How to Step by Step Publish on Google Play

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Robert Worstell

GooglePlay just recently worked out a nice little sequence of steps – a checklist – you can follow to publish your books there.

While this would have been nice to have at the outset, it’s nice to have now.

(photo: Davide Mancini)

I’ve taken the liberty of scraping these pages for your (and my) reference down the line. A little easier than having to click through everything (IMHO, anyway.)

–>

How to sell a book on Google Play: a checklist

(See also their troubleshooter.)

Step 1. Create an account

To sell books on Google Play, you’ll need to join the Google Books Partner Program. This will give you access to the Google Play Books Partner Center, where you can manage your book catalog and payment settings.

Go to play.google.com/books/publish and either sign in using an existing Google Account, or create a new account.
Provide account details and contact information, then click Continue.
Review the Google Books Terms and Conditions and the Google Editions Addendum. If you accept these terms, indicate this with the appropriate selections.
Click Continue.

Step 2. Set up your payment profile

You must have a payment profile in order to sell books on Google Play. The country listed in this payment profile will determine the currency you’re paid in.

Go to the Payment Center in your Partner Center account.
Under Payment profiles, click Add a Payment Profile.
Enter a profile name. We suggest indicating the country and currency for this payment profile.
If you agree to the terms, continue by checking the box labeled I have read and accept these documents.
Click the Complete Signup button.

Step 3. Specify a bank account

You can start selling books without providing details about your bank account — Google will hold accrued funds from any sales. However, you’ll need to specify a bank account in order to receive any sales revenue.

Click the edit link next to the payment profile.
Click the Add a new bank account or Add new form of payment button.
Enter your bank account information.
The box labeled Make this my selection for future payments is checked by default. Do not uncheck this box unless you’re providing bank account settings that you don’t wish to activate yet.
Click the Save button.

Step 4. Add sales territories

Sales territories specify the countries where any of your books can be sold. For example, if one book can be sold in the U.S. and another book can be sold in Canada, your sales territories should include both countries (formatted as CA,US).

In the Payment Center, under Sales territories, click the Add a Territory button.
Select an existing payment profile. If you need to create a new payment profile, click Cancel and go to the the first step of this checklist. If the payment profile has been recently created and doesn’t display in the drop-down list, try reloading the page.
Enter the list of countries belonging to this sales territory, using two-letter ISO 3166-1 codes. (See our formatting guidelines.) If you can sell your books across all countries, an easy way to list them is to enter WORLD.
Check the box labeled Enable this region configuration.
If you’re subject to fixed price laws in the above countries, check the box labeled I am subject to fixed pricing laws in these countries. This setting should apply to all countries in the sales territory. You can create additional sales territories if you need to apply different settings to different countries.
Click Create Territory.

Step 5. Enable currency conversion (optional)

Google’s currency conversion tool allows you to set prices in a currency you’re familiar with, while buyers in other countries will see the price in their local currency. This isn’t a required step, but it may make it easier for you to sell your books in more places.

Scroll to the bottom of the Payment Center page.
Under Currency Conversion, click the Turn on currency conversion for your catalog button.

Step 6. Tell us about your book

In this step, you only need to provide general details for the book, such as the title and author. We’ll ask for additional settings in the next steps.

In your Book Catalog, click the Add books button, then select Add Book.
Enter the ISBN. You can enter either the 10-digit or 13-digit ISBN. If you don’t have an ISBN for the book, check the box labeled This book doesn’t have an ISBN or other identifier. Google will assign an internal identifier (prefixed with GGKEY) to your book.
If you have multiple templates in your account, select the template with the default settings you’d like to apply to this book.
Provide as much information as possible about the book on the General details page.

Step 7. Provide prices

We require a price in order to list your book on Google Play, even if you wish to make it available for free (in which case, please enter 0 as the value). Google will calculate your revenue share based on the list price you provide. There are three required components for a price:

the currency,
the numeric value,
and the countries where the price applies.

Google needs a price in the local currency for each country where you want to sell the book — for example, to sell in the U.S., you must either:

directly provide a price in U.S. dollars, or
have currency conversion enabled, and include the U.S. in the list of countries where a price in another currency should be applied.

You can provide multiple prices with different settings (such as different currencies) if necessary.

Go to the Google Play settings for the book.
Click the Add a new price button.
Click Currency to enter the currency, formatted as a three-letter ISO 4217 code (e.g., USD for U.S. dollars).
Click Price to enter the numeric price.
Click Countries to enter the countries where you’d like this price to apply, formatted according to our guidelines.
- If you’ve enabled currency conversion (see Step 4), you can list countries that use a different currency than the one you specified or use the keyword WORLD to indicate all your sales territories. Your converted prices will be based on your list price.
- If you’re not using the currency conversion tool, you should provide separate list prices in the local currency for each country where you wish to sell the book.

Step 8. Configure distribution settings

Additional Google Play settings allow you to control the availability of your book.

If the book shouldn’t be available for sale until a specific date in the future, enter the date in the On Sale Date field. Use the format YYYY-MM-DD.
If you want to apply Digital Rights Management (DRM) to your book, check the box labeled DRM Enabled.
If you have the rights to include images in the eBook, check the box labeled Show Photos in eBook. If a book contains a significant number of images, we can sell it only if this box is checked or if we receive an ePub file.
If you wish to sell the book in PDF format, check the box labeled Include Scanned Pages.
Select the maximum allowable percentage of the book that buyers can copy and paste in the Copy / Paste Percentage field.

Step 9. Configure preview settings

Books available for sale on Google Play are also included in the Google Books index. Google Books settings apply to the preview of the book.

You can change the percentage of the book that can be previewed on Google Books with the Preview Type drop-down.
Make sure your preview territories are formatted correctly and include any sales territories (see Step 4).
If you sell your book directly on your own website, you may want to include a Buy link; the Buy Link Text should be the name of your website and the Buy Link is the URL for purchasing this specific book.
Enter your website homepage URL as the Publisher Website.
If you have a logo, you can upload it as the Publisher Logo.
If you have the rights to show images in the book preview, check the box labeled Show Photos in Preview.
If you set the preview percentage to 100% and you wish to make the book downloadable on Google Books, check the box labeled PDF Download Allowed.
If you set a future On Sale Date in the previous step (in the Google Play settings), and you don’t want this book to be previewable before that date, check the box labeled No Preview Before On Sale Date.

Step 10. Upload content

Google accepts eBook files in PDF or ePub format. If possible, we recommend that you submit both in order to provide buyers with more reading choices.

On the Content files page, click the Upload content button.
Click Choose files and select the files for this book from your computer. You can upload multiple files at one time. Please be sure to follow our filename guidelines.
Successfully uploaded and processed files will be listed under Content Files, although there may be a processing delay before they appear.
If you’d like to allow someone with a Google Account to see how the book appears on Google Play without purchasing it, click the Add button under Quality reviewers and enter their email address.

Step 11. Enable the book for sale

Because books can be listed just on Google Books or on both Google Books and Google Play, we need to know where you want to make your book available.

Click the Ready to publish button in the upper right corner. If this book was added to your catalog at an earlier time, it may have a different label, such as Live on Google Books, Needs approval, or Needs Action.
Select Publish to Google Play and Google Books. The button may have a different label for books that already existed, such as Enable for Google Books or Activate and enable for Google Play. If none of the options mention publishing to or enabling for Google Play, your book already has the appropriate availability settings and you can just save instead.

– – – –

This will also become part of my upcoming “How to Self-Publish on GooglePlay.”

Have fun with this.

Posted in book, Canada, E-book, epub, Exchange rate, google, Google Account, GooglePlay, iTunes | Leave a comment

Focus on Value Instead of Delivery

Posted on April 30, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Kobo’s recent piggy approach to public domain self-publishing has a lesson.

And that is: Concern yourself with delivering value, not just book sales.

When publishing books, keep an eye on delivered value in addition to book sales income.

Having to edit the meta-info on several dozen books didn’t exactly make my evening. Swallowing the fact that I could make only 20% off these books from here on out also didn’t sit well. (That royalty rate is just above what I’d get if a traditional publisher signed me a contract.) It is better than not publishing at all, though.

After sleeping on it (and venting in a polite blog post) the reaction mellowed a bit.

Kobo is a single distributor. I know of at least seven other major players in this area. (Feedbooks would be another if their upload process weren’t so antiquated.) If Kobo has decided to penalize self-publishing authors for public domain, it’s still not as bad as Smashwords – who won’t accept these at all. Meanwhile, Lulu will send your PD-based books direct to iTunes and B&N, while Amazon just makes you add “10 images” at a minimum. GooglePlay almost doesn’t care what you upload. So, Kobo can move itself to the bottom of this heap if they want. It’s free choice.

(Meanwhile, my income from Kobo has seldom been higher than other distributors. They beat B&N in volume, but not by much.)

[Update: Just found out that iTunes/B&N are now rejecting new public domain works. Seems to be a duplicate content script. Two more distributors out of the profit loop. See note below.]

You have to look at why we are doing this. Aside from having stories in your head screaming to get out, the primary reason for marketing is to improve someone’s quality of living by allowing them to exchange something with you (money) for a valuable product of yours (books). The higher the book quality, the more they are likely to return for the next (or previous, or both) in that series. That means you get to help them some more.

The reasons for re-publishing public domain books are:

They are still in demand, so the value is high.
You are able to market them better to bring them to people who have not yet found that solution, but are looking. (More market out there.)
Publishing books as a business plan allows you increased financial freedom of passive income so you can help even more people.

All markets have tradeoff’s. It’s easy to get your book buried in Amazon. iTunes and GooglePlay don’t reach near as many people, but they are on all the portable devices out there (at least until Microsoft buys B&N.) If you are on those three, you have around 80-90% of the sales. While Kobo and B&N each say they own 20%, the reality is that they probably split what’s left over.

The point of this is that you have many different choices of where to publish your books.

You also have many formats. Lulu and Createspace will publish hardcopy versions for you. Leanpub will give you PDF’s, .mobi, and epub versions. Convert it to an audiobook and upload to ACX for distribution. Your video versions have multiple outlets. PDF’s can be sold on Scribd and in other venues (although Scribd has a nasty “duplicate filter” content which throws out public domain books they already have.)

Again, that’s all mechanics.

What are you doing that will help people the most?

For me, that’s converting these books into ecourses so that people can study them from their mailboxes, audio so they can listen on their commutes, video – if that’s their preference, PDF so they can read it on any device.

The message behind the book is the help it can give to people to improve their lives.

Kobo? Maybe you want to simply do a book review with excerpts that then link to a page where they can get the full book from another distributor or in any format they want. That would fit Kobo’s requirements nicely for public domain content.

The bottom line:

What matches your production resources, and
What format(s) are your readers needing that would help them the most?

Keep those in mind to achieve your success.

Happy publishing!

[Update: My PD series I just published on Copywriting got summarily rejected after Lulu tried to push them to iTunes/B&N. I’ll do another test to see if this is both of them, or just one. Regardless, it means that a quality derivative work is needed, not shortcut-versions. iTunes/B&N just went into the Smashwords category, leaving GooglePlay, Amazon, and Lulu on the top of the heap, Kobo in the middle.

It also means you are going to need to do a lot more of the heavy lifting in order to succeed at this profitably. Writing a quality book, with substantial value is the real method now. Blog your reviews of books, include the chapter(s) you are reviewing, and then publish based on that.

I’ll do this with these dozen copywriting books and let you know…]

Posted in Amazon.com, E-book, feedbooks, iTunes, kobo, Microsoft, Scribd, smashwords | 1 Comment

How to Publish Public Domain Books and Profit Nearly Forever, Part 1

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Robert Worstell

(photo: 401(k) 2012)

I found sometime this year that it was more profitable to publish than it is to write. And publishing copyright-free material was faster than about anything.

[Update: the list of How-To steps have just been posted.]

I now have several dozen books published, some of them my own written works, most of them as tests.

So I did these tests with public domain classics and PLR (public-licensed-rights) material – both came up profitable. Not incredibly so, but since I was spending about a week to get dozens of books up, and then a handful of these sold regularly after that with no further work, I quit looking for other work to do. In fact, in my frugal/spartan lifestyle, these books paid my operating costs monthly.

I became financially free and didn’t have to “work” for a living. I still worked, but now it was to increase the quality of that freedom.

Today, I found some limits to expanding that lifestyle – some were my own creation, some were imposed on me.

Public Domain

A coordinator at Kobo recently sent this in an email to me:

You cannot take others work and claim them as your own. If it is in the public domain, you need to declare it as such.

This also goes for collections and derivatives of authors’ work. The works are still part of the domain and need to be declared as such. You retain the copyright to any books published through Kobo Writing Life but public domain needs to be declared.

That is their unofficial policy at this point. Declaring these as public domain on Kobo means dropping to a 20% royalty. Compared to the 70% enjoyed at most price points, this is a huge drop.

But as they hold the (purse) strings, this is their prerogative.

I also found that sending an ebook based on public domain via Lulu to iTunes and Nook would get rejected completely. Lulu would host it, but not these other two. (I’m still testing this to see what might get through, if any.)

Kobo is incorrect to infer they are public domain if they are legitimate derivative works.

A derivative work, is one where extensive editing has been done to the original, or it quotes or excerpts without containing the entire text – the original being used as inspiration or source reference. One example book I did was to select chapters from a dozen books having reference to the “Law of Attraction.” This book is definitely my own creation. This is a derivative work.

However, another book is also under my own copyright as a collection, “Secrets Between Your Ears” which has four books collected into a single volume, all dealing with affirmations. Kobo doesn’t recognize this ebook as anything but public domain, but says I still have the copyright (FWIW.)

However, I’ve accepted the concept that a person could simply slap a new forward onto a book and claim the copyright. This isn’t true, since it’s not extensive enough in the revisions. A good description is at Public Domain Sherpa. There is a full discussion of the what-is-public-domain scene there.

PLR

Another source of copyright free material. The quality on these vary intensely. Some of the more recent ones are better written and edited. Now they are coming with high-quality covers and source files to edit them fully.

They actually create these mini-books or reports with the idea of selling them so anyone can reuse them. Like public domain, there are essentially limitless competition out there with all these copies.

But also like public domain, you will see that mostly they have been poorly edited or poorly marketed and are really no competition at all.

While some have put various restrictions on them, you’ll usually find that there are many places to acquire these materials, so it’s arguable who originally put them up for sale said what restrictions are enforceable. As they are PLR, there are seldom any author who can be found on them.

Here the caveat is to look for an actual copyright notice – although one isn’t needed if you put your name on it and publish it. Another way to ascertain if someone simply did that is to look at the text stylings – if you find they have simply put a name on it but many other books are constructed the same way, then you have a PLR book or content.

My test was to find what I had collected, see which ones had good-quality covers and editable files, then publish these as epub-version ebooks.

Amazon will not accept PLR material, but Lulu, iTunes, Nook, GooglePlay, and Kobo will. It’s a bit of a Gold Rush to do this, however. If you are first with your name on this book, you essentially have the copyright. (I published under CC license with all these, just to be fair.)

Until they figure out how to crack down on PLR as they have on Public Domain, these will continue to be profitable – depending on quality.

Doesn’t Apply to Printed Works

I publish through Lulu to get books to Amazon. This is printed books, as I publish direct to Amazon all my ebooks. (Lulu recently started publishing ebooks to Amazon, but takes 10% of your royalty for doing so. Which made me re-think publishing to Nook…) You can publish public domain as hardcopy all you want. I added another yesterday on top of the nine I published about a week ago.

The trick is to make sure Amazon links these books together as they have different ISBN’s. But ebooks sell hardcopy ones, and vice versa.

A New Business Plan

My old one saw that publishing public-domain classic works as ebooks could be profitable. So I hobby-horsed on simply getting as many as I could up there. Unfortunately, this fell apart with today’s news about Kobo and iTunes/Nook rejecting or penalizing public domain works.

However, this interestingly leaves Amazon – who has guidelines on what makes a derivative work out of public domain content.

Meanwhile, you are able to publish the trade paperback through Lulu and match these up together so they sell each other. That paperback (even hardback) can go wider than Amazon via Ingrams. You only have to pay for a proof copy.

I hadn’t been doing this to public domain ebooks, as it’s more extensive work. However, these others have forced my hand, so it’s a simple re-compilation job at this point. The side benefit is getting a library of hardcopy books.

eBooks which do take off on Amazon (most don’t, actually) will do quite well. And listing these on GooglePlay will then give these books an added boost. I may be able to get public domain ebooks on to Nook directly – this is another research job waiting. (I have no MAC, so if iTunes blocks public domain books coming from Lulu, then that’s life.)

Publishing public domain and PLR books is a numbers racket to some degree. It will depend on the niche and the earlier recognition of that author and work. (Which is a blog post all on its own.)

Publishing to GooglePlay/Books enables a bit of search engine marketing to be done, as you are linking hardcopy and ebooks together when you do – and Google sends traffic to Amazon, which in turn raises that book’s value in their algorithm. The old mutual back-scratching model.

What tends to solve this is having all possible versions of a book available. Paperback, ebooks, audio-book, even hardback. And get all these versions available to as many distributors as possible. The Many Eyeballs strategy.

My plan at this point is to punt back to the beginning with these classic fiction works. I’ve compiled a list of the top 100 all-time bestselling and currently still popular classic fiction books. Also, the genres in order to publish them. The next step will be to edit these into shape for inclusion in Amazon and also publish the hardcopy version so these are linked. There are around 28 of these published as ebooks currently. So when I catch up with these and start publishing new books, they will then get distributed as possible to the other online outlets.

– – – –

There is much more to write on this subject. It will become a book at some point, to do with being able to create an independent income via online self-publishing.

For now, I have miles of sleep to go before I can work at this again. It’s much too late…

Some reference links:

http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2010/05/how-public-domain-publishing-can-grow-your-business/
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_FAQ
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=9781304403322
http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2008/06/us-copyright-renewal-records-available.html

Posted in amazon, Amazon Kindle, book, iTunes, kobo, lulu, public domain, publish | Leave a comment

Some copyright notes – where to check for public domain issues

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Some places to check for copyright orphans before you give up on that great public domain book.

How to check for copyright before sending your public domain book to the press.

The safest approach is to only use books printed before 1923. That limits what people want to read, though, since the language and grammar is quite a bit different from what we use today.

However, there are tons of books which were “orphaned” between then and now. I don’t need to bore you with copyright law right now – it gets a bit involved.

Best shortcut I know is Public Domain Sherpa’s flow diagram – or their easy to use calculator.

What you are looking for is checking a book you found to see if it was ever renewed. Just because it’s being published by someone today doesn’t mean it was properly renewed. They may be simply publishing a public domain book. Perfectly legal.

And this is why it’s often profitable for an self-publisher to get in on this scene.

So: was it ever renewed?

Using that calculator or diagram will give you a quick approach to finding out – but you still need to check if a copyright was renewed.

One online shortcut is Stanford University’s Copyright Renewal Database. This covers 1923-1963, by tracking renewals up through ’77. Another approach is to get Google’s XML file (it unpacks to a huge 300+ mb!) and search through this yourself. (I found a program called Base-X which doesn’t choke on it. I’m on Ubuntu Linux, though – your mileagewill vary.)

