Last year over 200,000 million books were self-published. The average self-published book probably sold less than ten copies.

The reasons for a book not to make it are many. Most self-published books need much more time, energy and yes, money, put into them than the author expects. If you plan to self-publish, here are ten important factors that stop most self-published books from making it big.

1. Poor writing. You cannot be your own judge. Nor can you expect your mother, siblings, and best friends to give you honest feedback. Your best and honest feedback will come from readers who judge your writing by the book they hold in their hand. Offer your book for free or at a low price and pay attention to the feedback. If it’s bad, don’t despair. Keep writing. You will get better.

2. Little or poor editing. No one can catch their own mistakes. You are too close to it. Besides missing some of the basics like grammar and punctuation, the vision that is in your head does not always come out in the writing. What makes sense to you may not be conveyed clearly enough to the reader.

3. Poorly designed cover. Covers sell the book, even for ebooks. Many authors think they can skimp on this point and still make sales. Not going to happen. Even if you know how to use Photoshop or other graphic design programs, if you have not studied book cover design and have knowledge of what is hot in today’s cover market, you will be losing sales.

4. No word of mouth. Thousands of authors work hard to create a book and then do little or nothing to start a buzz. Word of mouth rarely just happens. Authors need to start spreading the word in as many ways as possible.

5. No blog or little blog activity. This is one of the most important things you can do to promote your book. A six-month-to-a-year lead of building a blog presence is a necessity for self-publishing authors.

6. No social media. When it comes to selling books, who you know is going to be as important as what you know. And the more people you know the greater chance of success you will have in starting word of mouth. Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms are good places to start. Of course, you won’t have time to commit to all of them, but find one that you can relate to and start making connections.

Even good books will flop if no one knows they exist. As a self-publishing author, you have to promote in order to get your book noticed. At Wheatmark, we believe in helping authors with every step of the writing, publishing and marketing process. To attend a free webinar about “The One Way to Market Your Book,” visit http://authorsacademy.com

What is author branding? Author branding is presenting yourself in such a way that when readers think of you they associate a feeling, a message, a book with you. A type of book, a style of writing that, like your fingerprint, is you. Even if you write in different genres, the essence of how you write will always be yours.

Today’s popular authors have a style of writing and message unique to them no matter what they write about. Their readers come to know, love, and trust their writing.

Have you ever fallen in love with a book and, immediately upon finishing it, wanted another one just like it? That’s the power of branding.

Developing your author brand is important if you want to sell a lot of books this year, more next year, and a lot more the year after that. Write each book and blog post with the goal of building your audience rather than start from scratch each time. Link your books, your writing, your social media efforts, your public speaking, and website to a core message as a single brand. By having a consistent brand and a unified message you raise your chances of becoming a successful author.

With all that said, let’s get started building and identifying your brand.

Step 1: Ask yourself this question: Are you a writer of fiction or nonfiction?

Step 2: If nonfiction, is it inspirational, technical, historical, or business? If it’s fiction, is it mystery, science fiction, romance, or historical? Is it thrilling like Stephen King or quiet like Jan Karon’s Mitford series?

Step 3: What would you like your readers to experience with your books? Escape for a bit or rev up their motors and start a new project?

Step 4: How can you build upon that experience outside of your books? For instance, if you were a writer of children’s stories, you would have your website appeal to children and parents. If you have a business book, you might complement your book by what you blog about.

Step 5: Write a mission statement for your brand as an author. (If done well this will take some time and effort.) Once you have it, print it out and put it plainly where you can see it often.

Step 6: Keep everything you do, write, or speak about focused on your mission. If you can keep that one thought in the front of your mind, your brand will deepen daily with little effort.

Step 7: Unite your efforts by referring to your mission statement with your website, business card, email signature, social media bios, article writing, and blogging.

Step 8: Write a good bio and put it on your website. Center it around your mission statement. Make sure you explain what has inspired your writing. What makes your writing unique and offers a perspective that’s different from other authors in your genre?

Step 9: Think of one word that exemplifies your writing. Honesty, passion, frightening, encouraging, thrilling, fun, danger, peaceful, comforting, etc. Associate it now with a color. Start using that color consistently and it will become part of your brand.

