Have You Helped Someone Make the Transformation Your Book Promises? Part 2 of How to Sell Books. Last week I wrote about building platforms for your message and books.  Let’s keep talking about it.

Jim Murphy wrote a book, Inner Excellence, about mental toughness.

It broke him and nearly killed him to write it.

He used the book generously to coach his clients, mostly athletes.

It slowly disappeared from the market.

Then…a pro football player was seen on TV reading it on the sidelines during a game.

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP!

Jim was an overnight success.

The book was great for the five years it languished, but few people knew it, because it’s dang hard to sell books.

I learned from the mentor I don’t know personally, AJ Harper (whose book you should buy if you want to write books), to always ask my clients what they want to be doing with their readers for the next few years after the book is published.

If they say “nothing” and they don’t already have an audience, I still write a great book, but I also tell them not to expect it to sell.

They for sure won’t make back the $50K they paid me to write and publish it.

Book sales just don’t work that way. There are simply too many books published every day for yours to get noticed…

Unless!

You build something more important than the book. A platform.

Last week I wrote about 9 ways to do that.

Today, I want to write about just one important way to start.

Coach someone.

Get someone the transformation that your book promises. See if you can change someone’s life. Many of my clients come to me saying, “If I can change just one person’s life…”

Well, go do that.

While you’re at it, change two people’s lives, then three. Build a cohort, then a community. Start writing about your topic on Substack and social media. Help people.

Then…once you get good at helping people, and you’ll know when you are good at it, because you will have done it, you can write a great book and even sell it.

Once you’ve written a great book, use it to continue helping people, one at a time if necessary, until one of them gets caught reading it on television. Or something.

If your message is your life’s calling, this should be fun. And it will need to be fun if you are going to stick with it long enough to for it to work.

And someday, people will start buying your book, and they may even ask you for another one.

***Hey, I would really like you to know that for a measly $7 a month you can join writer church.

It’s not really called writer church, but that’s what it feels like sometimes to be in an encouraging group of Christian writers with a burning passion to help people with words.

We pray for each other and support one another in the journey.

We do feedback each week for anyone brave enough to submit.

We run free courses on book writing.

We bring in guests to teach us about book marketing and publishing.

We like each other and have a good time.

And so much more…

All you have to do us upgrade to paid and we’ll send you and NDA (because everyone’s work is protected) and a link to the call, Tuesdays from 11-12:30 CST.

Blessings,

Jeff Miller

P.S. I have a novel coming out with my friend, Carol. It’s a true story about:

A dear lady who falls 70 feet in a diabetic coma.

While the whole town searches for her, she prays through her family preparing to die.

An Amish Mennonite rescue team with high tech equipment joins the search.

It’s a good story, and it really happened. Launches in September. Preorder here!

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