The advantage of that last one is finding where someone has copyrighted a revision of the original work, which happened to both Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and Robert Collier’s “Robert Collier Letter Book.” The original of both of these is in the public domain, but not the revisions (in both cases done by relatives.) Dorothea Brande‘s “Wake Up and Live” and “Becoming A Writer” have dubious renewals, since in one, the author’s name is mentioned as part of the title, and in the other it has Brande as a co-author. The only way to be really sure may be to have the copyright office do a $150/hr search for you. (These above examples from cursory search only and do not constitute legal anything.) As well, they have a tough row to hoe as there are so many free versions of these books out there, they would have to be challenging quite a few places all at once. (Lawyers cost big bucks even then they are only churning out boilerplate ceast-and-desist letters.)

It’s possible to look up the actual record from the Copyright Office – via Internet Archives for anything before 1977 via those PDF’s. Everything 1978 and later is in digital form, and can be searched online directly. You’ll probably find the Stanford site or that mongo Google XML file is all you need to look up renewals.

And that was the point today – to get these links up so you could search yourself.

– – – –

Now, what do we do with this?

Once you’ve found out that it’s never been renewed, or it never had a copyright notice to begin with, then you can do whatever you want with it.

If you want to claim a new copyright, you can make a derivative version of it, but realize that you only have rights to the material you added – even if you quote the entire book.

This is where I was going around with the “coordinator” from Kobo, who insisted that I put my books in their 20% royalty set because they contained the whole book. That’s not what any law says, but it is the way she wants to run her fiefdom.

You can go ahead and publish your books on other sites without a problem, providing you follow Amazon’s rules about public domain and announce them as such. B&N will also allow you to publish public domain material directly. Along with Kobo, they offer low royalties for these.

The profit is then in derivative works or collections which are definitely not in the public domain (except on Kobo, where you “still have the copyright.” while your books now earn you squat.)

However, you can publish hardcopy versions of these with abandon, derivative or not. Know that there is a lot of competition for the popular versions. POD costs are higher than bulk printing, so it leaves you to find other options if you try to compete on price.

The money looks to be in how you market these to your audience. PD books, if they were ever successful originally, already have a demand for them. By doing the scene of building an online publishing house, you can start attracting traffic to buy these. Some search engine marketing may net you a few sales.

While we’re on that subject, getting your newly-copyrighted book up on GooglePlay will help you link to your own landing page for this book, as well as the print editions you’ve posted via Lulu.

(Why Lulu and not CreateSpace? Createspace is now going to about everywhere Lulu has been going to all this time. The problem is that they are an Amazon entity, so indie bookstores and big box competitors may not want to stock your book. This is exactly what happened to Ferris’ 4-Hour Chef. Had he simply published it via Lulu, he wouldn’t have had to market it through bittorrent.)

I’m leery of putting up a book on Amazon (or Nook or Kobo) with the original PD title without following their requirements. That could get all your books banned there. But there’s nothing saying you can’t get that book linked to your hardcopy version, or that you can’t sell the same book as your own via Lulu and GooglePlay. Same price, higher royalties. Fun, huh?

PLR

With the exception of Amazon, you can treat PLR with a broader stick than PD books. Amazon simply won’t take them – unless you almost completely re-write them (which is still faster than doing all that research again – you can verify their facts as you re-write) and can compile several of their shorter reports into a decent-sized book.

But when they come with decent covers and a word .doc or openoffice .odt file, then it’s simple to convert them into ebooks and also print books (again, they usually don’t have enough pages unless you combine them.)

One of the crossovers in this is where they are giving away a PD book as PLR. So you really need to simply check the copyright sites above first, but you’ll also find that people have already published these ahead of you.

After that, it’s like a different brand label slapped on the generic detergent box. The marketing is the difference.

As ebooks, I haven’t had any problem getting the main distributors besides Amazon (and Smashwords) to accept and sell them.

Next for me is a 30-day workfest

With the outline above, you can see that I’m getting ready for something.

I have 100 all-time topselling fiction books which I want to get out so people can learn from the time-proven successes on how to write in that genre. It’s going to take awhile, but I can get these published and use them to link to my sites and other books meanwhile. (I have written 4 books now on how to write and publish, with these blogs forming the backbone of a fifth on its way.)

As well, I have over a hundred PLR books on various subjects which only need conversion, as well as linking to a backing site to add value (and capture emails.)

If I do 8-10 per day for 30 days (think: NaNoWriMo), then this is somewhere around 250-300 books published in 30 days.

The point of this is to build a huge backbench so I can cover my expenses and invest the rest in marketing – while I find out what sells well and back these up with marketing, finding what doesn’t sell and revising these in title/cover/description/content until they do.

I’ve got to go now, as I’m already a few days into this month and don’t have today’s quota ready…

Luck to us all.

PS. There’s a dirt-simple to check a copyright – look up the book on Gutenberg.org or Internet Archive (archive.org) – they’ll tell you a lot about copyright and save you having to search or doubt.

Posted in amazon, Amazon.com, createspace, Dorothea Brande, Internet Archive, kobo, lulu, public domain | Leave a comment

Lulu gets finicky about publishing ebooks – tsk, tsk.

Posted on May 6, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Is the business plan for publishing public domain and PLR books dead?

No, but the rumors would make you think so.

Lulu won't distribute public domain or free online books anymore - but you can still make money this way.

(photo: seebrownflikr)

Got this from Lulu today:

Please note that we no longer accept public domain or other content freely available elsewhere into distribution.

Update: Further, I found this on their “distribution requirements”:

To be eligible for submission, your eBook must fulfill ALL of the following criteria:

Must be in EPUB format (Our new converter tool can help you with this later)

Must fulfill all formatting requirements

Must have all content in English

Must have an ISBN

Must be categorized appropriately, if it includes adult and/or sexually explicit content

Must not be public domain content

Books submitted without meeting all criteria will be rejected.

Which would assume you can’t publish this stuff about anywhere. That’s not true. The bottom line is that most won’t pay you top commissions for for public domain content any longer – well, on some of the sites anyway.

Lulu is only saying they won’t distribute them any longer. They still take the books you publish and give you a decent commission for them when they sell on Lulu.

Update: Found this on an Apple forum. Apparently iTunes is still accepting public domain books (and PLR) – so the biggest problem is Kobo‘s greediness, and Lulu deciding to no longer distribute such outside there little garden.

Here’s the rundown on who accepts public domain:

Amazon – YES. Will take public domain, will only give you 35% commission. You also have to differentiate it from the other PD versions already there.
Nook (Barnes and Noble) – YES. will take public domain if you declare it as such. (Again, test to follow shortly.)
iTunes – DON’T KNOW. I found this 2011 post about a bunch of public domain apps showing up there. More research needed. (May need to get a pre-owned MAC to figure this out.)
Smashwords – No. Absolutely not. Will get you banned for life. PLR is same thing.
Lulu – YES. Full royalties. (Up to you to get them sold.) Just won’t “distribute” them.
Kobo – YES. Have to declare it and take a 20% “standard” royalty.
GooglePlay – YES. (And there is an interesting/controversial gambit below.)
Leanpub – YES. Again, limited sales – but the key here is being able to do binders and packages of additional media with them. Note – they are the only ones giving 90% royalties…

Can you (still) publish PLR books?

Amazon – NO. Smashwords – NO.
Kobo – YES. Nook – YES (testing this.) Lulu – YES. GooglePlay – YES. Leanpub – YES.
iTunes – DON’T KNOW. (But testing this through Lulu as I write this… and when I get their software running on my new MAC, I’ll update this here as well.)

What was the problem Lulu is having to solve?

It seems when they expanded their distribution to Amazon and Kobo, the conflicting policies on public domain led them to simply nix the whole scene of trying to distribute to these.

Before that point, I had no problem publishing any PLR or derivative public domain book through Lulu and was willing to accept their cut of my royalties for their work in getting my books approved through iTunes and Nook.

Is a profitable business plan still possible with public domain?

Yes, but you have to add value. Derivative works are fine everywhere except Kobo, who will require you to declare it as public domain if you quote the entire work (and takes the royalty cut.)

Don’t figure you can take these machine-generated epubs and sell them anywhere, when people can get that quality for free. Don’t be cheesy. Be upfront about it and be classy with your covers and descriptions. Really market this book instead of just sloughing it off and going the “get-rich-quick” route.

Interestingly, this really makes your publishing plan become Amazon-centric.

Lulu and Amazon don’t care if you publish a hardcopy version of your book. Having a regular published book up there will enable your ebook to sell better, actually. It is also a class act, since you gain reputation and trust by publishing it as both. Lulu will publish your book Amazon and through Ingram to just about anywhere else. They just won’t distribute your book anywhere if it’s based on the public domain or a “freely available online” version. (Assume this means PLR.)

The other point is to utilize LeanPub or iAmplfy to package your book with A/V materials and so give a better experience. (Note: iAmplify only accepts PDF versions of your book.) Again, this is adding value. Note also that these both have integrated affiliate sales systems – so you can get your fans to earn extra income by pitching your book to their friends, and so on.

The steps would be to edit the public domain book into good shape, and add in either the annotation or original, relevant images Amazon wants. Then export a PDF version of that, suitable for hardcopy printing. Then order, review, and approve your proof – while meanwhile publishing your ebook directly to Lulu, Amazon, Nook, Kobo (sigh), GooglePlay, and Leanpub.

Note 1: Lulu still gives you a free ISBN for this, although none of these require it – it will help you with defending your derivative content, I would guess.

Note 2: Getting your epub approved through Lulu means it’s going to get accepted by Nook (and iTunes) as far as the technical end. It still takes weeks to get reviewed, but few to no rejections. You’re still submitting this separately, but overall saving time.

Go ahead and set up a binder on Leanpub if you are publishing a series of these-type books. (More added value.) If you have audio and/or video files or additional material, create a package for the book – and also create a package on iAmplify.

Now come back to your website where you have a special landing page for that book and post all the links and icons from the publishers who will accept your book.

(If you have a MAC, go ahead and publish to iTunes as your own test. It’s more than likely that iTunes is still accepting PLR and PD books.)

Again, this really only misses iTunes from the original line-up.

The lowest-common denominator (LCD) approach.

Lulu won’t distribute to these as their LCD can’t solve the problem of public domain, where each of these distributors have their own policy – so they just skip it.

Under this new business plan, Amazon is your LCD. If it passes them, then you can publish it anywhere. Interestingly, this means publishing directly to Nook (and iTunes), Amazon, and Kobo – so Lulu actually makes less money from you.

Update: Your LCD of quality hurdles remains done easiest at Lulu, so use them to make sure your file “passes muster” so you can publish it everywhere else. Just don’t try to distribute any PD file anywhere else except directly.

You create an ebook which will pass their standards, then set up a print version as well. Then you tell GooglePlay that you have both versions available on Amazon – and they’ll sell it for you. In-bound links from Google then makes your book get higher rankings on Amazon (as long as it sells, anyway.)

Kobo screws you from your full royalty, but something is better than nothing, even if they are paying less than everyone else.

Your ebook in all cases links back to your website (as does GooglePlay – more link love) so you can offer your binders and packages to them directly, as well as enlist them as an affiliate to sell your books.

Note that your YouTube video can link to this landing page, which then links to all the places you have it for sell – so that’s another way to add value.

Kobo becomes an automatic loss-leader for you in this case. Until they change their un-stated public domain policy (or that person leaves.)

Is PLR the same?

Kinda. You can put your name on it, but theres a lot of other versions (some identical) already out there.

[Update: Lulu apparently distributes PLR like always. Just Public Domain they have issues with. Doesn’t matter to me, I’m distributing my ebooks direct, now.]

Except that you can’t post it to Amazon. Period. Unless you completely re-write it. Slightly harder than simple editing, but easier than having to think it up out of whole cloth.

In that case, publish it to Lulu for the ISBN, Nook, GooglePlay, and Kobo (full royalty this time.) Make a binder/package on Leanpub – and craft a video for YouTube, then set up another package on iAmplify. (And then work up the affiliate offers on Leanpub, Kobo, and other sites.)

Note that these PLR ebooks are usually not long enough to publish as a book, so you aren’t going to get any advantage from that route.

You won’t get the boost from Amazon sales, which is iffy anyway. (I’ve found that these books sell pretty well through GooglePlay, though.)

Why haven’t I been doing this all along?

Amazon is iffy, as I said. Around 80-90% of the books on Amazon actually don’t sell. I’ve had one book (so far) make it to “bestseller” status. Out of 17 published
there.

The hype about publishing to Amazon is mostly that gold-rush phenomenon. The 80/20 rule applies – and as well the 99/1 derivative of it.

My earlier tests showed I made more money from the other routes (before Lulu and Kobo changed their PD policies, anyway.) It was something like 2 to 1 for all the other distributors. So I spent my time editing PLR and PD books as this was faster than writing my own from scratch.

That plan got me enough money that the paltry sales from Amazon didn’t matter. And I didn’t have to jump through hoops to get reviews, and so forth.

Once that one book started taking off (fit enough algorithm points) then Amazon started paying twice the combined total from all the others.

Now, it’s obvious that I need to shift gears to Amazon. Sorry, Lulu. Though with the paperback (maybe even hardback) available, Lulu will get their fair share.

Stacking some search engine marketing to my landing pages should then help my Amazon books find their way. Meanwhile, the “more is better” approach of publishing in several formats simultaneously will then boost the whole scene.

Google’s strange copyright scene.

On one page, I found that they were grousing for a fascinating reason. Someone had republished a public domain book as a print-only edition, and Google promptly pulled their free ebook edition – leaving the print version as the only way to get that book from Google. I’d have to agree that nixing the ebook was inconvenient – forcing readers to get the PD version somewhere else.

Google’s policy is to simply avoid conflict whenever possible, especially the DCMA scene. (Lulu tends to do this also. A “rights bully” can lodge a complaint and Lulu will promptly remove your book while you reply. But won’t reinstate it until you sort it out with that mystery person.) The solution to that is to make another derivative version and post it again. Maybe moot, now, since they won’t distribute it anywhere…

Back to Google – obviously, that print-only publisher is missing some income from the ebook sales. So your plan should include both versions, linking them as you go. (Again, Lulu gives you free ISBN’s for each version, so publish both there before you publish to GooglePlay.)

The trick is that if you take a public domain book, republish it under the same title and author (even though it’s your derivative version), this logic says Google will now only point requests to your books (as long as you’re first and only).

As long as you are able to produce a value-added product, then it shouldn’t be a grouse-point. Google drops it’s publid domain ebook version for yours. No, they shouldn’t, but they do. Sorry – in advance. (Crocodile tears all the way to the bank.)

Why publish public domain if it’s all this hassle?

Because you can make money off public domain – maybe even more than writing your own books. If you write your own, you and it are unknown. A small handful of talented writers make it “big” on Amazon, everyone else keeps their day job and dreams.

The secret to sales anywhere is having a huge backbench. PD and PLR books allow you to quickly develop that bench (in months, not years.)

A profitable backbench then allows you to perfect your writing skills without worrying about having to make a living meanwhile. That’s called financial freedom.

No, you don’t get insanely rich from public domain and PLR publishing. But you won’t have to put up with a 9-5 J.O.B. any more. And that’s a freedom I can live with.

Summary update: Essentially, Lulu just shot themselves in the foot – although to their credit, they’ll make a lot more with their 10% of the revenues they are getting by helping all these newer self-published authors crank out their own works via their aggregation through 4 distribution lines.

However, I have news for them. My bestsellers are actually public domain books and PLR. If I had started self-publishing these today, they’d have nothing from me for revenue. My sales on Lulu itself are less than 1% of the total sales I create.

And since I’m pushing a couple-hundred in royalties through Lulu every month, this is helping keep them in the pink. Unless I move my earlier books directly (a huge pain) it looks like from here on out, I’ll just have a metric now about how my marketing is going. There will be no more public domain books published by me there (and probably not even PLR, because “why pay Lulu when I’m doing it myself anyway?”)

Meaning, my work is going to pay me better. “The wooden door closes and the iron door opens.”

Posted in amazon, Amazon Kindle, google, iTunes, kobo, lulu, Nook, public domain | Leave a comment

Why Lulu Made Me Buy a MAC for Self-Publishing

Posted on May 7, 2014 by Robert Worstell

iTunes, unlike Amazon, doesn’t seem to be a walled garden. But there are hurdles which they put in place to keep indie authors out.

Here’s some solutions to the problem.

Indie self-publishing authors face hurdles when posting derivative public domain works to major distributors

(photocredit: Kyle MacDonald)

This began for me when Lulu decided to quit sending public domain (PD) and public-licensed rights (PLR) books in their distribution. They still accept the books themselves, but won’t pass them along.

I’ve used Lulu for years, because they are the most inexpensive of all the aggregators – and are generally ahead of the curve, plus easy to use. (They began by publishing hardcopy books and PDFs.) Smashwords has been around longer, but their “meatgrinder” is difficult to get used to (need a custom template) and also they simply do not accept PD and PLR books.

Long ago, I realized that the greatest works in the self-help genre had already been written and marketed. But many of these had gone out of print, and also were poorly represented as ebooks. Geniuses of earlier ages were going unrepresented today.

The problem with our digital age is that the relative ease of republishing books makes for a flood of public domain books coming back into the market, some poorly edited, most just floated into existence. They’re seemingly everywhere. You can even find them as apps in both iTunes and GooglePlay.

So there is a ready reticence of the major distributors to carry PD books. What they are doing is either rejecting them outright, or only paying the minimal royalties to keep the barriers up to spammy get-rich-quick self-publishing wannabe’s.

This doesn’t mean they aren’t profitable. Figuring that you can edit, re-cover, and write descriptions for a public domain work in less than a week, while it took the original author often months or years to write it – so getting only 20% (Kobo) or 35% (Amazon, Nook) royalty still seems fair. Many of these books still sell well, even though there are many copies of them out there. Your book will sell the same as if you wrote it – it will depend on the cover, title, description, and price (maybe the preview, and maybe reviews). The advantage is that they’ve already been marketed for as much as a century before. That long-dead author doesn’t care. Your bank account will be more appreciative…

Lulu put a crimp in my business plan

The problem with getting books into iTunes that you have to own a MAC (newer than about 2006) in order to self-publish. Otherwise, you’re needing to have a aggregator do this for you.

Lulu has long been my aggregator of choice, since whey were easier to use and also would be the go-between for some of that ~~anal~~ arcane rejections which would come from iTunes and Nook. However, Lulu has continued to work on their interface so that it will only accept passing content and titles. It’s also much easier to revise your works.

When they expanded their distribution to Amazon and Kobo, this made it even better, since for 1/10th of your royalty, they could send your book everywhere. Unfortunately, they started refusing PD and PLR books, which created a big hole in my business plan.

