Golden Rule No 16

Selling the book

You can strengthen your chances of having your book idea accepted by a publisher if you present some thoughts on a promotion and sales plan. If you can show, for instance, that you have access to a mailing list of people with specialist interest in your subject you will find your welcome much warmer.

You may be able to open the way to getting publicity on a dedicated website where there are ready-made readers, and you could possibly provide e-mail addresses of potential purchasers of the book. Perhaps you have a good contact at your local radio and/or TV station who could help you get air time for the book.

Be careful not to make the promotions/marketing manager think you are trying to do his/her job. But gently lob in your ideas to show that there are outlets for your book that perhaps they have not considered.

When I ghosted the first of three books for Frank Bruno I was able to give the publisher a big fight date around which they could promote the book (Know What I Mean). It just happened to be a world title contest against Tim Witherspoon, for which I was the publicist.

I managed to get both Tim and Frank to wave the book around during a Press conference that was shown on all the major TV bulletins. When Frank was giving interviews I saw to it that he always had a copy of the book on show. The fact that Frank then went and lost the fight, albeit in a hero-like manner, did not help book sales. But that I could do nothing about. I am a ghostwriter, not a ghostfighter.

In 1999 I collaborated with my old broadcasting chum Brian Moore on his autobiography The Final Score, and together we helped boost the sales by giving the publisher the addresses of every major football supporters club in the land.

Kevin Keegan and I were in harness on a book called The Seventies Revisited. To promote it Kevin did a signing session at St James' Park, the home ground of Newcastle United where he was manager at the time. We invited along all the local radio stations and North East TV broadcasters so that Kevin, who was on a tight work schedule, could get all his publicity done in one afternoon.

Alert your publisher's publicity department to any aspects of the book which will have particular interest in any one area of the media. Give your publisher a list of any people you feel would be able to help the sales if they receive a review copy of the book. You can expect a dozen free review copies for your own purposes. You are usually given the option to buy any others at a discount price.

Celebrity authors push up the sales with a procession of signing sessions at major bookstores. If you know a bookstore where you are likely to get a warm reception let the publisher's publicity department know. I have been at signing sessions with, for example, Jimmy Greaves and Frank Bruno, where the queues have gone out of sight. Sadly, I have also known the humiliation of sitting in a store waiting to sign books when fewer than a dozen people have come forward.

If you write a book about, say, the history of the Concorde it is worth approaching a bookstore manager at Heathrow and suggesting that he requests a book signing session. Or perhaps your specialist subject is golf and you know that you could get 200 members of your golf club along to a signing session. That would be most acceptable to a publisher.

If you have written a book about, for instance, the Women's Struggle for Equal Rights you could ask the publisher's publicity staff to organise a tour of women's luncheon clubs where you can give a talk on your subject followed by a signing session. Anything you can suggest will be welcomed by the publicity office where I know they get too little help from many authors. Just be careful to make it an offer of ideas not a takeover of their jobs.

Just suppose you are an expert on the lesser spotted warbling bird of Outer Mongolia. It is unlikely that 99.99999 per cent of the population would be the slightest bit interested in buying a book on the subject. Yet you might know of an exclusive club that has 20,000 members fanatical about this topic. When submitting your idea you must make this fact a prominent feature in your covering letter. This would give the publishers and their publicity department an area to aim at.

Your editor will be grateful if you volunteer to write a guidelines blurb: the book summary that appears on the book jacket. These are the "roll up, roll up, come on in" words that will hopefully entice a browsing customer to stretch his/her curiosity to the point where he/she will look inside. Then the power of your prose will take over and hook them (fingers crossed).

By the time your book is in the shops you will hopefully have received your agreed fee advances. Golden Rule No 17 explains the art of contract negotiation.

Golden Rule No 16 is to try to think of ideas to help your publisher sell the book.