Your expectations for your book should not be centered on copies sold. Instead, focus on developing and executing a brilliant marketing and PR plan, making key contacts, and finding ways to create value for readers, for media and for organizations who might make bulk purchases. If you focus on those things, sales will take care of themselves.

Concentrate on meeting all 5 types of goals. That way, even if your sales are only moderate, but you do brilliantly in getting publicity and making contacts, you can consider your book a success.

Have a solid, long-term marketing plan.

Before you ever get close to even finishing your first draft, sit down and map out basics of your marketing and promotional plan. The key questions you'll need to answer:

·What is my marketing budget? ·When should my book be ready? ·Who is my audience and what need does this book meet? ·What will my price point be? ·How many copies do I need to sell to break even? ·How many copies do I want to sell? ·What marketing channels will I use to reach my readers? ·What relationships can I leverage to make bulk sales? ·What relationships can I leverage to get press coverage? ·Who will design my Website? ·Do I need a marketing staff? ·Will I do an e-newsletter? ·Will I hire a distributor or ship books myself? ·Do I want to be in bookstores? ·Will I do "guerilla" marketing? ·What ancillary products can I produce (tapes, CDs, etc.) ·How can my seminars/consulting/current business support this book?

That's a lot of material, but all of it is important. Take a couple of months and figure it out. You can also cut some time off your learning curve by learning from others who have done it already.

Get yourself to the Mega Book Marketing Seminar and train yourself to be a mega-successful author and become a sought after speaker. Make the difference with your book that you want to make. To Register and for more information go to http://www.bazuji.com/book

Sample your book in print and on Internet.

If you have a Web site (and you should), it's simple. Just take a chapter from your book, paste it into its own file with proper copyright information so it's a self-contained document, turn it into a PDF (Portable Document Format, a wonderful type of file created by Adobe), and place it on your Website for free downloading. Then send an e-mail to your entire list offering them an excerpt from your upcoming book free. A 10% or 20% response rate is not out of question.

For print publications, it goes like this:

a.Pull together a list of target newspapers and magazines. b.Contact editors by e-mail asking if they would be interested in running your excerpt at no cost (editors love content they can get for free). c.Send your chapter as a Word file to those who agree. Make sure it's completely clean and free of any typos or grammatical errors, and include an author bio at end that lists your Web address. d.Be sure to get reprints or a PDF of printed article you can use for publicity purposes.

Start sending e-mails to editors several months before your book comes out. It usually takes a while to hear back, and even longer to actually get your sample in print.