As an author, one of the most daunting realizations you have, after the immensely demanding experience of writing your book, is that you are now just getting started.

The hardest lesson I had to learn, both as a speaker and author, is that the job isn’t writing your book.  The job is marketing your book.

Turns out, at least as far as I can tell from my experience, marketing is a whole different skillset that I wasn’t prepared for when I self-published my first book.  And, I have found that – just as I shared with my high school athletes as a basketball coach years ago – “you have to be bad long enough to get better!”

And now – after publishing my third book, I still have a lot to learn. But I do have a couple of tips that you can use to increase your sales using LinkedIn, which is a powerful tool for making professional connections and for making book sales!

The first thing you will want to do is focus on creating a professional LinkedIn account.

If you don’t have one, create one here.

After completing your profile (and including your book as part of it), take a few minutes to tackle one or all of the following ideas to sell more books:

1. Clarify Your Book’s Path to Profitability 

So – what makes your book a smart investment?

• Does it lead to better productivity in management roles?
• Does it teach ways to get higher sales closing rates?
• Does it help teachers improve collaboration?
• What is it that, after reading your book, people will do better, and how will that affect their bottom line? Even more than actual profit, what is the emotional value that it will deliver?

Once you illustrate the impact by connecting the dots for your readers, they will be far more likely to purchase, read and implement it.

You aren’t selling a book – you are selling the impact of your book.  Be sure that people who find your book and your profile understand how they will benefit from reading it.

2. Identify the audience that could MOST benefit

Once you know the impact that your book will have on readers – financial, emotional, and otherwise – then you can narrow down your audience to specific groups who would benefit the most from the information it shares.

The great thing about LinkedIn is their use of groups and hashtag. These are two powerful tools to locate and reach the people who are your best audience.

If you want to reach nurses for example, just type “nurses” in the search bar  (found at top left of LinkedIn). Then, click on the word more, then click on groups, and boom – a list of groups where you can share your articles and expertise and interact with your specific target audience.

Hashtags are also helpful.

When you post an update, just add a hashtag (like #teamwork for me) and everyone who searches for that hashtag will be able to find the content you shared along with that hashtag

3. Provide samples of your value:

• You aren’t just an author.
• You are an expert who happens to share information in writing.
• What problems do people have that your book helps to solve?

List the top seven problems that your book addresses.  Those issues are topics for seven different articles you can write – each of which offers a nugget of your wisdom that would help the reader and a hyperlink back to your book sales page.

You can also share comments on other articles in your LinkedIn feed, and then offer helpful ideas on the topic or interesting insights that invite engagement.

Each time you leave a comment you are clickable and can grow your audience through connecting with and sharing helpful insights with the people who are reading what you commented on.

Like most things, success is a result of effort and time.

Success with LinkedIn or any other platform may not be immediate – but you will definitely grow your audience and will likely see an increase in book sales over time when you clarify your book’s impact, connect with and share .

If you are lucky, you may even see a spike like I did when I was contacted by two different companies (a few months apart) who wanted to purchase a bulk order of my book The 10 Commandments of Winning Teammates.

I found out later that the person who had been most influential in getting the orders approved – in both cases – had found me through an article or a comment I had made. After looking at my profile they found my books, and after finding my books were able to connect the dots and see the impact that sharing them with their team would have on their performance.

I love to facilitate team building events – but my first love was writing books.

Here’s to you taking the time and making the effort to put yourself in a position where your book gets discovered over and over again by different people in your target audience because of your commitment to these three ideas.