My Sales Goals for Friends With Benefits...

Fiction outsells non-fiction by a lot and I'm looking forward to seeing how well my Friends With Benefits will sell. I think I tell a sexy, enjoyable story with rich characters that should appeal to a great many readers, the majority of whom will be African American, and some outside of that demographics. So what are my goals?

In general, if you're able to sell 25,000 copies of your book, your publisher will smile happily and consider your book to be a success. If you are one of the tiny minority that sell beyond 100,000 copies, then you should be able to figure that your agent won't have a problem selling your next two or three manuscripts.

I want to figure out a way to sell 25,000 books in a single day while selling 100,000 books total. In order to do this, I need to put together a promotion that immediately gets Friends With Benefits into the national consciousness, supported by non-traditional advertising, and mad publicity.

To do this, I'm going to combine sponsorships with an innovative idea for a promotion. I can't really say what it is right now because all of the "i"'s are not dotted, but it will be an experiment in turning bookselling from a pretty passive entity into one that forces the reader into the bookstore. Right now, the only book that has accomplished this is the Harry Potter series, with their midnight openings, the branding of the author (I'll talk about that later) and the publicity derived from high sales figures.

I want to move my books from the six week sink or swim, to a promotion more akin to what happens in music, where we know the weekly sales figures for top albums, and that begets more sales. My plan may not work, but it's worth a try.