A big portion about writing a best-selling book is not the writing only, it's the selling. That's why it's called "Best-Selling Book" and not "Best-Writing Book". You have to sell it really well.
Here are some of the efforts that I have taken to ensure that my books become bestsellers.
The first thing I did was arranging for a lot of book talks. Anytime I could get an opportunity to go out there to speak and sell the book I would do that.
So what I did was to approach all the major bookshops in Singapore. MPH, Times, Kinokuniya, Borders and Popular and arranged book talks every single weekend. So every single weekend I would go out there to speak and draw crowds. In fact, it is during my talks that I sold the most number of books.
Another promotion effort I did was to arrange free talks in schools. These talks were usually held during the school assemblies. So I would speak during the allocated time for the assemblies. And I conducted them over a 4 month period. That was what drove the sales of the book. That's what got people talking about my book.
The other thing which I did was to put advertisements in the papers
Some of my friends thought it was a stupid idea because it was expensive.
One small ad would cost about $3,000. They said "Adam, you are never going to make back your money!"
It did eventually, and by placing those ads, it drew the crowd into the bookshops. Which leads me to an important thing, you have to make sure the bookshops give you good shelf space. How do you make sure you do that?
It's all about going there, building rapport with the person in charge of book placements, talking to the person and asking the person to place the books at better spaces.
I would go to the bookshop every weekend to look at where my book is and if my book is in a lousy position, I would take my book and replace it with other books which were at a good position. I know it's a dirty trick but I did that.
The other thing I did was to create artificial demand. Initially, when I first wrote my book, no one wanted to display it well. A lot of bookshops didn't want to bring it in because I was a local author and no one knew me at that time.
So what I did was I got a lot of my friends to call the bookshops up, asking about the book. They would go, "Excuse me, have you seen this book called "I Am Gifted, So Are You"?" and the bookshops would say "Oh, we don't have it yet."
And my friends would reply saying "Hey, but it's a very good book, how can you not have this book?" I also got all my friends and relatives to write in to the bookshops complaining that it was a best-selling book, they wanted to buy it but they couldn't get it. So that got the bookshops to start ordering it and it created that cycle.
You will notice that sometimes it takes a little thinking out of the box and effort to make your book a best seller. Ultimately, in order for your book to be a bestseller, you have to take the necessary measures to sell your book.