Step 10: Visualize your brand as an image. Think of McDonald’s golden arches, Apple’s logo of an apple with a bite out of it, or the roaring lion of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. It could be something fun, simple, or dramatic. You don’t have to actually print or use your logo, but having an image that ties in with your brand is a powerful mental trick for staying brand centered.

In the beginning you may think it’s over the top to brand yourself as an author, that it’s something to do only when you’ve made it. But every author who pulls away from the herd has developed his or her brand in some way, a brand that causes people to recognize and remember them.

Wheatmark can help you create a book marketing strategy and platform that will help you maximize your impact while minimizing your time. Visit the Authors Academy to learn about more.

Almost every author wants to sell more books.

New authors think if they can just get one lucky break the yellow brick road of fame and fortune will magically open and their worries will disappear.

If only that were true.

The truth is even if an author does get a few lucky breaks there will still be periods of time when they will have to grab their bow and arrows and go hunting for readers.

In order to do that successfully you need to find the hunting grounds where your readers are feeding.

Your readers.

Not the reader of another author who writes in a different genre than you do or appeals to an audience that has nothing in common with your style of writing.

Finding the common threads between your book(s) and your book buying audience is the basis of target marketing for authors. There are many different factors in breaking down an audience demographic. Some of course are more valid than others are for authors but you will find that all do play a role in targeting a reading audience.

What age group is most likely to be interested in your book?

One way to figure that out is to start crossing off the list those who don’t fit and see who you have left. This does not mean that other age groups will not read your books but it does mean that you concentrate your time, money, and energy on the group that will give the highest return. Consider the amazing sales of Harry Potter. The target audience was for children between the ages of 8-12. Once the books became wildly popular, all ages loved the book but the target was for a specific age group. The cover design, advertising, and roll out to schools, social media, and book reviewers all targeted that age group. This is where the books made their biggest impact and continues to do so today.

Here is the typical breakdown of age groups.

• 3-to-5-year olds
• Middle schoolers
• Teenagers and young adult
• Echoes born between 1979-1990
• X-ers born between 1965-1978
• Boomers born between 1946-1964
• Matures born between 1909-1945

Where does the location of your book take place?

Typical readers are more comfortable reading about lifestyles that they can easily relate to or have some experience of. Do your books take place in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, the North Pole? Outer space? Customs, manners of speech, thinking, lifestyle, all play a significant role in how attracted your audience will be to specific locations.

Does your book lean toward a male or female audience?

This is an important one that some nonfiction authors do not take into account seriously enough. While some books do easily cross the lines many business books will find the common base of attraction more with one sex than the other. For instance, though both men and women are interested in social media, their approach to it and their reasons for using it are quite different. With Facebook, women are more interested in making connections and men in raising their status. If you try too hard to appeal to all, you may find that neither side makes a strong connection.

What is the income level of your best reader?

How expensive is your book? If you are writing a book about frugal living but the price is $50, you probably won’t be seeing a lot of dollars rolling in. If your book is aimed at a more influential segment, pricing it too low may cause it to be dismissed as not having value.

What education level does your book reader have?

It’s not only the reading level of your book that matters here but also how comfortable your readers are with different topics, ideas, and the way things are presented. College professors are happy with statistics, logical analyses, and extensive footnotes and references. Others would just like you to get to the point and leave out all the why, wherefores, history, and background.

What is the marital status of your reader?

Yes, it matters. Not for all books perhaps but lifestyle is very much affected by the family or group one is engaged in. Parents have concerns that singles do not. Young couples are faced with problems older ones have already worked through. Long-married couples have trials that the honeymooners think will never happen to them. Divorced, separated, and widowed people have levels of hurt and pain that are often still being worked through.

What occupation will you typically find your reader involved in?

This factors significantly in nonfiction but will play a role in novels as well. How much educating of the reader needs to be done to bring them into the action? If your book is about finance and you are talking to bankers the level can be pretty high. If your book is about street musicians on the other hand, you will need to tone it down some. Even though a number of street musicians have impressive college degrees, the lifestyle is certainly more laid back, day-to-day, in the moment, and your readership will be attracted to those who want to embrace that lifestyle.

What is the ethnic background of your book?

This is important in many more ways than you would think. The type of clothes you wear, the car you drive (or don’t), the food you eat, the places you shop, work, and go for relaxation all have definite ethnic attraction. The way kids are raised, spirituality is followed, and family lifestyle is lived out are significant factors in readership.