Like Amazon and Nook, it’s not that they won’t accept PD, it’s just that it has to be handled differently. Every distributor has a different policy. (GooglePlay simply doesn’t care, but never gives more than 52% royalty regardless.)

iTunes has been a major income source for my PD and PLR books, so cutting me out of that left me to research how I could anyway. You see, I don’t think iTunes has changed its policies. But I can’t tell until I start publishing their directly.

Why it’s cheaper to do it yourself – a review of aggregators

Research yesterday found that the alternatives to Lulu are still way more expensive than they need to be.

iTunes has some “recommended aggregators” which can post to iTunes. (Lulu isn’t on this list, so there are probably others as well.

I ran into some outrageous expenses when researching these.

(There’s a nice set of charts at ebookdesigns.net, mostly still accurate – see their graphics below)

What the major distributors pay

What the major publishers will give you in royalties when you publish directly.

(click to enlarge)

You can see the overview. Roughly, they are the same for original works. PD, as I mentioned, gets you the lowest they can get away with.

Not mentioned are smaller outlets like Leanpub, which gives you 90% minus 50 cents for their costs. Drawback is their small userbase, upside is they allow you to bundle books, make packages, and let readers set the price they want to pay (above your minimum.)

What the major aggregators cost

What the major aggregators will cost you in royalties when you publish through them.

(click to enlarge)

Lulu – 10% of your royalties. Free conversion. No other required costs, unless you ask for help.
Smashwords – 15% of your net royalties. Free conversion.
Bookbaby – 15% of royalties if you present a print-ready epub. Packages for conversions.
Booktango is deceptive about costs. If it sells other than on their site, they take 30% of your royalties. (Ouch.)
InScribe – costs per book, plus a split of the royalties (which isn’t clear on their site.) You’ll also need to have a minimum of five books to publish.

DIY vs. Aggregators (per ebookdesigns.com)

A comparison of publishing direct or paying aggregators to do for you.

In general, if you know how to format your own epub, doing it yourself will give you the best returns. Some of these sites require ISBNs, others not. None of the major distributors now require them. However, you are able to easily craft search-links for your book with this unique identifier (except on Amazon). Lulu requires them, but gives them away for free.

The other advantage with Lulu and Smashwords is that they collect the royalties for you, as all the distributors have different schedules. Nook and iTunes are probably the worst (see chart). Lulu will pay monthly by PayPal or quarterly by check. Smashwords only pays quarterly. GooglePlay and Amazon direct deposit monthly.

Overall, publishing directly to five big distributors (Amazon, iTunes, Nook, GooglePlay, Kobo) and two minor ones (Lulu, Leanpub) is probably the way to go if you’re a one-person publishing house. Writers may consider their time worth more.

So what about publishing on iTunes now that Lulu won’t?

Simple answer: Buy a MAC. Their free software runs on OS 10.3, which came out in 2005. Most of the various machines they have (don’t know if you can do this from an iPad, it’s not clear that it can be done, plus typing without a keyboard could quickly become a bottleneck – though bluetooth keyboards are available.)

Most recommended for a low price range ($500 new) would be a new MAC mini – then provide your own mouse, keyboard, monitor, DVD burner. Many of these you’ll already have around in USB versions. This seems much better than their other equipment options as far as price.

You can see that the cost savings you save by self-publishing without aggregators will pay for that machine within a year. Buying used (pawn shop, Craigslist) might get you an even better deal.

[Update: I just did this – bought my own. Found the best value to be a MAC Mini, which has more than enough horsepower even in their low-end version to do what is needed. Then found a discount “open-box” version available via BestBuy. Needs a DVI to VGA adaptor for the old monitor I have hanging around. Since LibreOffice runs on a MAC as well, this might be the practical platform of choice for any self-publishing author. Review upcoming…]

Can public domain publishing earn sufficient income as a business plan?

Three answers, both “yes, but…”

Your version has to add value and distinguish itself from the other also-rans. A snazzy, eye-catching cover and engaging description is a must. Pricing is something to tweak on a per-book basis. $2.99 – $3.99 are the two main price points which make the best income, with $0.99 being a requisite loss-leader for the first in the series. ($1.99 is a dead zone for some reason, by both Smashword and Kobo surveys.)
You have to have a deep backbench and strong outside marketing to help discovery.
You are going to have to serve a niche and cultivate your audience.

Unstated here is that your own personal finances have to be well-managed. This type of publishing won’t make you fantastically rich overnight. You’ll get out of it what you put into it – so expect to hang onto your day job for awhile longer until you establish enough regular passive income to enable you to fire your boss.

Meaning that it’s not an overnight success route. You’ll need several dozen (or dozen-dozen) books, which means assembly-lining the editing production somewhat. It will quickly get prohibitive to hire artists for each cover, so this will turn some GRQ wannabes away on this alone.

Once you do master editing an epub which will pass all scrutiny, then it gets easier and faster for subsequent books. (Leanpub will create your epub as part of using their interface, so that is the logical way to start if you haven’t done these before. Oh – and they also generate the .mobi file for Kindle users, and .pdf for the rest of the digital devices out there.)

If you have an epub file, any iPad owner can buy it and upload it. Same for .mobi files. What we want to see is sales from recommendations on iTunes and Amazon, which will drive more sales than you trying to market from your personal website.

The simple marketing I’m talking about is Search Engine Marketing, so that you provide authoritative content for Google and others. (Here it helps if your book is on GooglePlay…) Essentially, every book has a landing page with links where to buy it, as well as binders and packages. I don’t recommend buying ads. I do recommend sites like Stumbleupon where you can actually buy traffic to your site. If they like it, they’ll recommend it.

Again, it’s how well you can write engaging copy on your own website which will depend on whether search engines will recommend your site and whether it has a chance of going viral.

A possible assembly-line for public domain books

Get a good epub to start with.
Convert this to HTML via Calibre.
Edit this directly (LibreOffice) and check with Sigil, or use Leanpub’s online editor
Create your own cover (GIMP)
Create a minimal landing page which the ebook links to.
Tweak the epub so it passes Amazon’s requirements.
Upload to Lulu for a title and content check which will pass iTunes and Nook. Get their free ISBN.
Publish to Amazon directly. (Later come back and publish a hardcopy via Lulu to improve these sales as warranted.)
Publish via MAC to iTunes
Publish via Nookpress to B&N.
Publish to Kobo
Publish to GooglePlay
Publish to Leanpub and create binder with the other books in this series. Create any special package for this individual book.
Rinse, repeat.

Notes: Obviously, this is easier when you do a half-dozen or dozen books at once. A series can have the same landing page, for instance. Using the first cover as a template will give the entire series a similar look and feel. Note that all the programs above are free.

Summary

Public Domain self-publishing is a profitable business plan if you
a) stick to a niche,
b) make your derivative version unique and add value,
c) work in high volume.
DIY publishing is cheapest if you do it yourself, directly to the distributors, and with search engine marketing for your website.
PD publishing for profit now means going direct. If you want to be on iTunes, buy a MAC.

Posted in amazon, Amazon Kindle, book, iTunes, kobo, lulu, public domain, smashwords | Leave a comment

How to Set Up a MAC for Self-Publishing to Itunes

Posted on May 14, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Adventures in Apple-land: Using a MAC as a Self-Publishing Platform

When we last left our hero, he had made the decision – and leapt into the mist.

I ordered a MAC mini (hold the fries) and it arrived two days later. I celebrated by cleaning my desk and removing all the old hardware, cables and everything dusty.

We’ll do this in steps. First, the unboxing:

Got my MAC mini shipped in two days from Best Buy - open-box discount.

Nice box from Best Buy online. Gas Duster for reference.

A MAC mini with all the stuff that comes with it. Key is that dongle which allows your monitor to hook up - and those nifty decals.

And look at all the stuff inside…

My MAC mini with leftover/spare USB keyboard, mouse and HDMI monitor. Ready to self-publish books...

All hooked up with leftover/spare everything.

Lulu on a MAC, proving the world doesn't end when public domain isn't distributed anymore.

Proof that the Internet works – from the people who made my MAC necessary.

MACs and Linux self-publishing workstations for home/small business owners.

My full set-up with the right two monitors going to my Linux box.

I connected it up to an existing monitor, plugged in an un-elegant leftover USB keyboard and mouse, and followed their instructions. It’s been some years, but the clunky stuff we use in the non-Apple world looks shoddy compared to its elegant design. (Next quarter’s royalty payments should give me a Bluetooth Apple keyboard, mouse, and maybe the extra RAM – this quarter’s bought this MAC.)

I last used one of the old PowerMACs (15+ years ago) so the familiar startup sound took me back to younger days…

Back to business.

As I suspected, everything I’ve needed to publish on Windows or Linux are available for MAC. So far, anyway. I’m in the middle of downloading programs like LibreOffice, Firefox, Calibre, Sigil to see if this is all available. I’ve got nothing against Safari, it’s just that I’m not used to it. But yes, MAC versions are available for all of these, and the Writer2Epub plug-in works as well.(See below for links and download sizes.)

The idea here is that a non-MAC user should be able to shift platforms (like how I ditched Windows for Linux.) I’d worked out a production flow which had creation in LibreOffice, and side-checking with Sigil, meta-data stored in Calibre. Firefox has always been my browser of choice (IE has always had security issues, and Chromium is fine, but not the same.)

So if a person has that production flow in Windows or Linux, they can do it on the MAC, too.

Next, in order to publish on iTunes, you have to have an Apple ID, which is fairly easy to set up, and then download iTunes Producer.

Since we are straining my “poor” overworked Internet provider, we’ll let that run and get some sleep tonight.

– – – –

After coffee and breakfast: Well, the download didn’t. Turns out Safari doesn’t handle resuming downloads simply (takes a command line trick.) So I restarted that Firefox download and will install “downthemall” plug-in to make this happen. (With that download manager, you can restart paused/incomplete downloads.)

Again, just making it so I can use the tools I’m familiar with to get to work on this platform.

The blow-by-blow continues…

Since this is a 56mg download and my provider is currently penalizing me at their end of their month, I’m going out to do my chores now, and come back to finish this (hopefully.)

Update: The MAC has pre-configured SAMBA filesharing – nicer than out-of-the-box Linux, actually. OK. Funny enough, the common denominator is reverse-engineered Windows network sharing. Will need some more time on this to figure it out completely. Some work on this (while waiting for my downloads) showed that logging in as a remote user was easiest to get access – but is not work-safe for kids or “hacker wannabe’s”.

I’ve taken all my current files and sending them over via the network, so I can test the entire workflow. Calibre and GIMP need something to do.

(Oops – this download didn’t go. Too much too fast for my poor Internet Provider, who says I’ve already downloaded too much, until next month’s allotment, which starts in a few days.)

Meanwhile, I finally got the downloads down and, well – see below…

– – – –

What you’ll need to simply get started creating your ebooks just like you did on Windows or Linux:

The iTunesProducer file is a 305mg download. Firefox is 59mg, Calibre is 84mg, Sigil 34mg, LibreOffice 190mg, and writer2epub is 1.4mg. So you may be at this awhile to get what you need. Oh – and don’t forget GIMP (95mg) for doing your covers.

This means a person can easily shift to the MAC. What the MAC mini does is to make it relatively inexpensive. Anyone who has dealt with older machines usually has leftover mice and keyboards and monitors around. (USB and HDMI video – not the older plug-in versions – although I have a VGA adaptor coming…)

[Update: The Sigil initial download wasn’t accepted by the MAC – until I Googled the phrase and found this solution. With that window open (security preferences) it will allow you to install the dmg package that just failed, one at a time. (No need to permanently set yourself wide open.)]

[Update 2: Hold down the control key when you click open, and you get the same “Are You Sure?” dialog.]

[Update 3: While this could be a separate post, all you really need to post your book to the MAC is to download and install their free iTunes Producer. You manage your books in iTunes Connect (http://itunesconnect.apple.com) via most any web browser. If you are already editing it on your Linux/Windows platform, you don’t have to download a bunch of stuff to get going. I use Dropbox to sync my latest version to my MAC, and then simply upload those files in the next batch I have going. I then edit or improve the meta-data through my web browser. Again, the added value of a MAC is in the A/V you’re now able to create for marketing your book.]

That means we have all the tools we need to create and edit.

However, until I solve file transfer, I will be using the workflow described below. By getting all the vital tools over to the MAC, it says that a first-time self-publisher could ~~easily~~ use a MAC to get their books up and going. And anyone dissatisfied with Windows could make the jump to a better platform. If you need elegance, that would be the only reason to move to a MAC from Linux, IMHO. But I’m a geek down deep and have always loved to get below the hood and tinker. My MAC mini will be a very capable back-up for my dual-monitor production machine.

As I said, when I solve the file transfer (SAMBA) scene, then this may change.

Whoring the MAC to get to iTunes.

The basic summary is that I’ll be “whoring” this platform, using it mainly as a “go-to girl” for uploading to the various distributors – but chiefly, this MAC will be used for uploading to iTunes and handling audio recording. Reason being that file transfer is buggy at best – until that is solved, there is no real way to get files across except “sneaker-net” with flash-drives.

One additional feature is the native ability to simply create podcasts. Yes, you can do this with either Windows or Linux, but having a second machine should make this much easier – as I don’t have to move/unplug the mic. Yes, I can get good old Audacity for MAC as well. Podcasts and videos are the necessary content production needed for marketing.

This MAC didn’t come with any iMovie (it’s a $15 app) so it also doesn’t qualify (right out of the box, anyway) to handle making audio into video. My Linux version actually came with several of these programs – again, I have those 15 years which was more Linux than Windows during that time. So creating videos is still a learning scene.

[Update: I’ve found most of these Linux NLE’s (movie editors) are also ported to MAC OSX, so that’s an upcoming adventure.]

Plus, my Linux box has dual monitors, which is a simpler work flow.

I’ll get there with the MAC, but essentially it’s the learning curve which is throwing rain on this parade. (Coming up on Day 3 where I should have been editing and publishing.)

The bottom line is: Yes, you can do everything I do to self-publish a book on all the various distributors on a MAC. But just because you have to publish to one distributor, doesn’t mean you’re going to have to publish everything from there. It’s possible, though.

All these downloads will make my learning curve on this platform simpler and shorter.

An alternative work-flow

Go the Leanpub route to build your book. This gives you a tested version at the end, which should pass muster. Means you

Get a MAC (mini) and set it up with all these programs.
Edit your book into shape with LibreOffice, but save it as an HTML file.
Next, you open that in Leanpub and tweak it online.
As part of that, create the cover in GIMP.
Then, when you are happy with it, publish, then download their generated epub, mobi, and PDF files.
Right after that, test it on Lulu to be sure (and to get your free ISBN.)
If no go, ~~sneaker-net it over to another box to~~ tweak it on Sigil until it passes ~~(or fire up a virtual machine and do it there.)~~
Then upload to iTunes and everywhere else, saving your metadata to Calibre so it’s a copy/paste production.

Now you can do it all on a MAC. See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

If I were just starting out, this is the route I’d take, since that single investment in a MAC mini would pay for itself in short order.

Additional marketing goodies

The MAC started out as a desktop publishing wonder, but then quickly got adopted by the A/V crowd and never looked back. As an addition to my other workflow, this new MAC will be able to do my podcasts and video production to be able to reach a wider audience with my book projects. With LibreOffice being able to export PDF’s with embedded links (Leanpub’s capability for your finished book) you then have all the major formats anyone could want to find about your book – and also, to create packages of goods anyone could want. (And also do something like Tim Ferris’ bittorrent marketing)

For me, I’ll have a standalone solution to audio and video in addition to my book publishing. So this investment – which pays for itself in the fees I don’t have to pay to any aggregator to just reach iTunes – gives me auxiliary bonuses. Before this, the mic would have to be unplugged and moved away and back when I wanted to record, which left it less than useful – and less prone for me to actually do the recording. (Not to mention that the MAC mini has no machine noise, so if I ever build a sound booth, it will fit in perfectly.)

Not bad for a bunch of leftover peripherals and a $600 box.

Hardware wars – over?

I used to mess with building and re-building machines in the old days, accepting any amount of used equipment people would throw my way. What I found was that it was burning my time with little results. Re-cobbling parts together would as often as not result in no working machine, even when I put the original one back together “just like it was.”

The real scene is that producers have moved to new formats of RAM and connectors which have made the other machines too expensive to upgrade. With few exceptions, such as installing the maximal RAM you can when you buy a machine – key on Linux (Windows often won’t see or be able to use the extra) – there’s little additional to do.

With the MAC mini, you can go to top of the line for about twice as much, which will give you 16gigs of RAM and a monster CPU – but the question for a struggling publisher is the cost benefit.

$600 is just above what I’d consider a decent price range for a new box. Sure, I can get a machine with the same specs as this MAC Mini from Overstock or similar for maybe $300, also with no monitor (but giving me yet another keyboard and mouse) – but it wouldn’t get me into iTunes. Sure, I could spend the time getting torrents downloaded of a MAC disk image which would run on a virtual machine inside my Linux box – but that’s for the uber-geek.

Time invested needs to leverage into income. For the average author, getting a MAC mini as a replacement computer is quite a leap, but can result in doing everything you need. The extra $200 also means a week or so that I don’t have to spend getting a machine up and running on Linux – and just as stable.

Note: In my mind, there is no reason to use Windows, if you haven’t guessed this by now. Part of the upgrade was giving away my last two Windows-only machines, which were on obsolete hardware. No way to go back. (I do have XP running on a virtual machine, for a minority few programs which were only ever released to Windows platform. It’s still amazing that each Windows machine has to have it’s own anti-virus and firewall program,when Linux and MAC natively don’t.)

[Update: I was annoyed by the lack of keyboard shortcuts. So I got a bluetooth keyboard which 1) didn’t have the same look and feel – it slowed me down with errors, and 2) quit working once the original batteries went on the blink. So I plugged back in my old USB keybord (with those satisfying pushing keys/clicks) and found I could remap the “alt” key to do the same as the “command” key in Windows. As there are very few shortcuts which actually use the alt key on a MAC, it really solves the problem. (Chief short-cut I use is alt-tab – from Windows days – to shift between applications.) Situation solved – other than it takes another USB outlet.]

[Update 2: I’ve found that a lot of hardware which would only work with Windows (not on my Linux box) has been ported to MAC, so drivers are available. One scanner I thought was only available on XP was able to get going under a MAC, courtesy of the companies updated drivers.]

Batch production

My current plans are to do the development of batches of books, then copy sets of epubs with the final-final versions and their covers over to a jump-drive for transfer. This looks to be the simplest, most direct, and most efficient production line. This makes iTunes the last on the block, maybe excepting Leanpub. (Even Amazon and Smashwords accepts epubs, so this is again the lowest common denominator approach.)

Out of the dozens of books I’ve published to date (OK, it’s over a dozen dozen at this point) the public domain and PLR books sell the best. So setting up batches of these (or saving up collections until I have a batch) is simpler than some indie author writing original fiction. For that person, the best approach is to fire them out when the editing and proofing is done – and then get busy writing the next one.

Writers get paid by selling books, not by worrying over whether they are selling. “Writing feeds the soul; Publishing feeds, clothes, and houses the body – plus pays for the occasional night out on the town.” It’s the backbench of books which proves that theory.

