1. Self Publishing - Marketing
The hardest part! Wander into any bookshop and see the welter of choice. How is it possible to
make your book stand out from the crowd?
My guess is that very few self-published books, especially works of fiction, achieve any
substantial sales at all via the bookshops. Just getting the retailers to accept your book is a
major hurdle.
The skiing book referred to above succeeded because it was produced for a very specialised,
localised market. I had a substantial list of people who had strong links with the ski school but I
was also confident that people in the Cairngorm area would be interested in what was a slice of
local history. In the event, local shops sold about half of the 800 volumes, the rest were
distributed via mail order. I was able to get free publicity from local papers, TV and radio
stations.