My new POD publisher has published thousands of books so I can expect them to sell lots of copies of my book, right?

Thank you,
K.B.

Some POD publishers use deceptive verbiage on their websites to fool authors into thinking their book will sell just because it exists, or just because they’re listed on that publisher’s website. Putting a book up for sale on any website does not guarantee sales. In fact, if you don’t promote your book, I can pretty much guarantee that few to no people will buy your book.

A book’s sales potential depends entire on: 1. the book itself; and 2. the authors’ marketing savvy. Just listing a book on a particular website (even Amazon) won’t generate sales. The author must promote the book consistently in order for it to be successful. This is true for self-published and traditionally published titles. Traditional publishers do little to no promotion for unknown/new authors now. They take a gamble that a book may or may not take off and they run with the ones that do, while generally abandoning the ones that don’t. Of course, the ones that do succeed are the ones whose authors are promoting them creatively and consistently.

Many POD publishers upsell authors to the tune of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on products/services that will likely never result in enough book sales to pay for those products/services. We call those POD publishers author meat markets – they suck as much money as they can out of an author’s wallet before moving on to the next author.

If you simply don’t want to promote your book yourself, you should either save yourself a lot of money and not publish it at all, or you should hire a book publicist. Whatever you do, beware of POD publishers that upsell authors on bookmarks, coffee mugs, press releases, co-op ads in newspapers, “space” on tables at book fairs, and more. They’re experts at upselling authors on products and services that usually cost far more than any resulting book sales and some of their employees earn commissions on the upselling they do when fawning over authors, gushing false praise about the author’s book in the hopes the author will spend even more money there.

Incidentally, at BookLocker.com, we teach authors how to promote their books for free. We don’t upsell authors on marketing products and services.

You can see our recommended list of book marketing professionals RIGHT HERE.

Angela

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