It also takes four other things. I call them the Four Rs.

You must do the right things the right way,  in the right sequence, to the right people.

Let’s break this down.

The Right Things

There are two main things any author needs to do consistently over time in order to become successful.

1. Master your craft.

Without craft–and by this, I mean the freshness both of your message and your delivery–you will be here today, gone tomorrow. We’ve heard everything before. What fresh approach are you bringing to the table? What bling do you bring?

If you’re not really a writer, and don’t care to be one, you must put up the money to hire a very good writer. Period. Schlock never sells for long.

There’s something else you must master, or pay for.

A message is must reach its audience. So you must:

2. Market your message.

Everything you do as an author (or speaker, or business person, in fact) comes down to these two things.

Master your craft–the what–and your marketing–the how.

Which brings us to …

The Right Way

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways to reach your audience.

Nowadays there’s a plethora of social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, forums), as well as blogs, YouTube, apps for all sorts of technology.

There are article directories, magazines (online and off), speaking opportunities, podcasting, radio, television, YouTube, to name just a few things.

The right way means you do the right things consistently. That you test and evaluate regularly, discarding what doesn’t work.

But you must know not only where to start, but how to proceed, so you need …

The Right Sequence

So where do you start? And how do you continue from there, in the right sequence, so you’re building with a strategy, according to a blueprint, and not just performing a lot of frenzied activities?

That brings us to …

The Right People

You start with your who.

The people you are trying to reach is your who, and where you should start.

You must know your intended audience intimately. You must bring your message to the right who.

Know who they are (age, gender, economic status), what they like to do, where they “hang out” (online and offline). What they read. How much time and money they have for what you have to offer.

What you’re looking for is a connection. The vital link between your message and your audience.

Do you know what that key is that unlocks all these “right” approaches?

YOU!

You are the key. Knowing what you want to accomplish, what you want to say, what motivates you to reach your audience–this is the starting point.

Knowing yourself also shows you where to start with the how. As I said, there are thousands of ways to promote your book. Where do you start?

You start with the who–who your audience is, and who you are.

You connect the dots, using the approaches you enjoy (which will probably boil down to either writing or speaking primarily) that will also reach the people you want to reach.

You like to write primarily? Then you can focus on articles, blogs, forums and the like. But make sure your audience hangs out in these places as well. Or, if they’re not online, that you know how to reach the journals and magazines they read.

You like to speak? There are opportunities galore here, both online and offline. Again, make sure you focus on where your audiences likes to hang out.

What spells author success? The four Rs, and most of all, the connection.

And if you want more help with the four Rs and the connection, I invite you to check out “Write Your Book Right,” and/or my personal coaching to set up a plan that is right for you.

What, you don’t know what the three publishing paths even are?

Don’t feel bad, few do. Until recently, there weren’t really more than one publishing path.

But as you know if you’ve been reading me at all, things in publishing have changed tremendously.

Now there are three pretty distinct paths of publishing, and if you don’t know what they are and which one you’re on, you could make some pretty bad mistakes.

Like you could even publish the wrong way, spending money you didn’t need to.

Or you could spend years of your life trying to get published one way when another way would save you time and prove much more profitable.

So, I am making available a class I taught awhile ago, at no cost to you. There’s even a Study/Resource Guide available for you to take notes on and refer to.

Go here and find your best publishing path!

Boy, you asked a big question! Just about everything I’ve written on my blog and various websites are geared toward answering your question.  Many of my teleseminars also talk about what it takes to get published, especially the one I did with Terry Whalin at www.askaboutpublishing.com.

So I suggest you poke around my sites, especially this blog. Also, get the Author Success Plan. That 5-part minicourse is packed with insider’s tips on publishing and being a successful author gleaned from my 30+ years in publishing. It answers your question and shows you where to start: With the A-B-C’s of becoming a successful author.

Basically, it boils down to: Having a great idea, and building a following of people who like you and your idea. If you have enough of a following, a traditional publisher will take the risk of publishing you. Or, you need to publish it yourself, and glean a following through marketing.

Publishing has been undergoing a massive sea change, especially in the past 3 years. These days it’s very difficult to take the traditional publishing path, in which you get a publisher to take on all the costs of publishing and pay you a royalty (percentage of sales–usually 7.5% of what they get after they give the bookstores their 55% discount). Publishers just don’t want to take the financial risk of publishing an author unless the author can practically guarantee they can sell a lot of books, because the author already has a large following (called an author “platform”).

