- Image by Enokson via Flickr
As I mentioned in my previous post, we have a new book out “The Secrets to Working and Making a Living in Spain” which we are hoping will be a best seller over a long period of time. To this effect we decided to eschew the now infamous internet marketing style product launch, wham bam thank you man and onto the next product, and go for the drip feed approach to launching a book.
The idea comes from the methods put in place by Jack Canfield and mark Victor Hansen when launching “Chicken Soup for the Soul”. They spent two years doing five things every day to get publicity and traction for their book both before and after publication. This gave them a very long tail on sales even though they never had the blockbuster first weekend.
Prior to publication obviously back in the day they needed to find a publisher, none of this internet rubbish back then 
. They sent at least five copies out per day or did five actions such as follow ups every day until eventually they found a publisher at the last day of a publishing fair where they had visited over 200 publishers in the previous days and had been rejected 200 times. How is that for dedication?
Once the book was published they continued with the five per day formula on promotion doing things such as leaving copies in hairdressers and allowing the salons to sell them, going to church meetings and speaking, and memorably sending the secuestered jurors in the OJ Simpson trial copies to read as they weren’t allowed to read the news or watch the TV. Those jurors all carrying in copies of the book to the courtroom were captured on film and all of the news programmes mentioned the book giving it a huge boost based on the airtime given to the trial.
The book eventually arrived on the New York Times Bestseller list a year after release thanks to a lot of small incremental steps over a long period of time. Since then it has spawned a hatful of follow ups leading the authors to be described by Time magazine as the publishing phenomenon of the decade and sales of, I now believe, 300 million copies of their various books.
Now we are not looking at 300 million copies of course but doing the five steps per day is important. Today I would like to ask you a question and make you an offer on the blog.
Firstly the question. Have you got any ideas we can use for promoting the book in the next six months? The more outlandish and left field the better.
Secondly, do you want to help us? We have an affiliate programme for the book which you can find here. (There are full details of the affiliate programme on this website here) If you sell copies of the book using the affiliate programme then we will pay you a 50% commission on the sale.
So, if you have a webpage about Spain, a mailing list that could benefit from the book, some friends who are moving to Spain, if you are an estate agent wanting to give your potential clients added value to their purcahse or any number of other scenarios then get along to the link and sign up to be an affiliate.
We have plans for the book too so also if this is not quite the right fit for your business to promote consider the following:
- There will be an internet only version
- There will be an expat version relevant to any country in the World
- There will be a Spanish language version
- If you come up with some more ideas for us there may well be other versions
This book is the definitive guide for anyone looking to move to Spain and work. Don’t you think it would be an excellent gift for anyone coming to Spain to live?
So to finish, what are your ideas, how can you help us to implement them and do you want to earn some commisions by selling the book? You will have our support if you want to sell the book in the form of interviews, articles, banners etc… so get back to us with your ideas.
And to buy the book go here
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1) How a Quick Idea Becomes a Six Month Project
2) Finishing Something You Have Started
3) September and Back To Work For Some
