Our thanks to book coach Nancy Baumann for this guest post.

I don’t know about you, but I’m really tired of everything in life being so competitive. Whether you’re seeking a job opportunity or trying to find a parking spot, it can feel like a battle zone out there!

I’m so glad authors don’t have to be that way. Our profession is unique. Authors, we’re not in competition with each other! People are always going to buy books. It’s not like readers will only buy one or two books a year and have to decide between yours and mine. Books are relatively inexpensive, so when readers find something that interests them, they’re going to snatch it up.

We all want to be successful, and in terms of our books, for most of us author success means that people are reading what we wrote. We write to be read, and if nobody ever reads our work, then we can hardly feel successful. It’s wonderful to hold our book in hand, but it’s even more wonderful when it’s in the hands of others.

But we can’t succeed by ourselves. No one can. We need the energy and connections of others to go where we can’t go alone, to reach where we can’t put ourselves — around the corner, around the country, around the world.

The Giving Game

The idea of giving first is as old as time. What we give returns to us. You know how karma works. Karma says that what we give out is what returns to us.

What an opportunity! If we focus on giving, on sharing, on helping – then that positive energy will return to us. It may go against our natural grain to put ourselves aside and promote another author’s book, but that’s what activates the karma principle and sets things in motion. It’s the essence of karma and the subject of numerous proverbs, as well as some contemporary thinkers. Here are some of my favorites:

 “We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.” ― Winston Churchill

 “Happiness doesn’t result from what we get, but from what we give.” ― Ben Carson

“For it is in giving that we receive.” ― Francis of Assisi

Where two or more are gathered

We can accomplish so much more when we work together. It can be really tough to get exposure for our books, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Word of mouth marketing is always the most effective way to sell anything, and social media is our circle.

When we open our social circles to other authors, our books can go around the world with one simple click! That’s what Bookarma has done for you. It’s a pay-it-forward platform where authors help authors market their books globally through shared social networks. Here’s how it works.

There’s no pain in sharing other authors’ books because we’re not in competition with each other. When you share other books, you not only expose that book to an entirely new audience and help the author, you’re also giving something to YOUR followers. Perhaps they’ll discover a new novel or find something that provides an answer to their problem. When we give, we have no idea how far it will go, nor do we need to.

International Book Marketer, Public Speaker, Book Coach and Author Advocate, Nancy Baumann’s passion is to change the world, one reader at a time. She is the creator and owner of Bookarma (www.bookarma.net), the international book marketing platform where authors help authors market their books globally through shared social networks. She is also known at The Book Professor (www.thebookprofessor.com) because she gives everyday people the courage to tell their truth and the tools they need to write a book that will change lives, saves lives, or transform society. As an international speaker, Nancy will be on stage at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October presenting “How Karma and Cooperation Have Changed The Game in Self-Publishing,” and will be a featured speaker at the World Book Fair in New Delhi, India in February, 2015.