I find it’s critical to analyze your niche, roll up your sleeves, and find out where your customers go. For example, I publish books on Lyme disease, so I went to the Centers for Disease Control Web site, learned which states had the highest incidence of Lyme disease, and targeted health food stores in those states. Since my books were refused by the primary health-food-store book distributor (NutriBooks), I was at first discouraged, but I decided to call the health food stores myself. Scary? Yes! Successful? Yes!

You might think the saying, “pick a niche and grow rich” is just some silly cliché. The truth is if you try to write to everyone, no one will read it.

There are many ways to make a publishing firm succeed, but there is one sure way to make it fail — conducting business without a marketing plan. .

Many independent publishers look at book clubs as the province of major publishers, and subsequently overlook them. The smaller firms think that the BookSpan clubs are too big for them.

The academic marketplace is an enormous segment for publishers, one using books as a foundation for its existence. It impacts people of all ages, from pre-school through graduate school and adult education courses…

The term special sales is commonly used to describe revenue opportunities outside of bookstores. Tales of corporations buying hundreds of thousands of books whet our appetites and generate visions of grandeur. However, after spending fruitless months or years contacting corporations, most independent publishers learn that these visions can be mirages.