustained success.
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