Book Promotion: The Art of Smart Thinking
Self-publishing- ups and downs.
My book, The Art of Smart Thinking, originally went to press in a pre-publication effort in April of 2007. This book developed over a number of years as I audio-tape recorded question and answer sessions about my work that I set up with friends. These audiotapes were transcribed and went through many stages of edits.
In April of 2007 my assistant Terese had 400 pre-publication copies of my book printed as quickly as she could manage in order for us to use it as promotional material at a conference in Atlanta, GA. We had hoped to sell the book, but upon arriving at the conference and finding that it was an unexpectedly small event, we decided to give the books away. We came back with a large percentage of our original 400 copies. Shipping the books back and forth from the event was a surprisingly expensive ordeal. That should have been a clue as to future hurdles that I would need to learn to overcome.
By September of 2007, we managed to give away and sell the rest of the four hundred copies that were left after the conference. I had also done another round of edits on the book. To sell the book (and the brain wave trainings it describes) we promoted the book through our website and e-newsletters sent out to our Alumni. After the last of the original 400 books were gone, our office felt a great need to have more books printed. At this point we also had a good deal of confidence and hope for the future of the book. One of the individuals involved with pre-publishing the book in April of 2007 proposed a plan for achieving a New York Times Best-Seller. Although the idea was very attractive to me at the time, the proposal involved a great investment of time and resources and the book was not going to be “out there” in the public eye for over a year. For us, this prospect of major delays was not a viable one. So we looked for another answer.
One of the challenges of marketing The Art of Smart Thinking is the subject category of the book. While The Art of Smart Thinking is truly an important topic of interest for anyone who has a brain, it focuses on self-growth and self-improvement with a twist. By combining information about psychology and physiology of the brain and brainwaves (EEG) with my personal scientific research and technological information, the book tells the story of how to improve your life while also telling some of the story of my life,- which has been dedicated, since my college days, to developing the field of knowledge known as neurofeedback.
The book has a strong scientific basis, but is also easily read since it was composed by my conversationally speaking answers to people’s questions about the brain and consciousness. However, in addition to Science, the book also has a spiritual theme. This unique mixture of topics in a ‘self-help’ book is quite new to our culture and especially new to literature. Science, technology and spirituality often do not mix in literature unless it is within a philosophical context.
Thus, marketing the book on a mass scale was a somewhat daunting task, for which we had no experience. Through the advice and referral from a wise and supportive friend, John Assaraf, we found a marketing strategist, Michelle Price, who has experience marketing books that deal with self growth topics and who also has had significant success in marketing books that are of a similar genre as The Art of Smart Thinking. Upon her advice, we decided to set our goals on achieving an Amazon.com best-seller based on a “targeted marketing strategy” consisting of emails delivered to people who have already expressed an interest in neurofeedback and other closely related topics. Her proposal to attain Amazon.com best seller status projected a timeline of only a couple of months and her suggested investment was significantly less than the proposal for a New York Times Best Seller.
We rushed an order of 1,000 books and were able to get them delivered to our office just a few days before the scheduled release of our book on Amazon.com. Again, the shipping costs were outrageous and overall, the shipping costs have significantly reduced our ability to break even from our book sales. We have spent over $100,000 in producing, printing, shipping and marketing the book and revenues have been less than $30,000 to date.
For marketing the book I invested in a small marketing package that included: 1. A copy written sales letter, 2. A website devoted to the book (www.theartofsmartthinking.com) which includes a free e-course to support The Art of Smart Thinking and free gifts from authors that are related to the content of my book, and 3. Several email lists that were comprised of email addresses of individuals who expressed a desire to know more about topics related to the content in The Art of Smart Thinking.
I consider the investment in this targeted marketing campaign to be the most successful piece of our marketing strategy. We released the copy written sales letter the night before the book was made available on Amazon.com and immediately we shot up in the charts to number one on the worldwide Movers And Shakers best seller list. We maintained number-one status here for only a brief time before falling behind the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West (by HarperCollins which had languished in obscurity until her assassination). In the third day, we rose to #3 World-wide Best Seller and were very excited to hold the number three spot all day long and then, to stay in the top ten for about another week or two. As a result of our book sales, Amazon.com ordered 3,000 books on one day and then another 5,000 books the day after that. We were forced to rush the order and printed10,000 copies to meet the demand from incoming book orders. Again, placing a rush order and shipping on the last minute ended up costing us a great deal more than it should have; however, more importantly, we were able to fulfill orders for Amazon.com in a timely and professional manner.
