Have you ever wondered what it takes to make a best-selling book?

Ill tell you the secret, having written 12 books that have collectively sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

In a word, to make a book a best-seller, you need SALES!

Yes, this is obvious, but its also profound.

A potential best-seller has to be put into a sales channel, promoted vigorously, reprinted often, and shepherded along its way to ultimate success.

Secondly, it helps if it has a catchy title, is well written, and it pertains to a topic or has a plot in which readers are interested.

But the latter characteristics are not essential.

With a great sales effort you can make an average book a hit.

How do I know this?

I started my book career by selling them, for Time-Life, and having succeeded, I became a sales manager with them. Literally, our division sold millions of books, making them genuine best-sellers, yet they never appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list.

How could these monster successes be overlooked?

They were sold by phone, in kiosks at malls, by mail, and through various retail displays that are not tracked by best-seller list compilers.

Ask any contemporary New York book publisher whether theyre pleased with selling works through bookstores, and you wont hear the end of their lamentations.

This is why so many editors try to get todays authors to sell their own stuff, at the back of seminar rooms and to their own customer and client lists. There are many more effective sales channels than the large retail book chains.

So, if you want to write a genuine best-seller, spend more time worrying about the sales and marketing end, and less about the actual craft of writing.

If you can figure out how to sell large numbers of books, believe me, every big publisher will think youre a literary genius!