There is a popular formula in advertising that helps break down the steps that you can use to sell more products, in this case books. The formula is known as the AIDA formula, and it is a succinct, powerful way to present your book to the general public.
* Attention. This first step is the most important. What are you doing to grab people’s attention? Do you need to reach more people or make your initial pitch more attractive? Both? Grab someone’s attention and you will have the opportunity to sell them your book.
* Interest. Once you have someone’s attention, then you must build interest in your book. Remember, there are a million books published each year now – what makes yours more interesting than the next? Be very specific at this stage. All things being equal, the book that has the most specific information written about it will win out.
* Desire. This step is often combined with interest, but should be treated as a separate step. Now that your potential reader knows exactly what the book is and why they should be interested in it, you have to help reveal their desires. Appeal to the brain during the interest stage – appeal to the heart and the emotions at the desire stage.
* Action. I have consistently found this to be the hardest step for authors to execute. After all the hard work is done in the first three steps, this should be easy. All you have to do is ask them to buy the book. If the first three steps our well thought out, the fourth step falls into place without any problem. Ask and you shall receive (well, most of the time anyways).
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