The more information you have about your readers the more closely you can direct your book publishing efforts. Wheatmark can help you create a book marketing strategy that will help you maximize your impact while minimizing your time. To learn “the one way” to market your book, visit http://authorsacademy.com.

To sell more books you have to let more people be aware of them. If your audience is small, the number of books you sell will be small. If you have a large audience but no one sees your book, you have to work to make it stand out. This article will show you seven ways to make your book stand out among the 14,000,000 readers on Goodreads.com.

1. Become a member of the Goodreads Author Program

This program is completely free. It is designed to help authors reach their target audience and promote their book(s) to them. Over 44,000 authors, including New York Times bestsellers and other national bestselling have their books listed with an author profile. If you are not on it, don’t waste any more time! Sign up and get started.

2. Advertise your book. Yes, sometimes you have to put a little money into the pot to make a decent stew. Goodreads has over 140 million page views and 19 million unique visitors a month. All these millions of people have one thing in common: books. They love to read. Start with a small test and if you get positive results do more.

Here’s the big tip: Make sure you have your target audience carefully in mind. Not all 14 million readers are interested in your book. You will be paying for each click your book receives. Make sure that “click” is targeted by the correct book genre, location, gender, and even age.

3. Book giveaway. Goodreads states that the average giveaway attracts 825 entries (many more views). Does any of that payoff in sales? It’s hard to say as readers often will buy books later or from a different site. There were 95 comments about the giveaway program and of the authors who commented most did not feel it resulted in direct sales. Many were also unhappy with the few reviews they got. Still, getting 800 people to look at your book is worth a try, in my opinion.

You can give books away before the book is published to build up buzz and after publication. You can also give away books later.

4. Lead a Q&A discussion group for readers. This is a way to connect with new and old readers. The recommendation is to start by creating a single discussion topic called, “Ask me something!” Start the thread by writing a post welcoming everyone to your group and asking for questions.

5. Participate in discussions on your profile, in groups  and in the discussion forums  for your books. Selling books is all about building relationships. All authors have to spend time and energy making connections; here is a place where you can do it without traveling and for free.

6. Become a Goodreads librarian. As a librarian, you will be able to edit and improve the Goodreads catalog. Other activities include combining editions, fixing book and author typos, adding book covers, and discussing policies. You will also have some librarian status over your own books and can edit. You must have 50 books added to your profile to sign up to be a librarian.

7. Rate books, leave comments, and write book reviews. Little bits of activity that build up your profile and help you to get involved in the Goodreads community.

Not only is Goodreads a great place to promote your books it is also a fun place to simply hang out around other book lovers. You can see what other people are reading and what they feel about different topics. This is a wonderful place to mingle with your target audience, read comments and reviews on books in your genre, and dip into the world of your favorite people: Book readers!

To find out more about marketing a book and about building your author platform, check out the Authors Academy.

How important is building a brand name for an author? Very important!

Most readers don’t remember titles of books as well as they remember an author’s name or the main character of a novel. As an author writes more and more books, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember single book titles. Readers will walk into a bookstore or start searching on Amazon or Barnes & Noble for the latest book by the author’s name.

That’s what they remember. That’s why you as an author must build up your author brand if you want to sell more books.

Fiction writers may create a character that becomes very memorable. Think Harry Potter, Nancy Drew, etc., but even with memorable characters the author’s name will still be very important.

If you write nonfiction, it is even more important that you make your name as widely known as possible.

Once your name is established, any product or topic you write about will automatically get the “stamp of approval” by people who know your name. You will have built credibility and trust, which will result in more and more sales.

There are many different ways to build brand awareness as an author.

Offline you can do it with business cards, letterhead, and a mailing address.

Online you start with a website, blog, and different social media accounts.

Use the same version of your name consistently across all online platforms. If your name is Bill Jones but you sometimes go by Billy, William, Will, pick one and use only that one for your author brand. Don’t end up with bill@yourwebsite.com, William Jones, Inc. as your email signature, and a Twitter account “Willy.”

What you’re trying to do is imprint your name in people’s minds. Staying consistent with your name no matter what social media platform you’re using, will make it easier for other people to remember you. It will narrow the time spent trying to figure out who you are on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and other sites when they search for you.

As an author, your name is your brand. If you leave comments on blogs, send emails or text messages, always remember to be consistent in using the same name.