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It’s true that the winter holiday season is almost upon us but it’s not too late to sell more books.  Penny C. Sansevieri of Author and CEO, Marketing Experts, Inc. says in the article “Holiday Crunch Time! How to Sell More Books Before Christmas” that booksellers who are late to the party can still sell books during the holiday particularly if they are autographed.  She provides us with seven places to sell these books.  To get some insight into selling more books during the holidays click here.

Joanna Penn has a guest on Jane Friendman’s blog about selling more books by optimizing your metadata.   Metadata is information like categories and keywords on a book sales site.  Jane recommends the book “Let’s Get Visible” by David Gaughran.  The description on the book page of Amazon.com says:

“Take your sales to the next level! The author of the award-winning, bestselling Let’s Get Digital is back with an advanced guide for more experienced self-publishers.

There are over 1.5 million books in the Kindle Store, with thousands more added every day. How do you get yours noticed? Visibility isn’t a challenge that can be bested once – it requires continual work. But there are tools and strategies to do much of the heavy lifting for you.

In Let’s Get Visible: How To Get Noticed And Sell More Books, you’ll discover how to:

• Leverage Amazon’s famous recommendation engine to take advantage of the various opportunities it provides for exposure
• Position your books for discoverability on other sales venues
• Minimize the time you spend promoting so you have more time to spend writing
• Promote in a cost-effective way that actually works

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Another really useful site for authors is World Literary Cafe.  Join the World Literary Cafe community and find opportunities for author interviews, editors, reviewers, book giveaways, beta readers and more.  One neat feature is that you can hold and host a book club discussion of your book.  You will also find all kinds of writing and publishing advice.  Pop over to World Literary Cafe to look for yourself.

Even if you have a small fanbase interact with them weekly.  Fans love authors that take the time to interact with them and if you do your fans will recommend you to other potential readers.  You can get really creative with this but here is a list of a few things you can do to “meet” with your fans weekly:

• Hold a weekly Twitter chat.
• Create a weekly video and post on your website and social media accounts.  Ask fans to comment so you can answer their questions.
• Host a Google+ Hangout weekly.
• Have a weekly chat on Facebook.  You can post the notice of the chat on your Facebook Fan Page and have fans comment.  You can reply to comments.  Make sure you setup a regular time to start and end the chat.
• If you have local fans setup a MeetUp group to meet with fans locally.

Do you have ideas for ways to spend time with your fans?  Share it with us in the comment section please!

Authors who use PressBooks for the free ability to upload and format e-books now have a distribution option thanks to a deal made with BookBaby.  In the past if you used PressBooks you would have to export your e-book and upload it to a distribution site.  Now, thanks to a deal announced in April, you can sell your books directly from PressBooks.  There is a fee for selling on BookBaby but the convenience might make it worth it for some users.

Author Deborah Plummer has been published in the traditional, old fashioned way and she has self published a book.  In “10 Things I Wish I Knew About Being an Author That I Learned the Hard Way” she shares insights learned from going through the publishing process in two totally different ways.  To learn what she has read the entire article here.

Want to make a whole lot more from your non-fiction book — maybe even enough to go full-time? After working with 12,000+ authors over the last 20 years, Steve Harrison has learned rich authors simply do seven key things differently than poor authors.

Join Steve for a free telephone seminar on Thursday, February 21st and he’ll share those things with you. I participated in Steve’s Quantum Leap program a few years ago and it was one of the best investments I’ve ever made in myself, my business and the 42Rules series. So much so that this is one of the few programs that I’m an affiliate for (by way of full transparency. 🙂

To register go here now: http://bit.ly/VZzqTq

“42 Rules to Increase Sales Effectiveness” made the ASTD Sales Summer Reading List 2012!

If you’ve written your book don’t discount the value of international readers.  With the high cost of shipping overseas frequently increase more and more readers are purchasing e-books of various formats.  If your book is not in an e-book format you’re losing sales domestically and internationally.