• 2% of the 200,000 books published each year become bestsellers.
• 84% of the bestsellers are published by the 5 largest New York publishers.
• 2 out of 10 books published make a profit for the publisher.
• In 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies.
• Only 25,000 books sold more than 5,000 copies.
• The average book in America sells about 500 copies.
• Only 10 books sold more than a million copies in 2004.
• Fewer than 500 books sold more than 100,000 copies in 2004.

The magic number for a book to be considered successful is 10,000. When The Wealthy Spirit reached 12,000 books sold, my editor called me and said, “We’re ready for your next book!” And so I got the contract to write Zero to Zillionaire. The Wealthy Spirit has now sold nearly 20,000 copies and Zero to Zillionaire is approaching the magic number of 10,000 copies sold.

The good news is you don’t have to have a blockbuster like The Da Vinci Code in order to be successful with your books. You only have to sell 5,000 to be in the top 2% of bestselling books. That looks a lot more doable than selling a million, doesn’t it?

Royalties on books usually start at 10% – and unless you have a major publisher, they are now based on wholesale price and not retail, and the reserve against returns is 15-25%. So the odds on making your fortune from a book alone are slim.

Non-fiction books are like business cards. They are my best marketing pieces, help me spread the word about my seminars and professional speaking, and give me oodles of credibility so I can charge good fees for my work. Many times people have signed up for my workshops just because they were fans of my books. They are one of my “multiple streams of income” and I have ideas for more books to come!

Non-fiction book sales are all about PLATFORM. That means, how many people know you are will buy your book? That’s why you see so many celebrity books – they have huge platforms and so will sell many more books than an unknown author. That is why Jessica Seinfeld got a book deal for her cookbook when the unknown author who pitched basically the same book 6 months prior to her didn’t get a deal. Books are widgets and publishers are manufacturers and their number one goal is to sell a lot of widgets. Never forget that!

Here’s some insider info: I was a speaker at a conference in Mexico in October, along with Marci Shimoff, author of 6 Chicken Soup for the Soul books. She is a part of a mastermind group of best-selling speaker-authors that do mailings for each other – you’ve seen the “Be a Bestseller on Amazon” promotions will all the free goodies from other self-help authors, yes? Marci’s announcement about her new book Happy for No Reason, which is a fabulous book, went out to 5 million people! That’s what I mean by platform, and why she got a big deal with a major publisher.

But look, she started small, too. She pitched Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul to Jack Canfield when there wasn’t any idea for a series of “Chicken Soup” books – there was only the one book. But she saw a sequel in meditation and called Jack and pitched her idea. Then she built her reputation by speaking and writing more of those titles and I’m guessing not much money in the beginning. Now she commands big speaking fees and gets big advances for her books.

The book business is like every business. People who have made it usually built their brand and their business slowly over time and came into the big money later after years of hard work. Read the biographies of any famous person and you’ll find that same story over and over. Faith Hill became famous with her fourth album. Bon Jovi sold his 50th song demo, and the band didn’t make any money until their 3rd album. That’s why you have to love your work – your goals have to be so juicy that it’s fun just to work towards them! Because that’s all that will sustain you through the failures along the road to success. Look at everything as fun and an adventure along the way and you’ll be happy and successful every day of your life.
And that’s my secret of happiness.

Chellie Campbell is the creator of the Financial Stress Reduction® Workshops now taught by coaches across the country, and the author of The Wealthy Spirit and Zero to Zillionaire. She is one of Marci Shimoff’s “Happy 100” in her current NYT bestseller Happy for No Reason and is prominently quoted as a financial expert in The Los Angeles Times, Pink, Good Housekeeping, Lifetime, Essence, Woman’s World and more than 35 popular books. For more information, visit her web site www.Chellie.com.

You learn that, in the book world, PR is everything. When you walk into a bookstore, you are walking into a treasure house of 140,000 books. Online at amazon.com, there are 2.5 million books. Somewhere in your mind, dimly, you knew that, but nothing drives it home so much as walking into a bookstore and seeing rack upon rack of beautiful books and then you go find your section and see all the racks of beautiful self-help books and then, tucked into a small shelf on the bottom left, there is your one-and-only, your own beautiful book. Ahhh, you sigh, your book, your dream, has magically materialized and actually exists in a real bookstore in real space in real time. Then your eyes widen, you look around, and you think, “Gadzooks! (or some such expletive) How am I going to get my book noticed?”

The answer is PR, PR, pr, PR, PR, PR, pr, PR, and more PR. As in public relations, press, advertising, newsletters, ezines, magazine articles, newspaper articles, radio if you’re lucky, television if you’re really lucky, etc., etc., etc. Then you put on your gold tennis shoes and do a book signing, speak at the Lions Club, the Direct Marketing Association, the Church of Religious Science, the Women’s City Club, the Society for Technical Communication, and anyone else who will book you. You go to other people’s book signings and schmooze, give copies of your book to celebrities (Marianne Williamson, Mark Victor Hansen, Martha Beck, and Suze Orman all own personally autographed copies of “The Wealthy Spirit”). You go to your six or seven regular networking meetings, National Association of Women Business Owners, Women’s Referral Service, Chambers of Commerce, NEW Women Entrepreneurs (it really helps if you like chicken).

You do all this because, when you have lunch with Michelle Anton, the producer of the Dr. Laura radio show, she tells you how she found out about your book; that she didn’t know that you were on the “Dr. Laura” television show three years ago, that she didn’t get the press release your publisher sent with your book, and she didn’t get your letter that you sent with your book. None of that mattered. What mattered was that a friend of hers told her about the book. And that’s why, when someone asks what marketing strategy has worked the best to promote your book, you say, “The twenty years I’ve been out there networking.”

Then, because book money comes three months after the end of the six-month royalty period, you make hundreds of gold calls on the gold phone because the NOW money of workshops is in the phone, where the LATER money of books is in the mail. You teach class two nights a week and enroll class every other waking moment. In your spare time, you write an article for Dr. Laura’s web site, you write your next newsletter, and you smile sweetly when people start asking you about your next book…

And you thank God every day for giving you this rich, full, high-class-quality-problem-too-busy life where you can decide what dream you want, bring a book into being, and e-zoom your thoughts and feelings into the minds and hearts of your cherished readers.

Copyright, 2006
Chellie Campbell is the creator of the Financial Stress Reduction® Workshops now taught by coaches across the country, and the author of The Wealthy Spirit and Zero to Zillionaire. She is one of Marci Shimoff’s “Happy 100” in her current NYT bestseller Happy for No Reason and is prominently quoted as a financial expert in The Los Angeles Times, Pink, Good Housekeeping, Lifetime, Essence, Woman’s World and more than 35 popular books. For more information, visit her web site www.Chellie.com.