– – – –

While this last section really requires a new blog post, a short analysis today (while waiting for downloads, etc.) showed me that this is the core of my little one-man-band of a publishing company. I have a few large batches worked up for the near future, and then I’ll be ready to move over to a quasi-original derivative set of hand-illustrated classic stories.

Right now, I’m learning from classic copywriters. Once I’m content with a sufficiently deep back-bench, then I’ll move over to marketing what I’ve been creating and meanwhile doing a segue over to these illustrated children’s fables.

Lulu just compounded my work-flow by forcing me to get a MAC in order to do what used to be their job.

What this will eventually do is to improve my marketing backend, as I can do a lot more A/V work with this set-up.

Now you’ve had another glimpse into the world of an avid self-publisher.

Yes, there’s a book in your future – part of which you’re reading now. Someone has to tell the story of how anyone in the middle of nowhere can create a “publishing empire” from little more than consistent, focused production over a few years time.

Stay tuned…

Posted in apple, Best Buy, Calibre, Firefox, iTunes, LibreOffice, Linux, Sigil, Windows | Leave a comment

How to Build a Public Domain (Self) Publishing Assembly Line

Posted on May 17, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Publishing public domain books means volume and repetitive tasks – an assembly line.

Publishing books on an assembly line basis is possible in self-publishing.

(art credit:Tobias Mikkelson)

A one-person publishing “empire” is possible these days. Regular passive income can be made from re-publishing public domain as long as you:

1) Add value.
2) Market effectively.
3) Stay focused.

The efficiencies of scale work here. As a single person (or small group) it’s best to work in batches.

A project I’m currently involved in has passed the testing phase (28 books to 5 distributors) – sales are quite good, which means it’s time to broaden the project.

Elsewhere, I’ve dealt in why this is possible, why it’s profitable, specifics necessary to public domain publishing itself.

Today, let’s organize for regular production.

0. Overview: we are building ebooks as the cornerstone, since in many cases these books have only poor-quality versions out there. While we also create the hardcopy version, the ebook version will have the links to send people to your website and also to the hardcopy version. You can do far more search engine marketing more easily to a digital product than a physical one.

We work in batches so that you can get some done and then do some more, and so on. If you give yourself a hundred books to publish in a certain niche, it can get tedious to do more than a few at once. A week doing each step could get monotonous. So set yourself a target for a handful of books published all the way through for that week. The next week, you can take the next set, and so on.

Note: You should do all the steps below to every distributor you are going to be using at least once. That way you can verify each step and adjust your templates as needed. You’ll be tweaking as you go, but start off on the right foot with correct files – so you don’t have to correct several dozen files which weren’t created right originally. Each distributor is slightly different. Now that Lulu won’t distribute public domain books, you are distributing to iTunes and Nook on your own. The other major ones are Amazon, Kobo, GooglePlay, and Leanpub. (See my other posts for specifics on each – as well as “Just Publish!”)

00. Best is to set up a regular slot for uninterrupted work. Because it’s work and you have to focus. Except for the cover, there is very little creative work here. It’s more a point of digging a ditch, figuring out how many feet you can dig each day. Don’t allow distractions, set daily goals and meet them, much as Stephen King and other writers simply crank out 2,000 words each day or else. Clock in, do your job, clock out. Move on.

1. Amass a selection of public domain books in a certain area. This is one of the points to adding value. You are going to be marketing these books newly, banking on either their content or their previous “well-known” status to gain your own sales.

You want the best-quality books you can find, as this will speed up your editing. Right off the bat, let’s get one thing straight. While versions come and go, when a book is in the public domain, it belongs to everyone. In a later edition which has been edited, only the edits belong to that editor as copyright-able. The original text is still free to use. (See Wikipedia article on Derivative Works. This is not legal advice.)

I’ve found that quality ebooks are the easiest to edit. Sometimes the PDF’s are created such that they have line breaks after every line, so you have to do a massive search/replace with a text editor to solve this. Time-consuming, and not often accurate, so requiring extra cross-check steps to ensure quality.

But, isn’t this a rip-off? That’s your value judgement. A lot of people put a lot of work into editing public domain books into shape. They are much appreciated. I link to my ebook sources all the time, and contribute to them as well. Even Gutenberg says that if you are going to use their books, ensure you take every mention of them out for trademark reasons. The point is adding value. There are literally hundreds of sites out there offering free ebooks of one type or another. Add value to make your versions stand out. Attract only paid readers, and become their go-to choice for these. You can always make derivative works which are even more helpful. Collected works by a single author in a sub-genre is one example. Study guides are another. Making it more possible for people to access and appreciate out-of-print public domain books is valuable in and of itself. People pay for quality. Creating a series of books in a certain area (like copywriting classics) is quite valuable, compared to the maze of misleading texts in this area these days. Always, always add value.

Many of the machine-produced ebooks have errors in them. So finding sites which offer versions which have already been edited are best – though sometimes you have no choice, particularly in long-tail niches.

1a. Select a logical batch to work on. Example: Out of a pile of fiction books, pick a genre, then subdivide that by author, etc. In a mass of fiction works some genre’s (Romance) are more popular than others. Self-Help and Biography are more popular in non-fiction. Starting with a batch of these (selected Jane Austen’s works, then the Bronte sisters, for example) would be a simple one. Or simply take the top 10 bestsellers, then the next 10, etc. so you can see an immediate boost in your income.

Long-tail niches are different. A site with old machine manuals might have books divided by brand or by type of equipment. The books for a self-help author site could be divided into batches by author, school (New Thought), or technique (Affirmations).

2. Build a landing page for this set of books. We want to be able to send people to a site for “additional materials and related books,” as well as being able to have a specific page where they can buy the books with all the links on it. If you are doing a handful of books only, then you can create a landing page for each one. A series could have a landing page for the set.

At the extreme front and back of each ebook, there is a link where you send people to that landing page. First and last thing they see – which will help them to act. You want to leverage any buyer of a single volume into a client for the rest.

At this stage, you merely set up the landing page. Later, we’ll flesh it out with the cover, description and links. Building this at the beginning so you can easily link to it as you go, then come back when your book is published to update the landing page itself.

2a. Set up a template for the cover. Using GIMP, it’s simple to create this in editable layers so that you can change out images and titles, etc. as you go. Create the master template at this point, then “save as” the specific book you are working on when you get to this.

3. Edit this batch into shape. Easiest production line is to use Calibre to convert epub versions to HTML files. Then open this in LibreOffice (or your own doc editor) and save in their native format. This has to be done on a one-on-one basis, obviously. But the steps are very similar and are actually less tiring to do several at once, as you can import the settings from one document to the next.

You do add the links at the front and back at this point to your landing page. If you have several books, you can link them with on-page anchors (Ex. “http://yourdomain.com/landing-page.html#anchor”) so when they click they go to that specific part of the page to buy.

3a. Export the epub and test. This is by Sigil. You do an epubcheck to see if it will pass. I’ve only ever had a single book rejected (out of literally hundreds) which had earlier passed this check. That one turned out to have a very unique filename on it which was fine with Sigil, but not with Lulu.

Now days (and I haven’t been able to do this on the MAC, and forget Windows…) I use another step of opening it with Calibre’s editor, which will correct oddball filenames and often gets it into shape so that Sigil passes it right off. It’s an extra step, but Calibre will correct mass errors that I’ve had to edit by hand in Sigil, which is painful.

3b. Create the hardcopy version. Save as a new file, then export as PDF. LibreOffice will automatically embed the fonts and produces a file which Lulu is happy with. We are using Lulu to publish as they have been doing it longer than anyone else, give free ISBN’s, and are not subject to Amazon discrimination by independent bookstores who won’t carry a CreateSpace edition, as it’s owned by Amazon. CreateSpace has had to constantly play catch-up to Lulu.

You want to base your template off what is acceptable in Lulu. I usually format to trade-paperback, which is the same as hardback. Or rather that a 6×9 paperback can also be published as a hardback. Both versions get their own ISBN (required for hardcopy books) and will also add more authority (and sales) to your ebook when you do.

3c. Amazon has specific requirements to ensure they don’t have duplicative files. These are linked on that step of their submission – but are essentially adding additional, relevant images (at least 10) or an annotation.

4. Create all the covers for this batch. This is a different form of editing, and will get faster as you repeat the actions as one set. Each one is different, so don’t get into a scene of rubberstamping them.

If you want, out-source this, but ensure you aren’t busting your own bank. Many public domain books will not sell well, just like they never did to begin with. Some bestsellers will sell regardless of who re-publishes them. Like the legacy publishers, the handful of books which sell really well will pay for the production of the others.

There are requirements for cover size, such as being a minimum of 1000 pixels on the shortest side for iTunes. Your template should take this into account, so that you don’t have to go back and resize each one.

5. Fire up Calibre to record the meta-data as you publish these. You’ll want to import all your books in all their versions into Calibre as well. This will come in very handy for exporting a batch of books to GooglePlay, where you have to rename them by ISBN for submission.

6. Taking one distributor at a time (and starting with Lulu) publish the batch. We start with Lulu to test each book for inclusion into iTunes and Kobo. This is also where you can get a free ISBN. If it passes here, then you’re set. Lulu will check for correct titles and files. At the end, you want to make sure you uncheck distribution to anywhere else. Saves you and them time.

The reason for the ISBN is to make searching for these easier. None of these distributors require ISBN’s, actually. They all assign their own number to the book. You can (in all cases except Amazon) search by ISBN, so this is a template of links where you only have to change a single number in the code to have it work for each additional book.

6a. Submit your hardcopy version to extended distribution, so it will go through to Amazon and everywhere else. This means you will be buying a proof. Note: In doing this in batches, don’t “check out” until you’ve published all your hardcopy books – this will save you shipping costs.)

Again, record this (required) ISBN in Calibre. (Note: Again, each distinct version of a book requires its own ISBN – ebook, paperback, hardback, audiobook, etc.) Most of the distributors (not Lulu or Amazon) actually encourage you to enter the print ISBN along with the ebook’s. For GooglePlay, this is a simple way to promote both versions. (In Amazon, you need to send them an email to match up the two versions. Lulu isn’t all that important in terms of actual online sales.)

You’ll use the same cover as the ebook. This is efficient, it’s also branding.

6b. For Googleplay, you’ll upload all the ebooks as a batch with their titles changed to [ISBN].epub.

6c. Note: I haven’t tested Leanpub extensively, so consider the below theory at this point –

In Leanpub, you are going to actually re-edit the book in their editor to get it into their system. Export the file (save as) to HTML, then open it up with Leanpub and (re)create your book again.

Other than already having several batches ready in LibreOffice, I would recommend setting up your ebook with Leanpub first. You are already starting out with an HTML file. Leanpub then gives you an epub version which is supposedly passing epubcheck. With this line, you’d then check it with Calibre’s editor and Sigil just to be sure.

You will still need to open up the file in LibreOffice in order to create the hardcopy version. Leanpub creates a PDF file, and you can specify sizes of output. It is unknown at this writing if such a PDF will pass Lulu’s requirements. (Tests forthcoming.)

The value of Leanpub is in creating binders and also to get maximal royalties. Buyers can actually reward you with higher royalties by increasing the price. Here you are also able to create packages with additonal data you weren’t able to include in the book. Samples of other books, additional graphics, other related PDF’s, etc.

6d. Publish to Kobo last as they pay the least in royalties (20%) – and have the worst policy of having to declare it as public domain if you include the entire book – even collections. Otherwise, they remove it. (Googleplay pays the most, as they simply don’t care if it’s public domain. So their 52% royalty is the highest except for Leanpub.) If you get behind, you won’t miss much. But do publish to Kobo, as you will get some income that you won’t know you missed otherwise. Every penny counts.

7. Rinse, repeat – with your next batch.

– – – –

Notes:
Obviously, the devil is in the details. Producing high-volume, low-value shlock is exactly why distributors don’t really like (read: royalty penalties) accepting public domain books. I usually publish as a beta edition, as there is no real cost-effective way to find every single error – 99.99 should be sufficient for most readers, since you make up the difference with price or other added-value.

If you have a truly original book (or one which is composed from excerpts of several public domain books) then you can distribute via Lulu to the Amazon, iTunes, Nook, and Kobo – all for 10% of your total royalties. That makes it much simpler and faster. Lulu decided not to publish public domain any longer, which now makes individual publishing required. Each distributor has their own requirements about public domain, which is apparently why Lulu changed their policy to squash this.

Since the bulk of my income comes from PD books as opposed to my original works, this will limit Lulu’s sharing my future income. (They’ll still get my hardcopy version income, though.)

Publishing PDF’s directly to Lulu for hardcopy can be done. But you’ll never be able to get an epub out of it without OCR and editing that OCR into shape. A big book can take me most of a work-week to create an epub that way. So it’s not suggested compared with taking an existing epub, cross-checking it with that PDF to correct errors. But fastest is to work with high-quality epubs to begin with.

This also applies for PLR as an assembly line. I only really know that Amazon doesn’t accept PLR. You don’t get the royalty penalties for these books, but you also can’t easily make them into hardcopy books. Again, you work with those where you get the .doc or .odt file along with .psd graphics.

I’ll tweak this as I start publishing more directly to iTunes and Nook. This is based on nearly a couple of years now publishing directly and via Lulu.

– – – –

Had to get this out of my head, and to clarify it for myself.

Have fun with this.

Posted in book, Calibre, iTunes, LibreOffice, lulu, public domain, publishing, Sigil | Leave a comment

How to Make Higher Royalties From Your Books

Posted on June 3, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Affiliate Book Sales can earn you even higher book royalties. Some tricks, though.

You can get some of the distributors to pay you affiliate payments on top of your royalties.

The simple approach is to get your distributors to pay you affiliate sales fees on top of your royalties. None of them do it the same way, some don’t at all.

What this will give you is sometimes another 6-8% on top of whatever you are already getting – nice work when you just send readers from your web page…

Here’s the breakdown:

Kobo – yes, via Rakuten – http://cli.linksynergy.com/cli/publisher/links/deeplinks.php
B&N – yes, “private” (Rakuten) – http://affiliates.barnesandnoble.com/join-now/
iTunes – yes – https://signup.performancehorizon.com/signup/en/itunes – http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentation/itunes_app_store_affiliate_program.html
Amazon – if you live in the right states
GooglePlay – no (but they say you can run Adsense on your site – FWIW)
LeanPub – yes, 50%, but it’s a net wash – https://leanpub.com/affiliates – https://leanpub.com/affiliateterms – (for self-publishing authors:) http://blog.leanpub.com/2014/03/introducing-the-leanpub-affiliate-program.html
Lulu – not at this time.
Smashwords – yes, 11% – https://www.smashwords.com/about/affiliate – https://www.smashwords.com/about/smashwords_affiliate_documentation

The point of giving out affiliate links is to increase your royalties. True, when you are getting 70% or so for every sale, that’s not bad and it may not be worth the extra effort. However, when you are having to take a lower royalty for any reason (such as selling 99-cent “loss leaders” or re-publishing “public domain” books under their original title and author) then every cent counts.

(One wild example: on Kobo, you are required to declare any derivative public domain work which contains the entire book as public domain and get only a 20% royalty. If you then publish that book for $3.99, you get a whopping 79-cent pay-out. However, if you send buyers to Kobo via an affiliate link, you can get an additional 6% – which at least brings you up to 26% for your work. That’s only when people use your affiliate link, but it’s better than nothing.) But see this blog post about Kobo as well – it’s not all my public domain sour grapes: http://eboundcanada.org/index.php/resources/tutorials/171-a-publisher-s-guide-to-becoming-a-kobo-affiliate

If you only have a few works, and get most of your traffic from personal referrals, this would be worth a little bit for you. (For those of us with deeper backbench – lists of multiple books – this might be more trouble than it’s worth. Finding more books to publish would probably be more profitable.)

The real use is in getting other people to use affiliate links when they send traffic to your book. You can get them to jump through the hoops to become affiliate sales people, or simply give them a shortened link to use for your own affiliate sales.

Affiliate sales are iffy at best. Half the major distributors either barely support them or don’t. Amazon is particularly picky, as they shut down whole states if they even threaten to tax online ebook sales. (While that’s not rascist or sexist, it’s still discrimination – but legal.) Of course your best revenge is to send people to those distributors who do offer affiliate sales. Just another reason to distribute to as many places as possible.

If you are going to give out a single affiliate link, it’s best for you as a self-published author to use Leanpub. Because anyone who gets your book there will get the highest affiliate commission to reward their work. The buyer gets the most choices of ebook to download so it will fit on any ereader, smartphone, or tablet they have.

The other point of using affiliate links is to create another tracking point on how well your site is sending traffic.

Amazon is the simplest, if you are actually allowed to be an affiliate (and they don’t cancel you capriciously.) But their payout is measly. I think I’ve gotten a (small) handful of $10 checks over the years before they cancelled Missouri.

For print books, you’re basically screwed unless you’re an Amazon associate. Lulu has no affiliate program right now. Next best is to send them to B&N to get a hardcopy.

There is concept of getting into a major bookseller and selling as an affiliate.

Powell’s Books – https://www.powells.com/partners/partners.html – will give you your own bookshelf. http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partners/link_generate?type=isbnlink will give you individual links to your own books. Or you can use http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partners/partner-search for in-print versions. That is probably the preferable use for this. An actual bookstore which will ship actual books for your viewers. 7.5% commission. Better than Amazon.[http://www.powells.com/partners/partners_faq.html#commission1] They don’t carry everything, though. (You can also get commissions for people selling their old hardcopy book to Powell’s.)
Another approach is to sell your books as a wholesaler.

OverDrive – as a publisher, you can get your books into thousands of libraries, schools/universities, and retailers. I’m not ready to apply for this one, since I’m still in find-edit-publish mode. Once my backbench is established, I’ll be able to take advantage of this. Once approved, you can then utilize OverDrive for digital titles, adding them as an additional distributor (this brings us up to 8 major distributors.) And so you have a further reach through more channels.

This does take you into the model of setting wholesale and retail pricing for your books, which may well wind up as overall lower royalties than using the other models, depending on your pricing model. But it will get you into places which Amazon, iTunes, and Nook don’t always reach right now.

Obviously, anyone with more than a dozen titles and adding several per year should be on this service. Or – pool with other authors and select someone to manage your publishing for a fee (like 10% of profits) much as Lulu and the rest do. That person could also freelance in conversion services and find cover artists, editors, etc. In short, this is the route to becoming a 3rd-party services operation – much as selling picks and shovels to miners in this digital gold rush.

Obviously, OverDrive will take some more studies. They do match our premise for “publishing as many ways, in as many formats as possible” completely.

And then, there’s Ingram‘s – who should be on your side, but is mostly just there for the money. (Their self-publishing arm is costly, with fees per each book – while Lulu has published for free for years, taking only 10% of whatever royalties you make through their distribution.)

For Ingram’s, you essentially would set up your own online bookstore – like a publisher (http://www.ingramcontent.com/pages/online-retailers.aspx#WhatWeCarry, http://www.ingramcontent.com/Pages/Fulfillment.aspx) Practically, their monthly fees for getting access to their database isn’t worth the cost of setting it up and running it – not for the simple Indie publisher.