But while that old way of publishing is crumbling, a lot of alternative ways of getting published are springing up. More publishers are offering “publishing services” in a sort of partnership model of publishing whereby publisher and author share the costs.  That’s one of the things Terry and I talked about in the interview I mentioned, which you can listen to after signing up at www.askaboutpublishing.com. (I send you to the Ask page to sign up just so you’ll see how a cool way to market books works. It’s call the Virtual Book Tour, and I do these for publishers and authors.)

So I suggest you do a little more research on my sites, and if you still have questions, ask! I have a form on this blog (upper right corner) where you can ask questions any time. I periodically hold FAQ teleseminar to answer questions; asking a question on the form assures you’ll be notified.

My guest will be Noah St. John, author of The Secret Code of Success, the book published by Harper Business books that got him a six-figure advance.

Noah is a pioneer in what I call “New Era Publishing” strategies, and tomorrow he is going to reveal what he’s done in two specific areas: the media, and building a community.

I will also reveal some tidbits about what I’ve been learning about what big publishers are looking for now, from my ongoing dialog about one of my client’s books.

Learn too what Noah is doing to try to get on the Oprah Winfrey show–and how you can participate.

And of course, ask your question! If we have time, we’ll get to it.
http://www.greatauthorpromotions.com

One of the resources I review is Wishlist Member. I’ve been doing more investigating into this means of making a WordPress blog a membership site, and the more I learn, the more impressed I am.

There is tremendous flexibility, it’s easy to use, and most of all, it solves a HUGE issue for those of us who are trying to be paid for the information we provide.

Namely, unauthorized “sharing” of content. Violation of our intellectual property.

WishList Member prevents people who have not paid for access from getting access to your intellectual property. Period. It is one of the best ways currently available to protect your intellectual property.

Of course, if you provide downloads to members (and you probably should), there’s nothing to prevent them from passing it on that way.

Nothing, except for a guilty conscience (which doesn’t appear to be a factor for some people).

Still, having added “barriers” and doing all you can should help.

So if you are considering a membership site, read my article on pros and cons of membership sites, and do consider WishList Member software. It’s a one-time cost, there’s a special deal going on right now (3 sites for the price of 2), and if you already have a blog, it’s quite likely you can monetize it in this way.

Part 2 reveals the fascinating (and encouraging) story of how Randy got published, how his amazon campaign went for the launch of his book, the “new era publishing” strategies that are working for him, and more.
http://www.wordstoprofit.com/tamingemailbeast.html

It started off as a simple article on the pros and cons of membership sites, but ended up as, essentially, a whole coaching session on how to decide if it’s the best way for you to be “well paid for what you know.”

So I invite you to read “Membership Sites: One Way to Be Well Paid for What You Know” and learn how to make a membership site work for you.

I’ve included 5 action steps, which essentially become your coaching session for the week.

You know I’m always looking to help you be both well heard and well paid for what you know, and this is one very good way to make sure the latter happens. This mini coaching session will help you think through what’s involved, and whether it’s right for you.

Aside from taking the “Develop Your Audience” class (which you can still do, it’s all recorded–hint hint <g>), the best way is to start a blog and then point to that through the MPOW technique, developed by Internet marketing expert, Bonnie Dillabough. (Bonnie’s techniques snag more than a quarter of a million hits on her Yaktivate.com podcasting network–per month You can attend her Internet marketing classes for free on Saturdays; details here.)

MPOW stands for

Multiple Presences on the Web. First you have your focal point. If you’re a writer, make it a blog. If you’re a talker, make it a podcast. (More about this in my recent Publishing Coach Weekly article, “Are You a Writer or a Talker?“)

Then, you set about getting all sorts of links back to your blog or podcast. You put up articles at ezinearticles.com and other article directories. You comment on other people’s blogs. You start a Twitter account and get followers who would be interested in your message. You list your podcast in podcasting directories.

You make as many things point to your focal point as possible. And you keep adding good content to your blog/podcast on a consistent basis.

What this does is raise your rank in the search engines, enables people to find you, and if you do make a contact, say with a media person, when they google your name, it comes up with an impressive number of entries.

I just googled my name; 22,900 results. When I googled “publishing coach” one of my sites showed up in about half of the results on pages 1 and 2.

See what I mean about “multiple”? (I say this not to brag, but only to illustrate that it works.)

