Shenandoah, VA, January, 30, 2006. Its not easy being an author these days. Without their own agent, an author has only about a one in 15,000 chance of having their manuscript accepted by a major publishing firm. And while its true that anyone can be self-published with todays print-on-demand and desktop publishing technology, actually selling a book is a very different matter. On the one hand, there are now something like 3 million books for sale at an online retailer like Amazon or Barnes and Noble, with more than 100,000 new books being published each year. And on the other hand, with the rise in popularity of other forms of media, most people are actually reading fewer books today than they once did just one or two decades ago.

Not that there isnt still a multi-billion dollar a year market for books there certainly is. But short of a movie deal or a pre-established celebrity status, most authors will never actually make money on their books. In fact, according to Allen Greco, author of The Book Publishing Industry, in 1994 over 70 percent of total fiction sales came from just five authors: John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, Michael Crichton, and Stephen King.

This was the way the world looked to a middle-aged would-be author from Virginia back in 2002. He had an idea for a book that would help people to become more successful in life. Randy Gilberts premise was that people would find themselves capable of doing far more than they had ever thought possible if only they werent afraid of failure. And so, he made his first foray into the authoring world with his book Success Bound.

Randy claims three main reasons why he chose the path of self-publishing. First, he knew it would be difficult to get a publisher to pick up his book as an unknown author. Second, he wanted to have final say over what went on the cover (a painting by his mother). And third, he wanted to learn how to promote books.

He studied what few resources on the subject were available at the time, and developed a strategy of online promotion. By anyones reckoning, it worked. On the morning of September 18, 2002, Randys book Success Bound had an online ranking on Amazon of approximately 63,000. On September 19, 2002, his ranking was #1 in self-improvement, and #5 overall. Amazons VP of marketing called him up that morning, bewildered and impressed by the 11,000% increase in sales over a 24-hour period. Very soon other people in the book industry were calling him as well. Randys life was about to change.

No longer an unknown, he could now use the moniker best-selling author. Where once it would have been next to impossible to get a major publishing house to even return his calls, suddenly they were calling him to compete for the rights to publish his next manuscript. He sold the foreign language rights for Chinese, Korean, and Finnish, and saw it reprinted in English for Nigeria. Now the question, people wondered, was could he do it again?

Fast forward to two years later. Randy found a kindred spirit in the form of a Canadian woman named Peggy McColl. She had developed a system for self-published authors to actually make good money by selling their books through their own websites, to keep the maximum possible profit for themselves. Her own book, On Being the Creator of Your Own Destiny not only tied in well with Randys passion for helping people improve their lives, but it also did over $38,000 in sales within the first 48 hours of being released, and all without an outside vendor taking half. Between them, Randy and Peggy had cracked the code to both fame and fortune for the self-published author, and they figured that together they could teach other people to do it too.

And so was born Bestseller Mentoring, the first comprehensive course to teach self-published authors the rather meticulous art of online book promotion. Since the first class at the end of 2004, theyve helped numerous books reach online bestseller status, including such titles as The Disappearance of the Universe, Born a Healer, and How to Meditate with Your Dog.

And it wasnt just the self-published authors who realized they could benefit. The publishing industry as a whole really hadnt done much to develop its online promotion methods, and a number of already well-known authors wanted to include it in their own sales strategies. Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, T. Harv Eker, Bob Allen, Wayne Dyer, Mike Litman, and Marianne Williamson are just a few of the celebrities whove applied Randy and Peggys system for their own books.

Itll be interesting to see whether the major publishing firms manage to figure out effective online promotion for themselves anytime soon. For now at least, Stephen King, Oprah, and J. K. Rowling arent the only ones who can put a book onto the best-seller lists.

Copyright 2006 Proactive Partners, Inc