Writing Wednesday: How to Sell Books

Anytime I go to a bookstore, do you know what section of the store seems to have the largest number of books? The section that is full of books on how to get rich. If you want to sell a lot of books, it seems, you should write a book about how to get rich. Whether you are rich yourself is not important. Neither is having made your money yourself. Just inherit it, then write a book that has tired advice that worked for people decades ago, and you will have a bestseller on your hands.

Why?

Because people want to believe that making money is easy, and that if they buy your book, then they will be able to avoid all the traps that everyone else who has been investing for years falls prey to.

The other guaranteed bestseller? A diet book that explains how to diet without ever feeling hungry. Ten easy steps to losing weight that are brand new and never heard before. And easy. Just eat this soup every day and the pounds will melt away. Just cut out all red foods from your diet and the weight will magically disappear. The Hostess diet, eat twinkies and dingdongs every day for breakfast and lose weight like I did. The all-meat diet, eat steaks at every meal, and you will never have to diet again. Because all the known advice on how to lose weight is wrong. The whole history of human experience is wrong. You can eat whatever you want, and if you do it standing on one leg, then you will lose weight.

Why?

Because everyone in America wants to lose weight and no one wants to do it by following the real rules. They already know what the real rules of weight loss are. They want to be lied to. They really do.

In the book world, the variation of this seems to be people who write books about how to write books and make them into bestsellers. The reality that this is something that cannot be guaranteed, is not something anyone wants to admit. Yes, we can control what readers buy by tweeting on a regular basis, by blogging and linking to other blogs, by placing ads in magazines and on-line, by going to conferences, doing book signings, and on and on. These are GUARANTEED ways of becoming a bestseller for years on end. That's what people want to hear, and that's what sells these books. But no one ever thinks of the fact that if things were so easily manipulated, every publishing house in the world would already have a handle. No one would buy books that don't sell for millions of dollars. There would be no mid-list.

One of the things I tell my kids often is: If it sounds too good to be true, it is.