Do you want to run your own affiliate program?

The idea is that you should be able to simply give out links to people, or have them sign up to create their own links and market your book for you. The next step beyond that is to set up your book with digital delivery at an affiliate site such as Clickbank, and then get someone with a dropshipping service on a POD back-end. However, offering digital products is quite simple when you get the hang of it.

Running affiliate sites isn’t the same as simply posting your book to distributors and letting the sales go while you tend to what marketing you can. However, if you are (and should be) converting your buyers to a mail list, then it’s logical to include them in on special offers, giveaways, and pre-releases, etc.

While you already have an affiliate program in Leanpub, using Affiliate sites like PayDotCom, JVZoo, DigiResults, and Clickbank will enable you to take advantage of their distribution to hard-core affiliate marketers. Your existing audience will appreciate the commissions that Leanpub offers, but you can give the pro affiliate marketers up to 75% commissions using these others.

Frankly, running your own affiliate sales is a rabbit-hole for a different audience. What we are interested in is simply publishing your book in multiple formats (like to Lulu) and then get an affiliate link from the distributors so people (and you, the author) can make commissions back from selling your own book.

However, if you have just a handful of books, figuring out how to link the various Clickbank competitors to physical product fulfillment might be worth your while, given sufficient niche demand. This would be especially valuable to non-fiction writers using ebooks as an MVP (mimimal viable product.)

(Update: Found that ITunes has a nice little piece of javascript you can put in the footer of your site/blog to convert any iTunes link into an affiliate link. Handy. – Also, you can link any author page – another nice link to pass around.)

I recommend Indie writers-as-publishers take promote the Leanpub affiliate program to your current audience – as this is the best value and a minimal investment of your time.

Coming next in this series is how to set up your marketing for real with a membership. Almost no authors do this, and most Internet Marketers themselves don’t know how to make it work. So stay tuned…

Posted in amazon, Amazon.com, iTunes, kobo, lulu, Missouri, OverDrive, Rakuten | Leave a comment

How to Post Your eBook to Multiple Distributors – Ease and Profit

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Easy Profit can be made by self-publishing your ebooks to multiple distributors in an efficient sequence.

(photo: Blythe)

Sequence and Feeding of eBook Distributors – How to take it easy and make extra passive income meanwhile.

If you’ve been following this series of articles, you’ll know that we are now up to about eight major distributors to use. As an Indie Publisher, it’s key to ensure you make best use of your time, to be efficient and profitable. It’s all investing time for money. Leveraging your time makes money. Simple.

With eight distributors, there are more than a few tricks on how to get the most bang for your buck. Unknown, you’ll see these “Tips for Self-Publishing” where they tell you to just stick with Amazon, or only publish to Smashwords. That’s where you’re leaving money on the table. Until you get a routinely-good-selling book (or several) on Amazon, you’ll need to get these other distributors stocked as well.

Note: You’ll also note that distributing via Lulu or Smashwords isn’t covered. Reason being that they don’t allow public domain works to be published, plus you are paying them out of your royalties to distribute your books. If this is your current workflow, then adjust based on the below.

Right now, the other 7 distributors give me about half of what I’m getting from Amazon with only one decent seller there. (And it’s a 99-center.) When I started out, I was making four times as much from the other distributors as I did from Amazon, and that was enough to cover my monthly bills and quit working for anyone else.

Bottom line is that Amazon is a crap-shoot, and the regular sales you get from multiple other distributors will even things out for you. We’re here to make enough profit to live on and then some. (Also known as “Financial Freedom.”) Start by making money right off, and then build this up as you market your books and improve their discoverability.

The Lowest Common Denominator versus the Covers-All-Bases approach

As we build our ebook, and related versions, we want to work with the Lowest Common Denominator (LCD) which will be accepted everywhere. This is the epub format, once it’s been properly “epubchecked” and verified.

In posting to distributors, in general you want to start with posting to the distributor which enables you to post the most meta-data possible – then record that meta-data so you have it for the rest. Meta-data is the details about your book which takes the longest to assemble – and is your key marketing steps to take as you publish.

By “covering all bases” with the distributors which allow the greatest possible meta-data included (better for search engine discovery), then you can gather all this material once and copy/paste to the remaining distributors – tweaking as you go. This leverages your time and makes the publishing cycle quicker.

(Caveat: My tests with Leanpub and OverDrive are still ongoing at this writing.)

A rough sequence would roll like this:

Creation of your book on LibreOffice (since it will port to PDF and HTML directly.)
Either create an epub with the Writer2Epub plug-in, or save as HTML and import to Leanpub for creation. On Leanpub, you’ll simply publish it to get the epub file and then come back to fill in the meta-data.
Start your publishing with Lulu in order to get the free ISBN. (While ISBN’s aren’t required by any ebook distributor I know of, they make it simpler to track.) You don’t have to finish the Lulu publishing cycle as this point, just collect the ISBN.
If you haven’t already, open up Calibre and import your ebook. This is where you will input all your meta-data for later use. Note: create a custom meta-data input field for BISAC codes in Calibre. (Yes, I owe you a how-to article on this.) And I have created a spreadsheet for these you can access free.
Open up Google Play (https://play.google.com/books/publish/) upload your ebook, and fill out everything there. Record that data into Calibre.
Then post your book to iTunes and Nook, which are the next most data intensive.
Amazon follows, and Kobo. Both of these have their own versions of BISAC for categories.
Wrap up posting to Lulu and filling out your Leanpub data fully at this point. These two have the least meta-data to fill in.
Then post to OverDrive, which has different pricing points to consider.
Finally, update your ebook website with all these buy links, as well as Leanpub binders and packages.

That gives you an efficient work-flow with the fewest sets of back-stepping.

Notes:

Recording all your meta-data into Calibre makes copy/paste an actuality.
You’ll start getting sales from Google and Kobo within days. Amazon probably won’t rank you until you get some reviews. It may also take as long as a month or 6 weeks for your book to show up on iTunes and Nook. Almost all of these have a month delay from the time they make a sale until you can get paid for it. Nook has their statistics delayed by another month as well, so any attempt as a complete book sales analysis will always be tardy at best.
As it’s best to do a print version as well, you might want to publish this first via Lulu and get your proof sent. Any meta-data you use here can go into Calibre and expanded on. That secondary ISBN will be useful on GooglePlay, iTunes, Nook, and Leanpub right off. Google, for one, will link to it for sales (they get a split of sales they send to the major booksellers.)
Affliliate links are available via Leanpub, so you can get your audience to sell these for you.
One marketing strategy would be to set a publishing date farther in the future (once you are more certain it will be available on iTunes and Nook) so you can allow pre-orders on Amazon, Kobo, etc. Meanwhile, you can publish your book via Leanpub as you write it, which may finance your project, plus giving you vital audience feedback. You send out emails to your list so they can stay updated on your progress and will be able to post reviews on Amazon when it goes live. (The Amazon version is obviously discounted at first, just to get those paid reviews.) Note: Leanpub auto-publishes a .mobi version for Kindle ereaders.
If you use Leanpub to compile your book and involve your audience, you can use Calibre to convert the resulting epub to an HTML or RTF file (importing to LibreOffice) to edit your print version PDF for Lulu.
Goodreads is anther way to get reviews ported to its owner Amazon
If you are active on this platform, then post your pre-publication chapters there.
Always update your website when you generate anything with a new link. Search Engines love this.
Always get started on your next book once you’ve published your last one. Your audience will love you for that – send an email to your list when you do.
For serious publishers, this is best done in batches, especially for PLR or PD based books. Marketing for these is often based on what starts selling on its own – then you back this up with additional promotion which will goose the various sales algorithms a bit.
You can do all this on a MAC mini. Food for thought.

Then what?

Now you can expand into the various online marketing campaigns. Video trailers, social media syndication, doc-sharing, all these online marketing approaches can be layered on this. Even buying traffic to your book’s webpage via Stumbleupon.

The point of this is to enable you to get started with sales right off and not waste any time as you do. As you ramp up your marketing efforts, then your sales should respond as well. Eventually it takes off (or not.)

Your time marches on, regardless. Don’t waste it – invest your time, leverage your time.

Posted in amazon, Calibre, GooglePlay, iTunes, LibreOffice, lulu, Nook, OverDrive | Leave a comment

Leanpub Joins the Mix – Extending the Top Distributors List

Posted on June 15, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Getting More Distributors Means More Eyeballs, More Income

Posting your book to multiple distributors will give you more paying eyeballs = more income.

(photo: Jena Ardell)

This post is to update the publishing sequence to improve your profits with your home publishing business. We’re going to get into Leanpub next, a logical step – and a profitable one. What I found here shifts what we do first to earn that extra income…

I’m now actively into writing the book on publishing at this point. Publish. Profit. Independence – or something even more catchy (see this link as this title may still evolve.)

Of course this interrupted publishing my Copywriting books again, as the research muse took over my life – like the over-curious cat.

Update:

Filled out the OverDrive form and submitted it. Haven’t heard back.
My MAC-mini does a great job submitting PD books to iTunes, so that is completely valid for any book I want to publish. Published 3 and they were all accepted in about 24 hours. Again – they’d already passed muster at Lulu.
Nookpress.com has been DIW (dead in the water) for most of last week. I can’t get through to it. Their loss. I’ll keep trying.

Update 2: Finally got through to NookPress – they seem to have some sort of javascript framework problem which hangs on slow connections. However, early tests show that Nook accepts books readily. So I don’t know what the delay with Lulu is. It’s a corporate thing, I’m sure. Nook does have a glitchy interface with problems processing epubs directly, even though they passed elsewhere. So each book will probably have to be tweaked to get it accepted. As Nook isn’t the best income producer, this probably should knock them down a bit. Maybe below Amazon, just based on potential income. That’s if I got pressed for time…

– – – –

This again brings up the point as to whether having an aggregator do this for you is the best investment of your time. It’s still the argument that you do this once and it pays you from here on out. You’re aggregator does it once for you and get’s 10% (or more) from there on out.

Lulu did good for me for years – but since they lowered the boom on PD books, I’ve been looking at how much they’ve been making off me. Other than the time I’d have to take moving these files, it will bring me better income to move my books – lots of work, though. (Not my first priority – but it will be Lulu’s loss when I do.)

In my book (the one written by “Frugal Publishers, Inc.”) it’s better to invest your self in the process to get it done right. (Note to self: upcoming posts are overdue on both iTunes and Nook.)

That brings us to Leanpub.

Not for the faint-hearted. Practically, this has been put off as long as I could, since it’s a completely different way of doing things. As with all things I do for you, there’s a more elegant way of doing things which takes the least time for the best result you can use in the most places.

Overall, it’s a smart model, treating a book like a startup. Most of the books here are on programming, although there are some fiction. They’ve made it as easy as possible. You write in Markdown, which is a very simple formatting language. For most fiction writers, this would be a cinch to move over to this platform. Writing in a simple text editor is the easiest way to get your content out. Much like the old days of writing on a typewriter – no distractions, just write.

My problem with this is in porting my 150+ books over to this platform. You can’t simply upload an epub. The closest thing is saving your .doc or .odt file as .html and then uploading (see, it’s already geeky…)

[Update: A forum post brought me reassurance that they are working on this, so people can upload their files directly – maybe a couple months away.]

The blog-to-book scene is similarly problematic. Because unless you have a no-frills Tumblr blog or something, then it also works to convert all your special programming to this format. Related links show up, etc.

You’re then re-editing every page again. So scraping your own blog and dropping it into LibreOffice would probably be smarter.

I did the blog import and it trashed the book. Took hours to sort it out. My approach then was to take their generated epub and edit in Sigil. Once the bulk of it was in place, then I imported that into Calibre, and converted it to HTML. (Although this had its quirks as well – see below.)

At that point, I punted and brought it back into LibreOffice – my comfort zone. (Sure it could have gone back into Leanpub at that point, but I’ve worked for hundreds of books-worth in LibreOffice and is what I know best.) I’m also looking for the fastest route for me to port existing content into the only bundling distributor I know of.

Don’t do what I did – Build your book in Leanpub first.

Still, Leanpub should then move to the front of the queue in terms of creating your epub. After you have a decent book to begin with (in PD or PLR) you’d work within Leanpub to create a representative work. You could then take the generated files and edit them. (Since they are all branded with Leanpub logo, they will have to be tweaked to publish them elsewhere.)

It’s just simpler to include Leanpub the epub creation process at the beginning. The advantages of being able to create binders and also have an affiliate program from the start is worth potentially having two versions of the same ebook.

A Critique of Leanpub

This is it’s own beasty to master. Like any horse, it’s an individual and while still having four legs and a head, it will take learning to ride on its own – as its own.

It’s very much a scene of based in its roots, which started as writing each chapter as its own file in Markdown. While they’ve added support for importing blog posts and html, these work best where you actually have separate files for each entry/chapter.

Importing a blog post is problematical. Because the extra links you put into a blog post, plus the graphics, give problems you don’t have to deal with when you write a book from scratch. Blog posts are meant to stand alone, and link out to Wikipedia and other sources for better edification of your readers. Books have an integrity of their own, as you bring your readers along and try not to repeat yourself on anything not vital.

Meanwhile, when you export a book to HTML from LibreOffice, you get a single file. To Leanpub, this looks like one big chapter. While you can split it at the section breaks (headings/chapters) you can’t get a decent Table of Contents (TOC) out of it.

For a PDF, no TOC is OK, since most don’t. But in an epub, a TOC (and split sections/chapters) is what separates the cheap epubs from the quality ones.

While I have other tests going, it looks as if you are going to have to do a bit of work to port a LibreOffice document into Leanpub and get it to produce properly.

At this writing, I see that you will need to take each chapter and create an HTML file for it (cut/paste from your .odt master file into single .html files.) Similarly, with a blog you are better scraping each individual post and creating a standalone html file to import it. You may still want to aggregate the whole thing into one master file to edit it into a single book. Depends on your work flow and what works for you (as well as what your audience wants.)

Once you compile it, then you are best editing any errors on their site in Markdown rather than editing the master and re-uploading that chapter.

This should then give you a decent .epub and .pdf file to work with.

Their .epub does pass (usually) epubcheck, so it can be used elsewhere. Just note that they brand their .epub and PDF files, so you are going to need to edit these if you don’t want that. Safest is to just open up your epub in Sigil to double-check everything. (Since editing completed PDF files is tricky, you’re better off just porting them from LibreOffice.)

Note that you are still going to have to remove any H3 (heading 3) and below in order to get it accepted through Lulu. (I’ll be doing tests shortly to see if this is their arbitrary on posting to iTunes and Nook.) So editing your epub for use anywhere besides Leanpub is a given.

Here’s the first test I did: Publish. Profit. Independence.

Problems I ran into on Leanpub

As I said, there’s no simply uploading a finished file other than html (for now, at least.) So you need to start here with all your new books. Regardless. It all adds up, quite in addition to other benefits.

They have support for DropBox, which is great once you get it going. Very painless. Just move your files around on your own computer and it updates everywhere else. Then tell Leanpub to process your files and they generate previews and completed books.

They recently added support for Git – which I don’t get. It’s an uber-geek thing. I set it up and then retreated gracefully back to Dropbox. At least you can switch from Git to Dropbox to Markdown editing anytime you want.

The workflow currently looks like this.

Find and edit a PD, PLR, or own-written work into shape using LibreOffice.
Save as HTML and import to Leanpub – one file.
Have Leanpub process this for you.
Create your cover and upload it where Leanpub likes it.
Tweak your book.txt file and formatting template until you’re happy with the results.
Launch it for sale and set up affiliate sales.
Edit the finished epub so you can port it elsewhere.
Generate the PDF from LibreOffice if you want to get Lulu to print a hardcopy for you.

Current publishing-distributors sequence:

1) Leanpub
2) Lulu – for ISBN and also your print books.
3) GooglePlay (save meta-data in Calibre)
4) iTunes
5) Nook
6) Amazon
7) Kobo
8) OverDrive

Arranged in order of complexity, not ROI. Publishing your book gets simpler as you go. After #3 it’s mostly cut/paste.

Again – work in batches and complete each distributor before you go to the next. That seems to prove the most efficient. Build a set of books, preferably a series, and epubcheck them all before you start. Use Leanpub to edit, or simply port to them.

How to make money with these distributors

My experience (in purposely not marketing, devoting my time to getting more books published) is that until you can crack Amazon, these other distributors will give you a fair shake based on just your cover, description, and price.

This is what my experience was. Amazon luckily “kicked in gear” for one of my books, which also sold well on the other distributors. After a couple of months, that one book on Amazon was now selling more than the rest combined. Before that, I sold twice as much on any of them as Amazon.

The point of having a deep backbench is to also take advantage of “related books” algorithms they all have. Your tags and other metadata can help you improve your referrals. Google Play, for one, sent out an email recently telling people to use their BISAC categories so the referrals would be more accurate. Both iTunes and Nook enable full BISAC listings, so this should help quite a bit.

Note: Google wants the BISAC number, which is freely available as a spreadsheet from The Book Industry Study Group. Amazon and Kobo have bastardized versions of this – Amazon allows you two categories, and Kobo – 3. Lulu and Leanpub have their own categories. Lulu allows a single category, while Leanpub allows multiple ones from their list. Google allows you an unlimited number of actual BISAC codes, as does iTunes – Nook limits you to 5.

Income from additional print and audio versions. You should also set up your print books via Lulu and get these posted with or slightly before your ebooks. So they show up on Amazon when your epubs do. Any additional version raises the authority and so increases the algorithm effect. Publishing a paperback is a simple and cheap route (you’ll have to buy a proof copy.) You can also publish a hardback, or a separate sized paperback (overkill.) When someone offered to record my bestseller as an audiobook (for a fee) I took them up on it and promptly doubled my income from that book. On Amazon, the more books, the more sales. Just a point.

Most of my experience has been solely from ebook sales – which are a quick route to financial freedom. My current test has paperback versions of the 14 books in my next batch. We’ll see.

Notes on how to start your own home publishing business

There are two models:

A writer with a backbench of created works.
A publisher with a backbench of other’s works.

For the writer, you should use Lulu as an aggregator so you can focus on your writing while Lulu distributes everywhere else (except GooglePlay) for you. You’ll also publish to GooglePlay in batches (far more efficient here.)

You can use any computer you have, since the distribution is all online. As well, using free programs:

LibreOffice (with the Writer2Epub plug-in)
Sigil
Calibre
GIMP (or hiring out your covers.)

Those programs run on any platform, so you’re set. You can use Leanpub instead of LibreOffice as your editor. There are many standalone Markdown editors, as well as online versions. Sigil will still be needed to check your work and tweak it. However, you may find that Leanpub gives you a completely acceptable epub and print-ready PDF for Lulu.

For the publisher, use a MAC (mini) as this is the lowest common denominator. This is because individually publishing to iTunes, Nook, and the rest will be required for any public domain books. This will give you more administration (8 separate distributors sending you royalties) but higher income as you aren’t using an aggregator. You’ll still use Lulu for print and ISBN’s for your epub files.

