Get Your Vision Board Iphone/Ipod App and start moving toward your dreams today! Books by this Author 301+ Ways to Get Ahead: Business Success from Home If you want to kiss your boss good-bye, this book could be your ticket to a home-based business. Lots and lots of examples of possible home-based activities are included along with stories of real people from across the county who have their own businesses, from accountants to zen instructors.   How Branson Got Started How Branson Got Started is the captivating story of how a small Missouri town -- less that 5,000 people -- has become the world's live entertainment capital.   Internet Success with Fred This is a very good introduction to the Internet. If you're smart enough to get this book, you won't need another because you'll learn by doing.   The Emmett Till Book What happened to cause a young African American student's lynching in the Mississippi Delta? When Emmett "BoBo" Till threatened Mississippi's rigid Jim Crow laws this fourteen-year-old paid with his life. Till's murderers were set free yet his death spurred Rosa Parks to take her important stand in Montgomery. In this 50th anniversary, the case has finally been reopened with new and intriguing information.   Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited Discover unresolved Mississippi murders - untold stories of the civil rights era. Susan Klopfer's "Where Rebels Roost" reveals new information about unique, persevering and brave people -- many who were murdered and forgotten.   Unlimited Autoresponders! Unlimited AdTracking! Free 30 Day Trial! http://www.trafficwave.net Feature Articles: Contest Advice for Screenplay Writers... Novel to Screenplay: The Challenges of Adapta... A Writer's Secret Place... Click here for more >>

The book publishing industry in the U.S. consists of some 82,000 book publishing firms, up from some 3000 in 1970, by R.R. Bowker's count but there are many thousands more publishers who do not bother to apply for Bowker's listing.

Altogether, these publishers represent some 150,000 new book titles every year.

Six publishers are considered to be the big firms and they are located in New York City. Some three to four hundred are medium-size publishing companies. The rest, or most, are smaller and/or newer publishers.

More than 8,000 new publishing companies are established each year. Book sales amount to more than $25 billion annually and there are 2 million books "in print" or currently available.

So with these facts in mind, the question becomes - Where to Start?

I'd like to suggest to start small at first. Get your feet wet unless you just have to do that Novel (and then go for it). But you might consider looking at material that does not require as much work to begin with.

There is a story or two in everyone; it is your life and you may think it has been a huge bore, but others might think your story is fascinating. If not your life, look for old family diaries, talk to older relatives about their lives, consider local or regional history projects.

Regional "Ghosts" books often are good sellers as are regional recipe books.

Author David Rising in Using Web Strategies of Database Logic To Market Your Book on The Internet suggests

If you do not think you are a very good storyteller, surely you know how to do something. How To Books are very popular, How To Cook , How To Make Money, How To Cook Brownies , How To Please Your Mate , How To Be A Good Mom, How To Cook A Turkey, How To Be A Good Dad, How to Cook Fried Rice Twenty Different Ways

How To Find A Nursing Home For Your Parents , How To Cook A Blueberry Pie, How To Mentally Block Out Your In-Laws , How To Stay Single, How To Cook Spam , How To Diet, How To Eat Right , How To Save Money, How To Cook Country , How To Stay Beautiful, How To Make Your In-Laws Go Home

Or perhaps, How To Write A How To Book.

Okay, so you are thinking these how to topics have been told a thousand times ... and you would be correct. Here are some more ideas that might wet your bookwriting appetite.

In year 2004 some of the hottest selling books were diet books.

You might consider children's books, twenty to thirty words a page. "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle has sold over twelve million copies and has been around for decades and is still a top seller.

Carle also has a Brown Bear series that does very well. Again, think about starting with a regional children's book -- "Mollie and the Mighty Mississippi."

Here's another tip that I learned while working as an editor for Prentice Hall. Go to a bookstore and look at the 100 best selling titles. Do this for several weeks to get a feel for what is actually selling and you will see a fair share of cook books, diet books, health books, how to books, and children's books.

Watch people search for books. What books do they take off the shelf? (Money books are very popular!) What books do they put back? What books do they sit down with and read? What books do they actually purchase? People watching is a great way to learn about what books work.