One more note about those results for my name: a good number of them are social network profiles. Another way to be “all over the Web.”

None of the things I mentioned cost anything, aside from the basics of having a web hosting company to host your site. You can get free software (audacity) to record your podcasts, so all you’d need is a microphone.

Over time, as you do these things, you begin to attract people who want to hear your message. Over time, you build your audience.

Did you notice I repeated something?

“Over time.”

As Bonnie Dillabough says often, “The Internet is not instant pudding.”

It does take time.

There are, however, ways to lessen the time it takes.

How to Lessen the Time

First, if you are very, very clear about your message, and you know it’s a message people want to hear, then you can build your audience quicker. (That’s what the Develop Your Audience class is all about. Listen to my interview with Russell Cox here.)

Second, you can use leverage. If you can get the media interested in you, or get interviewed by someone who has a large audience, that provides leverage and is probably both the fastest AND most cost-effective way.

So get to know the media. Sign up for helpareporterout.com, and you’ll get reports on what reporters and journalists are looking for–delivered to your email inbox–three times a day.

So those are my two tips: remember MPOW, and leverage what you do as much as possible.

That’s why I want you to listen to a different class this week other than my Publishing Coach Weekly teleseminar.

I am working on something exciting that will show you how to create a global audience for your message.

I’ll tell you about that soon enough, but in the meantime, I want you to take the Podcast Secrets Preview training on Thursday evening.

This 2-hour training is going to lay a foundation I want you to have for when I show you how to create a global audience.

It will give you some steps, upon which I’ll show you how to build an author platform, for being “well heard and well paid

for what you know and love to do.”

It is 2 hours (maybe longer, knowing Alex Mandossian), it is taught by Alex and Paul Colligan, and it will cost you $20 with the VIP discount I obtained for you.

If you can’t make the live training, you will be able to listen to the recording within 24 hours. And you will have that recording, and your notes from the Action Guide, to refer to forever.

As I said in my recent blog post, podcasting may be one of the easiest and fastest ways to establish your author platform.

Author platform is what will allow you to be well heard and well paid.

Audio and video are increasingly effective and popular.

Knowing how to use these venues will give you the edge in getting your message out there.

And I know no one better to teach you than Alex and Paul. I took Podcast Secrets last year, and will attend it this year with video in mind as well. (My most recent foray into that will be posted at www.abundantgiftsblog.com as soon as I can get to it, assuming technology works as it should.)

I hope you will take advantage of this training. (Yes, it is a preview of the entire Podcast Secrets course, but the way they do preview calls, you will get a lot of valid training out of the preview itself–or you get your money back.)

I hope you will avail yourself of this important step toward becoming well heard and well paid.

My answer is usually two-fold.

First, once you have your words down on paper, you are protected by copyright law. So if you sent me (or a literary agent or an editor) your manuscript, you are already protected from anyone stealing your idea. If someone put out your exact words with their name on it, you’d have a pretty strong case for their plagiarizing your work.

However, remember that copyright law protects only your expression–the exact words-not the ideas. (Note too: You cannot copyright book titles. So someone can use your exact book title.)

Second, you have to realize that people you would send your book to–a publishing coach like me, or an agent, or an editor at a publishing house–have no reason to steal your ideas. We are way too busy doing our work (if we’re reputable, and most of us are), to take your work and run with it–especially if you’ve already developed it and are known somewhat for your idea. (There’s that platform thing again. If you already have a following around your idea, how on earth could I or someone else compete? Why would we want to?)

Also, we do have our reputations to protect. What’s in it for us if we take your idea?

Seth Godin, in his recent blog post, makes another excellent point. Book publishing is an industry based on buying ideas. “A company that likes buying ideas has a process,” Seth says. “They make it relatively straightforward and they have no upside in stealing from you. A company that isn’t in that business puts up barriers. They troll around trade shows looking for ideas to take.” (Seth adds that he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with that, legally or morally.)

The people who might steal your ideas are not those in publishing, but people in your own industry. If your idea is complicated, patent it, Seth says. If it’s simple enough to dream up in a week, Seth says “the only way you’re going to protect it is to build it, fast and well.”

That is, develop it, get it out there to your following (through ezine articles, blog posts, or podcasts, for example), and get known for it. Then you can organize it into a book format you can publish (either by convincing a traditional publisher to publish you, or by self-publishing).