The four programs above are suggested for a publisher, exporting your docs to HTML in order to upload to Leanpub. You’ll be able to use the Leanpub epub file, or create your own with LibreOffice. Your own most-efficient workflow will determine which way you want to go.

Again, why Lulu? Because some independent bookstores don’t like Amazon. Createspace is owned by Amazon, so is blacklisted as a publisher by some. Lulu not only will get your print book distributed, but will also distribute your ebook (or at least tell you what has to be done to get it to a standard Apple and Nook will accept.)

Building an Audience

This factor is more present on Leanpub than anywhere else. And why you should include Leanpub as a priority for porting in your batch to distributors. As you post each book, you are opening up your lines for feedback on each book, as well as the set. So you’ll produce more valuable books and can also then engage them for the releases on other platforms, or related books in that series or a following one.

A series would get the feedback you want faster and so you can test/prove the viability of such a launch. As well as getting ideas for your next set. Frankly, posting your earlier series here will show whether you need to spend any great amount of time marketing them. Or what marketing you should use for them.

There’s more about why Leanpub needs to go first in your distribution on their Manifesto. Check it out.

Posted in book, iTunes, LeanPub, LibreOffice, lulu, Markdown, Nook, publish | Leave a comment

Budget Corks: How to Keep Your Money Instead of Watching it Drain Away

Posted on June 15, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Financial Freedom and “Getting Rich” can be accomplished much cheaper than most people think possible.

At this point, you’re well on your way to getting financially free by operating your own book-publishing home business. It’s time to discuss getting rich.

Put a cork in your waste to keep your income working for you. Uncork conventional wisdom and let it go.

(Photo: Nic Taylor)

You are going to use two corks for this. Corks have long been used to stop flows or open them.

Cork 1: goes in all your income drains.
Cork 2: comes out of all your conventional wisdom drains.

Corking your Income Drains

The simple rules are these:

Make more than you spend.
Spend only on what you really need.
Leverage everything you make.

Before I get into those simple strategies, we have to open another drain.

Uncorking Conventional Wisdom Drains

The trick is to open your mind to constantly draining away useless conventional wisdom.

Almost everything you’ve been told is wrong and keeps you poor. Helping people get rich and quit being poor is entirely a matter of education and motivation. Welfare and government handouts only increase the amount of poor. Paying people to stay unemployed only makes more unemployed. When anyone decides to improve their lives and starts studying those who did, then they start getting rich. (See the movie “The Pursuit of Happyness.”)

If you are not as rich as you want to be, it just means you have bought some lie which you have been applying in your life. Get rid of that lie with a workable truth and you’ll start getting rich. (If you are already rich, why are you reading this? Oh – you want to get richer…)

Start developing the habit of critically analyzing everything you’ve accepted in the past and consider everything anyone is telling you to be just another scam.

Cialdini’s “Influence” is required reading on this point. As is my own book, “Get Your Self Scam Free” (which quotes Cialdini.)

People are trying constantly to get you to do what they want you to. Marketers, Politicians, Family – these are probably the worst. Your boss and co-workers come next. A job is described as “Just Over Broke.” Most of the really rich people are self-starters and usually entrepreneurs. Find these people. Study them.

Figure out what you really want in life, then throw everything else away while you concentrate on that single goal. Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” is the key book you need to read, re-read, study, and keep re-reading regularly.

You are here to fulfill a certain purpose, to live out a journey only you can take. As we are all individuals here, everyone else out there is here only to do that same thing – whatever their own purpose is.

The trick is to find Mentors and a “Master Mind” of like individuals whose purpose aligns with yours. They are few. And you can find them in old books like Hill’s and others.

Surround yourself with only people who align to your own dreams. Let the others go away.

Common Lie 1: A college education will help you get rich.

What’s true:
a. Only if you use it.
b. Also if you didn’t hock your soul to pay for it.
c. The richest people on this planet didn’t go to or complete Ivy League educations.

Logic will carry you through on this:

Knowledge is like any tool in a toolbox. It has to be kept sharp and it has to be used when the time is right. If you let it get dull, or simply don’t use it, the most powerful tool is a waste.
Student loans are the worst investment anyone can make, as is any loan – you start out in the hole, several hundred yards away from the starting line of making any income.

Michael Dell (of Dell Computers), Bill Gates (of Microsoft), and Larry Ellison (of Oracle) all share one thing – they have been on the list of richest people on this planet for many years. The other thing they have in common is that they all dropped out of college.

If you look up that list of top twenty richest people in the U.S, you’ll see that all but two either dropped out of college or went to a no-name school. Bloomberg and Buffett were the exceptions. And Buffett only went to an Ivy League graduate school.

Not going to college will get you started earlier in life. If you create your own “virtual college” by learning constantly from people who have achieved similar goals to yours, then you’ll have the right teachers you need.

I ignored college for years and burnt my middle-life working at a dead-end corporation. I left with no savings, no retirement, and debt. I went back to college to test out the idea that I needed some sheepskins to make money. This gave me more debt – but in seven years I got seven degrees.

Then I found out that the “best-paying” jobs would require me to relocate again, go into more debt, and generally just set me up for more failure.

At the end of a decade (3 more years), I narrowed down my business to publishing books online. Meanwhile, I’d paid off all my debts and credit cards. I cut my expenses down to what was manageable – so I was living within my means. Once my online income exceeded my monthly bills, I was financially free and no longer had to work for anyone else. All the work I was doing on a daily basis now contributed or not to increasing how rich I could become.

Common Lie 2: Getting Rich Means Lots of Money

What’s true:
Once your income routinely increases beyond your cost of living, you are on the route to Financial Freedom. Everything above that is “rich”.

Getting Rich Quick is an urban legend. It’s a marketing ploy for Conventional Wisdom Suckers. Look up the back trail of anyone who’s gotten rich “overnight” and you’ll see years of study before they actually did. Every. Single. Time. Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers” quotes the rule that it takes 10,000 hours of study before anyone can be outstanding in their field. That’s between 7 and 20 years, depending on how much time you spend weekly at learning a particular field.

The good part is that all your hard-won experience up to this point counts.

Most of getting rich is having excess income that you can now invest in other income sources which you don’t have to spend a lot of time managing. Real Estate is one. Mainly it takes time to accrue real value, and only buying properties which can bring you more rent than it costs in any mortgage. The key point is having excess income from your main goal first before you start studying up on these “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” schemes.

The best income is passive. That’s why this approach of book-publishing-as-a-home-business. Edit and publish a book and it will sell from here on out. Once you have a huge backbench of books which sell regularly, then you have more income than you need to run on. To make more income from these, improve their individual marketing – which also doesn’t take a lot of money.

Invest the extra income in additional passive income sources which need little management, and you are on the road to accumulating a whole stable of low-maintenance income sources – which are now making you rich.

Rule: Get Financially Free first. Then reinvest extra income into additional passive income lines which don’t require a lot of your time in management.

Example: one of my books started selling well on Amazon. Someone contacted me about making an audio book. This version started selling well, doubling the monthly income for that book and paying the cost of creating it. Now that extra income is going to creating audio books for my other top-selling books. I don’t need the extra income to buy more stuff – I just reinvest it in earning more income – getting richer.

Get Rich Slow Strategies

1. Live within your means.
Yes, this means being frugal. Again, examine your lifestyle to see if your Conventional Wisdom Drains have been plugged:

Clothing: What comfortable, durable clothes do you need, compared to what people are trying to force you to buy?

Entertainment: Can you watch your favorite DVDs over and over, waiting to buy them when it goes on sale a year or two after it comes out? The price of a single movie ticket will cover the cost of several “discount bin” movies. Classic movies are regularly repackaged just for this purpose. Does the “party animal” in you result in more customers? Does consuming alcohol make you more productive? Open up some of those conventional wisdom drains and let the nonsense out of your life.

Lifestyle: Are you “keeping up with the Joneses” or living simply and honestly only doing what makes sense? Did you know that home cooking is cheaper, more enjoyable, and healthier than fast food? If you buy a sturdy truck (they last longer than cars and have equivalent gas mileage) and pay it off, all your miles after that are basically free. Buying used is way cheaper than buying new. Keep it in paint and polish and it will soon be a “classic” that is regular and dependable.

Housing: Rent until you can pay cash for your home. Consider this: Buy a mini-home built on a trailer and park it in your parent’s or a relative’s driveway. (Another link here.) That’s quite a concept. Steve Jobs was living with his parents when he started Apple. You can buy pre-built mini-homes on wheels which are quite good looking and will give you everything you need in a very small version. Buy (or rent) a city lot with power and sewer hook-ups. Use the existing structure for your business.

2.Spend only on what you really need.
You have a goal to achieve. Ask yourself for a month or so, every time you go to the store, “Does this purchase enable me to make my goal faster or better?” Once you’ve gotten this into a habit, then you’ll find other habits coming in – like only shopping with a list, and ensuring all items on that list are within your budget.

You do need to enjoy life. Get a copy of Stanley’s “The Millionaire Mind” and you’ll find that the rich are known as “cheap dates.” Being frugal doesn’t mean a sour existence. Yes, walking along a beach isn’t the same as sailing a fancy yacht in the harbor. But the effect of getting peace of mind by communing with Nature doesn’t have to be expensive. Do you think you need to impress someone with anything you do? Just check it over. Throw out what you don’t really need. Buy only what you do.

3. Leverage everything you make to make you more.
Any income you earn should be put to use making more income. This idea of a home business means that your home Internet connection should be making you money. Working at home already saves your commuting costs – your vehicle will last a lot longer if it’s just used once a week or less. If you have a computer that plays your DVD’s, it is also able to help you publish books that will sell and bring you more income?

Get into the mindset that everything you have around you needs to contribute to your goal. This is what Napoleon Hill found out after he was suddenly insanely rich – having a fleet of Rolls Royce’s and a huge estates didn’t mean he got more freedom out of it. In fact, it meant he had to work harder so he could hire the people he needed just to keep up what he owned – maintenance costs. And he eventually lost it all and rebuilt his life. Lots of rich people find out that after they’ve gotten all these millions into their lives that they actually downsize their living to smaller houses and less expensive cars which are more manageable and don’t drain their life and income continually.

You’re here to enjoy life. Being rich is also rich in spirit. Helping others is the way you earn extra income – by adding value to the lives which yours intersects with. Leverage all the income you earn so that you can add even more value to those around you – which will in turn earn you more income. Everyone wins.

Summary:

Get financially free by being frugal and using your common sense.
Invest extra income into additional passive income sources.
Enjoy living the life you are here for.

Posted in Cork, Education, Larry Ellison, Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Dell, Pursuit of Happyness, Real estate, Wealth | Leave a comment

Book Marketing That Actually Works: Part 1

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Books are only paid journey invitations. They are not the journey itself. “You buys your ticket and you takes your chances.”

While they make income, they are not your bread-winners, despite any individual bestseller. Your income comes from the teamwork of your entire bench.

Marketing your books has to take this into account.

The first thing to learn is to unlearn the conventional wisdom. If you’ll pardon my crass assessment: there’s lots of crap floating around in the book-marketing sewers passing off as pure gold.

Some lies:

1. Reviews only work on Amazon.
2. Social media doesn’t sell books. It’s just an invitation to discovery.

Some empirical truths:

1. No one distributor has all the possible buyers. Amazon’s share has been dwindling for years. Every distributor has different niche-tribes visiting them.
2. Celebrities with huge social media followings can produce “instant” results no one else can duplicate. (While they spent years building that following so it could be exploited.)
3. Most books sell little, if at all, by themselves. Publishing a single book to a single distributor has almost guaranteed failure. Some individual books don’t sell at all.
4. Authors with sets of books (series) sell books. Authors who spend their time writing instead of marketing make the majority of the income. (See Taleist survey. And DBW survey.)

These tests have proved out over and over.

Those surveys were backed up by studies of classic bestseller authors. Dickens was prolific, as well as Shakespeare. They had uncommon success, even though individual works sometimes failed. Current generation successful authors such as Louis La’Mour, Stephen King, and Amanda Hocking all use(d) this model: Find a niche genre and produce consistent works with feedback from your audience.

People who wrote and published a single or just a few books rarely made any personal success. Moby Dick became a bestseller almost a generation after Herman Melville died. Similar outcome happened for Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Henry David Thoreau, and others.

Author success depends on a backbench of works. Anecdotal reports say that it’s around the fifth book that the series takes off. Recently Howey’s “Wool” series took off just at that point. Others hit sooner, some later. Hocking had already written 17 books before she hit it big.

The caveat is that my work down this line are simply and only a successful implementation of the backbench theory. The test was publishing over a hundred ebooks. Since they started selling immediately, this disproved the Amazon marketing data was commonly being promoted. In fact, they were selling 2-to-1 over the same books on Amazon.

With other limitations on Amazon at the time (their policies on Public Domain [PD] and Public-Licensed-Rights [PLR] books) I simply left that platform and pushed over a hundred books to the other distributors. After all, I was making far more income otherwise.

The only marketing these books had were a decent cover, description, and price (most at 99 cents.) The PLR books were given whatever covers they came with (as long as they weren’t awful.) Descriptions were pulled from their introduction, usually. They sold best on GooglePlay, where Internet Marketing can take advantage of keyword-based titles.

PD books sold regularly across all platforms. I used what was estimated to be the all-time 25 top-selling books. Priced at 99-cents, there were a few who sold better than the rest.

One hit an algorithm circuit on Kobo – Jane Austen’s Emma – and sold very well for several months, then dropped again.

When one of the supervisors at Kobo contacted me about her interpretation of company policy about public domain books (I couldn’t find any policy on the site which backed up what she said – and it was contrary to U.S. copyright law) – I was forced to declare all these books as public domain and take the 20% royalty as a penalty for them. So I raised the prices to 3.99 for each book (which gave me a79-cent payout, which was up from the 43-cents I had been getting.) Interestingly, my income from that distribution platform increased. A couple more months of sales should give me some comparatives in this.

One of my books sold well on all platforms, but it really took off on Amazon once it got sufficient 4 and 5 star reviews. Soon that one book on Amazon (along with some peripheral sales) were bringing me twice the income of all the other distributors combined. When I added an audio version, this doubled that again.

Tests continue.
Now that Amazon has clarified their public domain policies, I’ll reformat the earlier PD books published on other distributors to align with Amazon’s PD policies and post those there. Since they will instantly aggregate the reviews from the title, I should have a jump in sales and overall income, even though they force a 35% royalty on PD republishing. Again, reviews only work that way on Amazon.

Lulu has dropped all distribution of public domain books outside their own platform. This necessitated getting a MAC to publish to iTunes and start publishing to Nook on my own. So these tests are still in progress as well. Meanwhile, publishing PLR books via Lulu were successfully distributed.

You can see that this is more down the line of merchandizing rather than what passes for book marketing. But these tests proved that a person can make a decent living simply republishing ebooks – given enough books and a focused approach.

Other studies were undertaken and more tests worked up. I write this while in the middle of one of these (which I’ll tell more about in the next installment.) What came up out of that study of copywriting books was a very successful online marketing company and how they’ve proved what really works regardless of the urban legends floating around.

Stay tuned….

Posted in amazon, Amazon.com, book, iTunes, kobo, lulu, Nook, public domain | Leave a comment

Book Marketing That Actually Works: Part 2

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Robert Worstell

The soul of your marketing journey is Copywriting.

Copywriting is communication, it’s actually telling the story of a product or service and inviting a potential customer along for the journey – or giving that individual a tool or weapon or advice they will need on their own journey.

It’s logical to take up the study of copywriting in order to improve your sales. (My series of books in this area is hosted at Masters of Marketing Secrets, BTW.) Some even call it a “rainmaking” skill, as it’s so rare to encounter someone who really knows what they are talking about in this field.

I’m not going to veer off in that direction – get the books I’ve published and study them for yourself – just know that it’s something any marketer needs to invest in and master.

The essence of Marketing revolves around helping people on their journey – either to get going, or to continue on some part of the great life-cycle they are on. (See this final essay from Joseph Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces” for a flavor of the individual journey we are each on.)

That one connection has been missing up to this point with all the greatest copywriters of all time. Only with the long study of this copywriting series above did it finally peek out and raise its hand.

Your bookstore is a shop all heroes visit.

That’s the approach to take. Either at the start, or somewhere along the way, you want everyone who has a journey involving your particular niche to stop in and buy the tools, weapons, manuals, or advice you have to offer.

Your job is to constantly rotate the merchandise and freshen up the displays so that every time anyone visits, they see something new and exciting which will help them overcome their next challenge.

You are offering individual books, in various shapes and sizes, and also packages of related materials, as well as collections of related books so they can buy them and improve their life and success-rate in living it.

No one book will make your fortune. More that you are offering a continuing service of enabling people to find what they are looking for within what you have been collecting.

Your storefront is virtual. You work from your own home. But people can visit your shop simply by pointing their browser to your address. This is why book publishing as a home business is a way to first get financially free and then get as rich as you want so you can do whatever you want with that money. Real freedom.

Display-tidying, stock-rotating, specials, and clearances

Overall, your shop has a theme. Like any business, it services a niche. That niche is something you are fascinated with personally – it’s part of your own journey. You could talk about it endlessly and wake up with fresh inspirations about what you can do to help people find out more about it. You find yourself researching some detail or strategy or rabbit-hole which answers a question of “how come…?”

Within that niche is where you collect the books which you and others have written about your shop-theme. Then you tidy these up and publish them in all sorts of formats so people can have the type and kind they want. (Some want hardcopy books, others collect your book on their smartphone, others want video’s.)

You mostly have all the tools to run your own shop already:

We’ve already covered Leanpub, which will allow you to create packages for every individual book, as well as binders of related books.
We’ve also covered Lulu, which will help you create almost any version of hardcopy book.
You’ve read a story about iAmplify which will help you sell audio and video versions of the book online.
I might have mentioned Kunaki.com – which will enable you to sell CD‘s and DVD’s directly to your customers.

These are all links you can have on your site which will earn you income to keep going – by providing all these tools/weapons/supplies every visiting hero or heroine needs to succeed.

Within Leanpub (and I suggest you make them your central jumping-off point) you can create limited specials and also engage your customers with special emails just for them. So you can tell them when any given book has a new release or special, etc. You also have the capacity to reward them as affiliate salespersons when someone buys one of your books through their link.

iAmplify will do the same, although you can actually offer video’s on Leanpub as part of your book packages, while you can only post PDF’s to iAmplify.

You can also invest in other affiliate sites with digital offers, such as JVZoo and PayDotCom. (We’ll get into how to incorporate these in just a bit.)

Now you’re set to run your shop and market your wares to anyone who comes in.

The next question is how to get them into your shop.

Building all roads leading to your book-publishing business

Like Rome, it’s possible to set yourself up as the center of the known universe for your particular niche. And that’s the model to consider.

Book distributors are just outlying sales points which carry your books on a commission basis. You get paid if they sell. All these distributors also link back to your site.

Each ebook has links in front and back which send people to your site.

