Marketing Ideas from Robert and Kim Kiyosaki

• How can low-profile people publish and sell books?
  
• What if publishers reject us?
  
• What if bookstores don't want to stock our book?
• How can we sell our books?
  

Best-selling author Robert Kiyosaki (author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, 26 million copies sold, on the NY Times Bestseller list for six years) and his wife Kim addressed some of those questions in an interview. Their main points:

1) He considers himself a poor writer, having flunked out of high school twice because he couldn't write. "I can't spell and don't know punctuation. If I were back in high school today, I'd still flunk."

So he wrote as best he could and gave it to a second grade teacher to re-write, but she made it into a boring textbook. He then gave it to the person who would become his co-author to put it back into more natural, interesting language.

2) He approached the book as an entrepreneur rather than a writer. His background was sales and marketing. From that perspective, most authors are boring. You need to say something that others aren't saying. You need to write with your readers' needs in mind.

Also, as an entrepreneur, he considered related sales. In fact, he wrote his book as a brochure to sell his $200 game.

3) He overcame rejection. All the publishers he pitched the book to said that it sucked and would never sell. Wholesalers and distributors didn't want it. Bookstores didn't want it. So, he self-published 1000 copies.

4) Market your books. He paid a publicist thousands of dollars, but got only one small speaking opportunity. He then took out an ad in the Radio-TV Interview Report, which landed him interviews with a few big-time radio stations. Then the big bookstores started calling him because people were asking about his book and they needed to stock it.

Someone asked Kim why she was attending this marketing conference. After all, they had already sold millions of books. She responded, "That's why we're on the bestseller lists." They're always learning about selling and always promoting their books. "You can never stop promoting, never stop selling. I never stop selling."