Jump Start Your Book Sales: A money-making guide for Authors,
by Marilyn and Tom Ross
Published by Communication Creativity
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Reviewed by C. L. Rossman
Being a writer, I’m always interested in books that tell me how I can sell my material; and this one, Jump Start Your Book Sales, is a dandy.
The authors, Marilyn and Tom Ross, who previously wrote and published the bestseller, The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing, have crammed together a mass of instructions for both traditional and unusual tactics to fire up your bookselling techniques. In these 324 pages, they include advice on everything from the print media (newspapers and magazines), to doing a guest spot on radio and TV, right over to some much more unusual markets, like catalog sales and in-house newsletters. And wherever they can, they also list the contact person’s name for each organization.
Besides chapters on such avenues as putting together your own author tour, doing op-ed pieces for newspapers, and becoming s speaker at libraries and before book clubs, many of the page edges are adorned with sidebars like “Rosses’ Rules of Order: 13 Tips for Awesome Results (marketing),” and “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Publishers;” the end pages contain a lot of helpful appendices. The Rosses used someone else’s tip for titling this book—they left out the hyphen between “Jump” and “Start” so people searching for the book in wholesale catalogs would be able to find it better.
The book is meant to be a guide for independent publishers and small presses as well. I think, from reading through it, that nonfiction authors will be able to utilize more of the tips than fiction writers. They can build campaigns based on day-of-the-week and news-of-the-day more easily. The advice most easily adapted to fiction writers seems to be “get live readings, not just book signings.”
Normally I would give this book a five-star rating; but one thing worries me: the book was copyrighted in 1999, and went into further printings in 2005 and 2006. But no mention is made of whether the authors updated the websites listed in here (and there are many of them.); so I would feel more comfortable with the words “revised edition” inside. Otherwise, it’s a very helpful resource book.
Armchair Interviews says: Anything that can help authors sell more books is a good thing.