It’s much like an octopus, where the different tentacles each bring food to the center. However, in this case we are giving even more value they closer they get.

Search engines are the same scene. Your site is optimized to ensure that the search engines get the data they need to rank you well for any search. As well, you also have posted material (such as videos and PDF’s) to outlying sites which have links coming back to your central site.

On top of that, you are constantly adding new content to that central site (like your specials and updated merchandise displays) which makes your site interesting and new – so the search engine ‘bots are visiting regularly.

That’s how you get all roads leading to you as the top authority for your niche.

Arriving at your site is the start of another journey

Your site is specifically designed to get them to opt-in to other special offers.

You don’t make real money off search engines. You get a small sum from someone buying one of your books and then visiting your site. Same for your promotional videos and PDFs. They each bring you people who are already looking for what you offer.

Your job at that point is to get them to opt-in for additional material in that area so you can communicate with them directly on the subject.

That additional material can be a no-cost (other than their email address) special report, whitepaper, manifesto, or even an ecourse delivered over time by an autoresponder. One of the most effective offers is to give them free access to a special collection of books or materials.

Once they have told you that it’s OK to email them, then you can regularly market your specials and data so they will eventually opt-in to a paid membership – which is where your real income begins.

And you then get them to become part of the forum and also to become affiliates and get paid for recommending your books to others.

A book purchase is a one-time occurrence. Maybe they’ll go and buy the rest of the series from that distributor. If they buy from your site, they can also get the binders and packages you’ve created on Leanpub. Or the video sets available on iAmplify.

What you want to do is to get collect their email address (into your autoresponder) which comes with permission to market to them. Then move them along with additional materials until they buy into your paid membership where you can really help them. Eventually, you get them to evangelize your books and get paid for doing so – as an affiliate.

That’s the whole sales cycle, which some people call a “sales funnel” – but it’s anything but. There is no one route, but many. And thats the way you like it, because more is better.

Look over those routes again:

Search engines bring people to your site for information about books and those people can find distributors to buy books, or opt-in directly for no-cost materials.
Distributors have your books and they sell them for you – income.
Readers who follow the links in your ebooks visit your site and buy more or opt-in – more income.
Buyers who opt-in to your free membership get exposed to timely specials and new releases – more income (and maybe reviews.)
Buyers to opt-in to your paid membership pay you continually for access to low-cost materials and even better special offers – more income
Buyers who evangelize about your books and offers bring you more sales – more income.

The beauty of this is that you are getting paid at most levels before they move up to the next. While you could create huge packages of materials, you don’t have to. Build good value into everything you offer, and only work as hard as you want to.

Variations on a Theme

Different uses of this are legion.

Fiction writers will want to stay working on their next book. Having the email addresses of their hardcore audience, and using Leanpub to engage their readers in actually writing the book. (Meanwhile, they can buy your other books here, as well as special packages of extra “cutting room floor” material. And they can become affiliates.)
Non-fiction writers can base their entire business on getting paid speaking and coaching gigs based on that one book. The site enables people to contact the author for these. Meanwhile, any blog posts can be converted via Leanpub into an upcoming release – and so continue the process. A paid membership and forum access allows inside information and for all your readers to become part of “the team.”
As we really covered above, small publishing houses can both publish PD and PLR books, but also help beginning authors with other services. (Like writing a book such as this one might generate prospects.)

The Core Marketing Efforts for Audience Acquisition

There aren’t all that many things to do, just lots of ways to do them.

For each book:
Decent cover – hire this if you need to, but get nice-looking covers which attract attention.
Description – The first sentence is the headline and needs to pull the reader into reading the second. The second needs to get the reader to read the next, or click “read more…” so they can read the rest of the description. Your description is an advertisment, and salesmanship in print. Again, hire this out if you want – or study the Copywriting Series, particularly Eugene Schwartz.
Price – Play around with these. It used to be that unknown authors on Amazon could get known by keeping their series at 99 cents. (Amazon has since changed their algorithms to make this more difficult.) Both Kobo and Smashwords have found that authors make the most money at $3.99 and get the biggest audience at $2.99.

Beyond that, you port to different formats and post these widely to sites which want that type of content.

Videos – YouTube is the third-largest search engine. There are at least a dozen more sites you can post them to as well. Make sure you fill out your description well, and offer a link they can follow.
PDF’s – Doc-sharing is huge and is known to send more traffic to a site than anything else. Just don’t be salesy. At least 8 big sites want you to share your PDFs from there.
Audio – Podcasting is starting to find it’s way into the mainstream now. Several sites will host your content for free.
Graphics – Pinterest and other sites will accept your book covers and allow you links back to your site (like the landing page for the book with sales links.) There are also infographics, but these may not be worth the time it takes to create them, however popular they are currently.

You should also note that when these are done with high quality and attention to detail, they can be packaged on Leanpub or sold individually as DVD’s or audiobooks.

Your book distributors also help with audience acquisition. The more books you have out there, which all link back to your site internally and wherever they are sold, will be your active envoys for acquiring more audience. The better the book, the more people want the next in the series.

Your ongoing marketing – launches

There are a few people out there who recommend simply doing regular launches as a way of making income. These are usually built around a series of videos which come out and walk a person through the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) cycle to buying a package of materials and/or a paid membership.

Commonly, these launches are simply four videos, one for each step. But they can be a 30-day process, with that many days of content as an online course – which culminates in why they should buy a membership to get additional coaching and forum access, etc. They could also just be spread out over a couple of weeks.

The trick is to have a special limited-time offer at the end of them to get people to opt-in. (One of those Cialdini “Influence” tactics again.)

Properly done, they can build to rake in millions in sales, and at least 6-figures in actual income – all in a week or so.

But with a book-publishing business, you aren’t limited to a certain product or a couple. You can create any number of special, limited-time offers for your binders and packages. The videos and podcasts you create as part of that any launch then become valuable products on their own, and can be collected into additional packages.

See how this just builds?

Start with your bestselling books and build a package around it and/or related books. Invite your readers to tell you what they would like in such a package (via your Leanpub or autoresponder emails)

If you have a deep backbench, then you have unlimited possible offers to provide as value to your readers.

While this is the broad strokes to your marketing scene, I’m not going into building websites and so on. This is just to get you excited about getting started on your own…

Posted in book, iAmplify, iTunes, Joseph Campbell, LeanPub, lulu, Portable Document Format, publish | Leave a comment

A Comparison of Distributors – Who’s on First?

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Figured I owed you a no-holds-barred, warts-and-all review of the main distributors – from my experiences with them.

The aggregators all charge something to post your ebook to the various distributors. Lulu is the cheapest, at 10%, Smashwords at around 15%. Everywhere else is a lot more. Some are outright rip-offs preying on the naive. I include Lulu and Smashwords below, the rest are distributors.

Lulu

While I recommend them highly (way above and ahead of Amazon’s CreateSpace) it is really because of how I originally got in with them through Print On Demand (POD) books. They got me into ebooks when they started porting epubs to iTunes and Nook. So I started taking all my books and ported them through Lulu to see what would happen. When they started selling – more than Amazon – I was hooked.

What they’ve done recently is to clamp down on public domain ebooks. Which put a damper on my business plan. They simply won’t distribute them anymore. They’ll ship PLR, but not PD books.

That doesn’t affect local Lulu ebooks, or hardcopies they print. And that is their main use again – printing books which independent book sellers will stock that don’t have the Amazon imprint (Createspace). The other great point is to be able to create low-cost hardcopy books which are available as a special enticement for your paid membership clients.

Lulu has a small community. It has generated few sales for me – and probably most of these were from linking my own pages there.

Smashwords

Frankly, too hard to use. I just don’t have the time to work up a working template and then port a special version to them. While they now accept epubs, you still have to edit that file just for them.

They won’t take PD or PLR books (and will pointedly ban you if you try.) So they are out of my business plan, except for my own books.

If you do put your book up on Smashwords, it’s a separate version and will be up there with any other version you have there. Amazon doesn’t easily take up Smashwords books, so you won’t see them much there. Like Lulu, they will now ship everywhere. Lulu actually gets accepted by Amazon, so they have a leg up over Smashwords (particularly as they are much more easily accessed.

Smashwords generate multiple versions of your original ebook, much as Leanpub does now.

They do have an active community, but I haven’t used them much. Certainly I’ve had few sales here – as I only have 2 books there.

Amazon

A lot has been written about the, as the 900-pound godzilla in the room. Only the presence of other distributors has forced them to improve their royalties for indie publishers. They still stick it to you with added “upload” fees.

I’ve no love lost with them. Get some of the books on how to game their system – most of them work, or did. Amazon adjusts their algorithms regularly, just as Google does. Once you do hit the “big time” then you’ll get a lot of sales, since Amazon has something around 50% of the total ebooks sold internationally. That share has been declining and there is no really accurate measurement of market share for any distributor (since none disclose their actual sales.)

Amazon is easy to upload to, and they take epubs.

Kobo

Not bad. They go more places internationally than Amazon or anyone else. They do only ebooks. Originally Canadian, they were bought by Rakuten and have been expanding. They have special arrangements with the ABA and indie publishers to sell their ebooks and ereaders locally in the U.S. A win-win for all concerned.

My recent problem with PD books came up when a supervisor there said I had to either declare them as PD and take a “standard” (their words) 20% royalty. PLR isn’t subject to those.

Still, it’s not my best income source.

iTunes

I’ve only recently begun accessing this directly. Most of my books were earlier submitted via Lulu, so I don’t have a great deal of data at this point. iTunes has produced the greatest income outside of having a bestseller on Amazon.

Submitting is simple if you have a MAC. A simple approach is to get a MAC mini.

Practically, a MAC will give you all you need for posting to any platform. If you’re doing a lot of public domain books, then you don’t really have an option to not post directly to iTunes.

Publishing directly is much faster than waiting 4-6 weeks for Lulu to process your files. You are also able to enter a much greater amount of meta-data, so your book can be found easier through the “related” algorithms.

Nook

Most problematical. Most of my experience was via Lulu, so I’m just getting up to speed here. However, my first test with an epubcheck-passed file required additional editing before it was accepted. (It had passed through Lulu, which normally means it’s fine.)

The other problem was some sort of javascript framework deal where I couldn’t get in for a week. This might have been a low bandwidth problem or a ping-delay due to my satellite provider. Their forums noted access problems a year ago.

Nook gives me some of the lowest income. On Lulu, the sales reports are slowed by a month. Direct posting should give me immediate data, as it’s part of their interface. Hopefully, this will give me clues as to how to improve it.

Direct access also gives you better meta-data posting options. We’ll see.

Google Play

Decent income for me. Even though their royalties are only around 52% on average (some changes when your price is at the low end, which all of the distributors do.

They also screw around with your price, arbitrarily dropping it around 20% – so watch this as Amazon will “meet” their price automatically.

Google imports reviews from other sites (like Amazon and Goodreads) just as part of providing data – they aren’t review-centric like Amazon (which gets gamed regularly through that function.)

They are simple to publish books, which facility only happened earlier in this last year. This integrates your books with Google Books, and so is kind of actually two distributors in one.

It is simple to connect your print books with ebooks on Google Play (and iTunes, Nook) – and so then enable Google Book Search for the print work. This then enables greater SEO for your books. Other than Leanpub, this would be the single link to use if you only had one.

Google Play makes money off direct sales, but will take a percentage from sites which sell your hardcopy books.

Leanpub

This is the jumping off point now. As distributors, they give you a 90% royalty, minus 50 cents – which keeps them in the black. The essential model is comparing a book to a start-up, positing that posting early and often allows your book greatest success – since you get user feedback immediately.

Elsewhere, I’ve done a much longer review of this distributor. If you can only give out one link, use this one. They create epub, mobi, and PDF versions of your book. They allow the reader to pay the amount they want – which can be much more than your stated minimum and maximum. (Actually they found a common payment to be $10.62, which was actually turned out to give the author a flat $10.00)

They have a built-in Affiliate program and the ability to create binders of related books on Leanpub, and packages of any digital materials.

Build your book there (they are said to have direct epub upload shortly) and then edit that ebook so you can post it elsewhere without their branding (or go ahead and keep it.)

Overdrive

Tests still ongoing. I’ve not been accepted as a publisher yet. Here, you are able to set wholesale and retail suggested prices. You are also able to post audiobooks here.

These reach different outlets than the rest, as they deal with libraries and colleges, as well as retail outlets.

I’ll keep you posted as I get more data…

– – – –

That wraps it up. Posting here so I can get it into the book I’m wrapping up on this subject.

End of this book may mean also the end of this project as I move onto the next.

If I do find something, I’ll post it here – so do subscribe in the way you’d like (above, right.)

Posted in amazon, google, GooglePlay, iTunes, lulu, Nook, public domain, Smashword | Leave a comment

Summary of Getting Started: Lists and Sequences

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Tying it all together in a neat package means giving you a shopping list of stuff to do in what order.

I. What distributors?

Leanpub
Lulu
Google Play/Books
iTunes
Nook
Amazon
Kobo
(OverDrive)

This sequence is to get all possible meta-data figured out, then storing this in Calibre locally so you can add it as you can. This is a posting sequence, not based on income levels.

I suggest porting to Lulu in order to get their free ISBN – which is handy for creating links and for search engines to find your books. None of these distributors require ISBN’s to publish ebooks – they are necessary for print versions.

II. What to distribute?

Format: .epub

Everyone except Leanpub (for now) will take an epubchecked file. Leanpub will create an epubchecked file out of any HTML file, or directly entered Markdown. (You can export your LibreOffice or Word .doc into an HTML file and then import it into Leanpub.) Leanpub will also import your blog, just export it into a Blogger or WordPress export XML file.

Most of the distributors will also take a .doc file – but whether that will process depends on many factors. An epubchecked .epub should pass everywhere.

The suggestion is to double-check everything in the most current version of Sigil. You can edit out Leanpub’s branding with this, as well, in order to port it to other distributors.

III. How to create them?

Follow the guidelines and sequences laid out in “Just Publish! Ebook Creation for Indie Authors.”

IV. Where to find original public domain works?

Gutenberg.org
Archive.org
any public domain work repository.

Any version of a public domain book is still copyright-free, except for any editorial changes made, which are the copyright of the editor. Extracting the original material gives you a version you can edit into your own derivative work. I’ve covered this earlier, but it’s worth going over again – derivative works are not legally defensible if they are simply following the “two-step” of only adding a new introduction or preface. See Wikipedia entry on this.

There are also public domain images, video/movies, and audio files.

V. Where to find PLR works?

Any site which sells or gives away these packages.

Note: the reason PLR is shunned on many sites is that they are pretty widely distributed and show up on many websites as content. But this material can usually be edited under most license agreements. PLR is different from MRR (Master Resale Rights.) In those cases, you aren’t able to change the content, only resell the package. Be aware for packages which have simply been converted to MRR with no real changes to it except the license (perfectly legal.) Doesn’t mean you can’t still get it as PLR somewhere else.

VI. What skills do you need?

A command of spelling and grammar for editing.
A review of good-quality ebooks to find what is considered standard and above-grade.
Graphics Art talent and training for covers.
A grasp of copywriting for writing descriptions.

Any and all of these can be out-sourced.

VII. What equipment is needed?

If you are using Lulu to do all your distribution (original and PLR works only) then you can use any machine that will connect to the Internet and create an .epub file.
If you are intent on re-publishing public domain books, then get a MAC and do everything from there.

The “old school” of a few years back said you were going to need a scanner and OCR program to convert old books to digital format. Mostly, this isn’t needed these days. Some books still come only as images. And you can get free programs to OCR. On Windows (run in a virtual machine on Linux) I use a free program called TopOCR, which does a very good job.

I don’t recommend going this route to begin with. It can take a week or more of editing to get a scanned book into shape. That same week could give you a dozen PLR or PD books published to all distributors and earning you income by the end of that month.

However, some of the best classic books in some genre’s have never been converted and so there is no competition as an ebook. It it fits your niche exactly, then it may be a good investment. (I’ve also OCR’d and edited a book as a form of study, as well.)

VIII. What is the most efficient production workflow?

0) Determine the niche. Do complete market research on it.
1) Accumulate related books and convert to ebooks.
2) Build rudimentary websites.
3) Publish ebooks in batches along with landing pages as you go, updating links as publishing is complete. Build binders on Leanpub from these batches if appropriate.
4) Continue step 3 until you have a deep backbench.
5) Taking your bestsellers first, equip their websites with opt-in forms, free and paid membership areas, forum if applicable/possible.
6) Create video trailers and/or ecourse videos for each bestseller and post to several video sites with descriptions containing backlinks.
6a) You should also publish the hardcopy version(s) through Lulu to Amazon and the rest. (Also, take the bestsellers on Amazon and get audiobooks created for these – see the second workflow.)
7) Convert ecourse text lessons to PDF and post to doc-sharing sites with backlinks in the PDF and description
8) Post covers to image sites (Pinterest, Flickr) with backlinking descriptions.
9) Using a social syndication service, promote your landing pages on social media.
10) Build binders and packages for bestsellers and promote to relevant mailing lists.
11) Continue step 5 in order of individual booksales.
12) When you get to low-producing books, review their title, cover, description, and price. Tweak and resubmit as new book (don’t take the old one down unless the title has remained exactly the same.) Note: Get new ISBN for new edition.
13) Create new binders and packages for bestsellers and do bonafide launches and re-launches on a periodic basis.

Note: Your income will boost based on launches and building your email list (which launches help.) Figure 6 launches a year once your backbench is built. One month to get everything in place, one week to run the launch, one week to recover personally, 1-2 weeks to analyze what you just did and see what could be improved for the next one. Plan your launches around major event timelines – December, Halloween, and other shopping events (these major marketing dates have long been established and can be researched online.) Or you may find by statistics that hitting in between these will work best – or that utilizing major affiliates (and their mailing lists) will set your launch date for you.

Again: the concept is that your ebook publishing will make you financially free – while your paid memberships will get you as rich as you want.

VIX. What is the most profitable production workflow? (Untested.)

0) Determine your niche. Do complete market research on it.
1) Build your book in Leanpub and attract audience input from that niche.
2) Set up your website for the book series or batch.
3) Revise your book until your readers are ecstatic about it.
3a) Meanwhile, publish the paperback version via Lulu.
4) Post to the distributors with a pre-launch date, Amazon first. Update all links. Ensure Amazon links your paperback and ebook together.

5) Work out getting it posted to Goodreads, so reviews can accumulate.
6) Get your Leanpub audience to post reviews on Goodreads.
7) Create a launch with videos which coincides with release date on Amazon.
8) Set up opt-in forms, free and paid membership areas on your site.
9) Execute your launch.
10) Run analysis on performance metrics.
11) Take next book in your batch and run it through above.
12) Once your first batch/series is complete, do a launch for it’s binder (create a single “boxed set” as an ebook for Amazon and others.)
12a) You can also do a launch for an Aubible audiobook version – which will boost sales of all three versions (four is you go ahead and publish the hardback, too.)
13) Expand your backbench with a new batch of books and run each book through the above.