While it has been a significant investment to publish this book ourselves and to market the book ourselves, I honestly can say that it is a wonderful experience to have. I can better influence how the book is perceived and where it gets publicity. I am directly connected to its progress and I feel a happy responsibility for the outcome of our efforts. Some of the professionals involved in the marketing effort were also astonished at the powerful and sustained results we achieved in sales at Amazon.com. So astonished were they, that they asked to interview me about how I felt with this amazing and unexpected degree of success.
Because I had to formulate my thoughts and feelings for that interview in early January, I can now more fully recall and re-create my experience here for you.
It was an entirely new kind of pleasure that I had never experienced before in my life. Many people could understand the idea of a new kind of pleasure in life as being, for example, a new zesty exotic flavor, or an amazing new position in sex, or a deeper level of love and commitment with a partner, or the blessed birth of a child, or the attainment of a great and enduring life-success for one’s child.
The new kind of pleasure I had was none of these, but maybe was more than all of these and probably closest to that last one listed: the attainment of a great and enduring life-success for one’s child. I’ve labored, often unpaid or underpaid, for over 30 years to bring forth a technology for the spiritual awakening of humanity. In this quest I’ve raised and dedicated about $11 million. For the first 20 years in this work I was so far out ahead of my culture and university colleagues as to be considered a very dedicated oddity. But here in the closing days of 2007, the book describing my life’s work was winning hundreds and even thousands of new people to their own awakening into the vast and beautiful possibilities for their own higher consciousness and a better, happier life for themselves and their friends and families.
A strange new pleasurable feeling began to seep into my awareness. It did not have a name and it was utterly new in my experience. I did not even know what to call it. Without a name for it, I was left marveling at the wonder of it. When the interviewer asked me how I felt about this unexpected success of my book, some of my new pleasurable feelings crystallized into words. Part of it was joy that the good news (of a method for broad and easy access, by ordinary people, to formerly forbiddingly unattainable advanced spiritual states) was being heard by thousands of my fellow human beings.
Part of it was relief that a message and a knowledge that I had nurtured, developed, protected and carried for so many decades, almost alone, was now gaining a wider audience, so that it was less likely to be lost. Knowledge can easily be lost, and has been lost all too often in the past. But now I felt relief and joy with thousands of new people excitedly discovering the existence of a publicly-available Technology and Method for healing emotional wounds, empowering effective forgiveness, reversing aging in the brain, boosting IQ and creativity and enabling rapid access to advanced spiritual states. This knowledge that I had been carrying almost alone, for decades was now almost flying out into our culture,- reaching a wider and more general audience than I had ever known before, and therefore the danger of the loss of this knowledge was being dramatically reduced. It was a little bit like one’s child securing a stable, beneficial and enduring position in life from which they could then do the work of healing many others.
For me one of the greatest joys is helping people to heal their emotional and psychic wounds and then go on into states of happiness, joy and bliss. As the book sales expanded into the 1,000s I felt a contentment and a fulfillment in being able to bring this good news to many many people. It was an acknowledgement that my sacrifices in so many areas of my life had been worthwhile. My labors were bearing fruit and knowledge of better ways to organize your own mind and personality and spiritual seeking were becoming known to thousands of my fellow human beings. I felt joy, happiness and fulfillment in being able to tell other people about better ways to forgive and to deepen love, compassion and understanding. Sharing the good news with thousands of new people was an almost unspeakable new joy. A certain part of me that had been working ceaselessly toward this goal was, finally, able to relax. The warmth of contentment spread throughout my entire awareness and I was at peace.
I felt that I had successfully set into motion something that could now not ever be stopped. I felt that “ignition” had occurred for a new stage of the consciousness development of humanity. I felt that the awakening of humanity had now become inevitable. The forces of ego and darkness would no longer prevail. People were finally going to discover how to self-regulate their own brain activity and thus discover the greatest freedom they had ever had. Instead of being like bound and gagged prisoners in the trunk of the vehicle of their own lives, they now had the potential to remove the gags and the ropes and shackles and to move into the driver’s seat of the vehicle of their own lives and to steer in new directions and to attain new and better outcomes in their lives. Vivekananda, in his book Raja Yoga, says, “The goal of every soul is freedom and mastery” and I saw that this goal will now be attained very broadly throughout the ranks of humankind.
Of course, there are many things that I would do differently next time I decide to self-publish, such as to contract with a shipping company for a better rate than “retail” shipping, but I did not know those things before I started.
Our plan was simple: a targeted marketing campaign based on an email sales letter that was professionally written by a copywriter. We did not predict the hugely successful results; however, we did strongly intend for a successful outcome. My staff was extremely supportive and enthusiastic about making the book happen and to make the book a chart-topper. I give them a lot of credit for taking on the project with me and for making it a reality and a great success!
My guest bloggers book marketing feature will still continue, but something came through my email today which prompted me to ask you, the reader, a question.