A great way to start off writing comes through creating technical manuals, guides and software. If you write a very good technical manual or guide it may be suitable for libraries to include in their current inventory.

Dan Poynter, a well-known coach for self-publish authors (The Self-Publishing Manual: How to Write, Print and Sell Your Own Book, 15th Ed.), offers solid strategies on how to get started writing your book and then selling to libraries and loads of other markets. His Para Publishing site offers great tips and lots of free tools, along with a professional newsletter. (Dan helped my husband Fred and me market Internet Success With Fred. He got started in his own careeer writing about para-sailing, his hobby.)

Richard Paul Evans originally wrote The Christmas Box to show his two daughters he loved them, and to tell his mother he understood her grief in losing a child.

Through his persistent determination and marketing genius, Evans parlayed his self published novel into a $4.25 million advance contract from Simon & Schuster and established himself as one of the most financially successful authors of the '90s.

Evans' book made history as the only self-published novel to hit Number One on The New York Times best-seller list as a self published book. Further, it was the only book to simultaneously hit the top spot on The New York Times hardcover and paperback best-seller lists.

According to The Wall Street Journal, in 1995, Evans' book had the highest one-week sales of any book in their list's history.

JOANNA LUND, AN IOWAN, used her desire and newly discovered marketing "gene" to write, publish and sell her famous Healthy Exchanges cookbooks to millions of people.

JoAnna was a farmer's wife, and she knew how to spread a fine table whenever neighbors gathered to help with a big farming project. But following a divorce, she gained 60 pounds and the weight gain was followed with depression.

When Lund's son left home to become a soldier, the Iowan realized she wanted her health back and began creating healthy recipes for herself. She wanted to cook healthy food that looked, tasted, smelled and felt like what she had always eaten. But without the calories and fat. Lund started following her own cooking advice and lost 130 pounds. Her recipes were not exotic. Not what you find in a gourmet cookbook, and they were not complicated. They simply represented good heartland cooking without the sugar and fat that take their toll. Once JoAnna lost her weight, she wanted others to know they could eat common, good food and maintain a healthy lifestyle. So she set out to self-publish containing her low fat, low sugar, and good-tasting recipes.

Her bank loan of $1,000 was a three-month open note and it was paid off in one month through JoAnna's perseverance. She got the word out by talking to people, speaking to clubs and organizations, taking her book to stores, and getting good publicity through hard work.

Lund's first cookbook sold over 70,000 copies and her second cookbook did even better.

The last time I spoke with JoAnna, she was heading to New York to meet with three top publishers -- all vying to publish her next book. Random House won out! "I even get to choose which publisher," she told me. This was after accomplishing major sales on the Home Shopping Club.

Assuming you want to self publish, one of the easiest places to start is with Lulu. The staff at award-winning LULU.COM will walk you through a retail pricing option, enabling librarians, bookstore buyers and book store owners the ability to order copies at regular discount prices, directly from Lulu.

Another REALLY easy place to build your book is Blurb. This book community provides free software that's easy to use. You can even build a book with Blurb directly from your blog.

You are not just an author or just a publisher or just a book promoter, you are an information provider. Some of your potential customers commute or travel a lot; they do not have time to read your book. But they do have time to listen to it. Consider publishing your book on a CD, either text or audio.

eBooks are very similar to normal physical books in the sense that they are rich in content. They are a huge resource for information. Anything you can put in a physical book, you can put in an eBook. If your website is about Panama, why not write a Panama travel guide. If your site is about web design, you could write a beginner's web tutorial.

An eBook basically is a packaged offline web site that allows authors a great deal of flexibility in presentation of content. eBooks can be downloaded from your website and stored and read offline at any time. eBooks come with user friendly navigation tools that lets the reader skip to any page or search for any keyword in the eBook. You can even write, publish, market and sell your eBook on Ebay.

eBooks will play a very important role in Internet Marketing over the next few years, no matter what the product or service offered by a company is. A great spot to visit is Build E-books.

Once you get started, it won't take long to find that book writing is definitely worth your time.