Note: This builds with your launch as you build your audience and email list. Getting your list to buy your Amazon book and give it glowing reviews is the heart of the “bestsellers” there. Since Amazon can leverage income, this is the core of most “get rich quick with publishing” books out there, because it works if you already have the email list. The above assumes you have no real list to begin with.

Note 2: The rough formula is Leanpub + Goodreads + Amazon + Launches. The real money is made with paid memberships, which Amazon sends you traffic for. Any review on Goodreads shows up just about everywhere (Amazon owns it.) Reviews are what will kick in the algorithms on Amazon to get your book discovered. Only Amazon.

Note 3: This is untested by myself, not by others. Buy their ebooks on Amazon and you’ll see they are telling about the same system. I went the harder route of building a deep backbench and getting sales across the board long before I had any bestseller on Amazon. Mainly because I consider their review system is false. It’s long been gamed, and is constantly being revised by Amazon itself. (The first reviews on Amazon were created by paid staffers.) Meanwhile studies of reviews show people are using them less and less to make buying decisions. But they do get your book visible on Amazon, which will spike (not create) sales.

The above model mixes financial freedom with getting rich. If your books continue to sell well on Amazon, you’re set. But as Warren Buffett quoted someone else, “You can keep all your eggs in one basket – just watch that basket very carefully.” So the emphasis is still on publishing to all possible distributors in addition to publishing to Amazon. No book will sell the same on any two distributors – they each have different audiences.

Note 4: iTunes and others have additional incentive tools to sell books on their individual platforms. These could be worth researching and incorporating into your launch – or running a separate launch, particularly if you sell more on iTunes for a given book than Amazon.

Posted in amazon, HTML, iTunes, LibreOffice, lulu, OverDrive, public domain, publish | Leave a comment

Postcript: Tracking ebook links for fun and profit

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Putting your ebook envoys to work in earning you income.

(I got this surprisingly logical idea recently – which I’ve not heard anywhere else – of how you figure out how your ebook is performing in bringing you additional traffic, leads, etc. Of course, this is after I’ve published over 150 books on 6 or 7 platforms each – do the math, this is about 900 iterations to retrofit with what I’m about to tell you. Better late than never, though. And you win out of my dilemma.)

Of course, you want to know what your ebooks are doing as envoys for you.

Remember that you put those links in the front and back of your ebook? And they go to a particular landing page? You know, that one with the opt-in on it to get their email? Yes, that one.

The trick is to figure out which book (preferably from which platform) is actually giving you the traffic.

So you use link shorteners to do this. The ones with analytics.

Bit.ly has been around for awhile, and is an easy setup.

Some casual research also found that Stumbleupon and Google API have similar setups you can use.

How to select a link shortener

You want one which has been around for awhile and so will be around for a good deal more. Too many of these have already started up and left with or without maintaining their links, but losing the analytics.
Analytics is the next criteria – can it tell you easily where these come from and when?
You want ease of use. A web interface that will simply give you the shortened link you can use in your ebook for tracking.
Finally, you want social interaction if you can get it. Your ebook link all by itself should be producing traffic for your ebook landing page.

How to set up individual links per book.

I haven’t worked out how to get this to individually work on a platform basis (which means creating 8 individual versions, one for each distributor.) It is possible, but not something for a mass-publisher such as myself. More than likely it would be profitable once you actually have a bestseller on your hands and want to separate out which distributor is bringing you the most traffic.

All of it deals with creating anchor links on your page. This is a bit of HTML to learn, but worth your while. (It’s also applicable if you have an ebook linking to a shared landing page – which isn’t recommended, but does happen when you have a batch of books all on the same topic, but they aren’t worth the time right off setting up individual web pages. PLR ebooks would be one such example.)

An anchor link looks like this: http://landingpage.html#anchorlink

All you have to type on your page is #anchorlink (which changes every time) and your browser will open to that point. Such as #seriesbook01, #seriesbook02, etc.

Simple, once you’ve done it a couple of times. Just open up your blog with the “html” link so you edit the code directly and insert it wherever is appropriate. Of course, you then save the file and test it in another window or tab.

When you know the anchor link works, then you take that link and drop it into your shortener. Take the resulting shortened link and use it in your ebook. (Suggested is that you set up a text file or spreadsheet with all this data. You could even put it in Calibre as meta data, some sites don’t like links in their descriptions, so it might not be the best thing to put it there.)

The short list of link shorteners

These are all been-there, done-that. they’ve both been around a long time and will probably be here in the near future. Both have browser plug-in’s which makes them handy to use.

Bit.ly – simple to use and integrates with both Twitter and Facebook accounts. It’s been used by scammers before and is banned on certain sites. One advantage is that you can make custom shorteners, which are descriptive to where they go or keywords.
Goo.gl – simpler than using their app, but the data is publicly available, like their other analytics.

There are others, such as ow.ly from Hootsuite, but this leads you into a subscription model one way or another. Means they’ll be around for awhile longer, but haven’t been around already as long as the other two above.

Of the two, I’d use Goo.gl, since it plugs into everything else you have going with Google – all of which is to entice that search engine to rank your stuff. If you already use bit.ly and gone through their learning curve, then you probably should stick with it. The other point is that Google is so big, it’s not likely to go out of business anytime soon.

Or if you have another shortener which serves your purpose, then keep using it.

The bigger point is to put a shortened link as part of every ebook you have so you can track the traffic from it.

Those analytics should start to tell you what is happening with your ebooks and eventually give you a clue as to how to make them more effective in bringing you traffic.

OK? Back to our story, then…

Posted in book, E-book, google, Hootsuite, HTML, iTunes, Landing page, publish | Leave a comment

Update: How Lulu Distributes Your eBook – on a Lag

Posted on June 27, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Something funny with Lulu – why the delay in distribution?

Lulu delays distribution of ebooks as an aggregator - are they worth your royalties?

(Photo: RainbowCave)

Lulu has now started e-mailing when they actually ship your book to the main distributors (iTunes, Nook, Amazon, Kobo.) Nice. But why does it take so long?

“Congratulations! Your eBook, “[book name goes here]”, meets all retail distribution requirements and we have forwarded it to the retail distributors you selected.

“… Important Note: Generally, once your book passes the Lulu Review process, it will be available to purchase on retailer sites in 2-4 weeks. Retailers update their online catalogs at intervals determined solely by the retailers. Lulu cannot provide a release schedule nor can we influence the timing of your eBook’s availability on other retail sites.”

On the other hand, given a direct upload to iTunes and Nook, your ebook goes live in 24 hours. Amazon and Nook have a similar lag.

But it’s not 2-3 weeks on top of whatever delay (in weeks) that Lulu takes to process your book through their own filters. (In this case, I had to remove the term “Smashwords” and any link to it.)

Now, with my MAC, I send directly to iTunes (and anywhere else) without any delay such as this.

Meanwhile, I don’t have to pay an aggegrator 10% of my royalties with all the delays.

The Lulu interface is also limiting – only 1,000 characters to market your book (while the rest are somewhere between 4-5,000 characters) and only a miserable few categories to prove your place in their “related” algorithms. Google Play, iTunes and Nook use true BISAC categories. Amazon and Kobo have their own versions of this, as does Leanpub (who is even more limited than Lulu.)

Note that Smashwords is on a similar footing – limited characters and categories. As well, they have month-long delays in shipping your book to distributors. Meanwhile, they take around 15% of your income.

The question then becomes: Are aggregators worth it?

In all cases, they charge for their services. The best of the best (lowest cost and best distribution) are Lulu and Smashwords. The rest are much higher priced and can be, quite frankly, “rip-offs.”

What do you gain by using an aggregator?

Time = money.

The independent writer, who is posting his own work, this is probably a good deal. And the reason I stick with Lulu is as this enables the indie author to get their books published as print-on-demand (POD). And having printed books up with ebooks make both sell better.

The platform this provides gives the freedom and time to just keep writing. And writing is what brings in income for any author – not spending time at anything else (including marketing.)

Spending time publishing isn’t in the best interest of the indie writer – who wants to make a living from publishing their own works.

BUT – the indie publisher sees things differently.

The depth of any backbench is the predictor of income.

The more books you publish, the higher income you can earn.

It’s all dependent on the value you offer and deliver. The indie publisher is constantly looking for more authors with books which people want. Finding existing market niches and servicing these with valuable materials (books, videos, podcasts, whitepapers, manifestos, etc.) is the core business plan for such.

Profit runs business decisions. Speed of execution, time to market – these result in more profit.
Having to wait a month or two to get a product to market (and having no control over when such a product actually arrives) could mean missing relatively short buying seasons such as Christmas, Black Friday, and Halloween. Or longer buying seasons such as spring (gardening) and summer (vacations).

Books have seasonal buying patterns. These can be discovered and strengthened with promotion to increase sales and lengthen their sales duration.

This means that a self-publishing home-business is better to invest the extra time in simply publishing their books (and materials) directly. The offset in time used to directly publish is paid back in almost precise control of delivery and sales.

As well, the added analytics each individual distributor gives can allow you to tailor-make your promotion campaigns to fit those which result in greater sales. For instance, I have multiple PLR books which sell better on Google Play than elsewhere – as they are keyword-relevant to Internet Marketing niche. Certain public domain fiction authors do better on iTunes than elsewhere. iTunes also has certain extras such as discount coupons and pre-sales which could be a targeted campaign that would raise a single book or series by high-selling authors – and so raise more sales of related books.

Another point is where a book comes out which has recently been made into a movie. “12 Years a Slave” was originally a public domain book which started selling better once that movie came out. The Koran also started selling better after 9/11 (as a morbid example.) Current news discussions of Doye’s “Sherlock Holmes” series now being in the public domain – as well as the multiple Sherlock Holmes movies that have been created over the last few years – would then prompt more sales (especially if these were linked with promotion pointing to the sites where your versions of these public domain books can be purchased.

A site with PLR and PD books on gardening, which was launched in late December, then promoted in January and February could get more traction. A collection of Gothic tales published and promoted in time for Halloween could bring sizable profits. Then a re-launch each season would spike sales again annually.

Conclusions:

The indie author, with just their own brand, should use Lulu to carry their water. This frees them to get back to writing their next book.
The indie publisher should always do their own aggregation, as the savings and profit potential are much greater. This frees them to find more market-niches and publish books people will buy.

PS. How to publish from home – “Publish. Profit. Independence.” is now live on Leanpub and available for purchase. Get Your Copy Today!

Posted in amazon, E-book, GooglePlay, iTunes, lulu, Nook, publish, Smashword | Leave a comment

Falling in Love with Leanpub for Self-Publishing Ease

Posted on July 2, 2014 by Robert Worstell

I Love Leanpub For Making It Easy to Self Publish eBooks

It’s now so easy to self-publish via Leanpub that I’ve fallen in love all over again.

Half tongue-in-cheek and half in earnest – when I moved to publishing my latest set of books on copywriting to Leanpub, the ease of editing and proofing made me re-think the way I had done it before.

If you’re following this blog, you know that I already have recommended moving Leanpub to the beginning of the queue when self-publishing your latest masterpiece.

Then I started using this in earnest, testing it with a dozen books. The great part is that the Leanpub learning curve is so short.

Here’s my current operating basis:

All my books are cobbled together in LibreOffice. I do the rough-edits in a text editor, then import and work it up in LibreOffice Writer to get a WYSIWYG approach and a view of what it’s going to look like. Earlier, I’d port via Writer2Epub to epub, then edit and correct with both Calibre’s built-in editor and Sigil (they each have different functions and complement each other.)
Then I save as HTML and import into Leanpub. I use the Dropbox connection, so it updates the files on my own machine every time I generate a new preview.
Proofing is simple – you just edit the converted file with a text editor, using Markdown (which is extremely easy to learn.) Then save – and it’s auto-updated via Dropbox. Hit the Preview button again, and use the PDF to see how it’s going to look. (I set it up for viewing dual pages at 100% on a 22″ monitor.)
After a few iterations, I can then hit “Publish” and have the finished version.
Now I can combine that latest book with earlier ones and so have a bundle for sale. They even encourage you to create a video which they will pull in from YouTube or Vimeo and feature for you.
Then you have a base set of files for porting to the distributors.

The improvements are vast.

You don’t have a great choice of margins or fonts with their PDF. And you have to settle for justified text as well. But it turns out looking great. (One trick is to have your Chapters as Heading 1, so they become the titles in the header – otherwise, you can have the parts as H1, and the chapters as H2.)
Your epub already passes epubcheck, so is ready to distribute as-is. (One drawback is that the epub, mobi, and PDF files are all branded with Leanpub links and logo – so porting these to other distributors probably means you’ll need to remove these with Sigil, or Adobe Acrobat Pro.)
You’re starting out with three versions, binders, packages, plus extra’s you can add yourself to make the Leanpub version outstanding.
You also have a built-in affiliate program which pays 50% commissions (compared to the industry range of 7-8%.) So your readers can get rewarded for becoming evangelists.
You can email your readers from Leanpub to let them know of any changes or upcoming new releases.

In short, this is THE WAY to start your publishing. Period. (They’ll also import from Wattpad, if you’ve already got a following there.)

Once you have this all done here, you have the basics for porting it to the other 6 or 7 main distributors.

Self-Publishing Sequence

Your sequence would then be

Lulu next, for the free ISBN and also to produce the print version. (You can edit the PDF as well as the epub file.)
Then Amazon. Having your print book ready at the time (or close) when you post your ebook will boost sales. (But regardless of that, you can crank out porting your ebooks everywhere meanwhile.)
Next would be iTunes, Nook, Google Play.
Then Kobo.

And of course, you store the data into Calibre as you develop it.

The marketing begins at that point. When you have a video at the outset (or you can do it now), you’ll be way ahead. Podcasts would then be available.

You also put up an opt-in form with an ecourse. Those PDF’s also go to the doc-sharing sites.

About now, you set up your release-launch sequence. A series of video’s could also be excerpted for video sites, as well as added as extras on Leanpub and also iAmplify – where you could get extra income.

Note that you can fire up your Affiliates on both Leanpub and iAmplify as part of your launch.

If you want the more data on book launches and publishing, get this bundle…

I wrote up the research on running a book launch in the latest update of “Just Publish! Ebook Creation for Indie Authors” – while it’s full implementation into an ongoing publishing strategy (using Leanpub and 6 other main distributors) is found in “Publish. Profit. Independence.”

~~These two are bundled together on Leanpub just for you. Contact me via Leanpub and let me know what you think.~~

(As below, my earlier books and bundles have been removed from Leanpub as I published too many (more than zero) public domain books there. Until I can get these up on other platforms, the links are gone.)

– – – –

Update: Getting Leanpub into the production line-up has improved quality and speed. Proofing is much faster and easier with PDF previews and Markdown editing with simple text editor. The file Leanpub produces is already epubchecked, so there isn’t any need to export via a Writer2Epub plug-in and then using Sigil and Calibre editor to clean it up. Much less complicated.

This strategy as laid out has proven itself. Nice to have a test succeed.

Update 2: Leanpub suspended me for “copyright violations” (public domain books.) Love affair is definitely over. Warning: Do original works only there.

Posted in Dropbox, GooglePlay, iTunes, LeanPub, LibreOffice, Nook, publish, YouTube | Leave a comment

Leanpub Shows Their TImidity – Accepts Original Works Only.

Posted on July 6, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Leanpub does great at publishing original works - won't let you do public domain, through.

(Logo property of Leanpub as trademark.)

Just got suspended for “copyright violations” from Leanpub (on one account, anyway.)

Means they don’t like public domain books.

Scratch them from anything except original books. Which means they’re in the same category as Scribd and Smashwords: “Dead End – Avoid.”

And I now have to review/delete a lot of stuff from the book I was writing on how to publish and make your financial freedom with a home-publishing business (- as it was centered on public domain and PLR works.)

The only real route for public domain self-publishing (not original works) is the old one:

1. Build your book in LibreOffice, create your ebook in Writer2Epub, then proof using Calibre’s editor and Sigil.

2. Publish through Lulu first, but don’t distribute there. Get the free ISBN. Publish your hardcopy books there, so they can be matched up on .

3. Using a MAC, publish directly to iTunes. With or without a MAC, publish to Nook, GooglePlay, Amazon, and Kobo.

4. Nobody else is really useful at this point. The rest simply avoid public domain books like they are plague-ridden.

5. iAmplify is probably the only way to “bundle” anything, and they don’t do epubs, just PDF’s. You have to have a video, which can be a book trailer. They have a decent affiliate program, but you can also use JVZoo or PayDotCom, even Clickbank for this.

Too bad Leanpub is being so conservative. Means I lost about a week trying to publish there as a test. Like many, they seem to consider that public domain books have a lot of risks connected with them. (Too bad, though – Leanpub otherwise has a great model for self-publishing.)

So, screw Leanpub. Like Smashwords, Lulu, and Kobo – they are all too uptight about the public domain scene to spend (much) time on.

(Sigh.)

There are now just 5 distributors worth any investment of time. The rest, frankly, suck. (And Kobo working its way to that other list quickly…)

Of course, that’s if you’re trying to earn a living with public domain and PLR books. If you want to sit down and crank out tons of original content, just get them up on Leanpub, then push through Lulu as an aggregator. Lastly, port them to GooglePlay. Spend most of your time writing and sending emails to your audience.

For public domain, use Lulu only for the ISBN and hardcopy versions. Itunes, Nook, Amazon, GooglePlay, and Kobo are all published to directly. So there’s only 6. (OverDrive hasn’t answered back, so I presume they are not taking indie publisher submissions at this time.) Five main distributors, really.

Hope you have better results than I have. Wish I’d been suspended a few days ago instead of wasting a whole week. But that’s life.

Posted in iTunes, kobo, LibreOffice, lulu, Nook, OverDrive, public domain, Smashword | Leave a comment

Choosing Your eBook Package Distributor – A Review

Posted on July 10, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Distribly vs. JVZoo vs. BlueSnap vs. DigiResults vs. MyCommerce, etc.

Lots of sexy choices between able affiliates - for ebook publishing

(Your choice of dancing affiliates…)

When Leanpub showed me they weren’t publishing anything but original works, I was left finding other options for creating binders and packages – as well as getting affiliates to sell your books for you.

As I noted, the major ebook distributors don’t have any option like this. Even their “boxed sets” are simply multiple books packaged into one big ebook.

People want entire series or sets of books. And in various formats. Packages are a logical and necessary step in any ebook marketing.

This really brings us to Internet marketers who have been dealing with digital products well before the ebook formats took over book publishing.

I’d pretty much settled on Distribly, but still had a nagging question, so did this review to compare what the other possible options could be.

How to Pick a Digital Distributor

We want to follow the same tenets that set us up for successful (and profitable) ebook publishing:

Start from scratch (or less) – using only online resources with no required upfront fees.
Work smart, not hard – build your package once and leverage it as far as you can.

This means that these distributors should also follow the ebook publishing model, where the hosting is on them. There should be no reason to have to set up special hosting for digital downloads – which is additional monthly expense.

We also want to have integrated affiliate capabilities to enable your audience to become evangelists for your book packages.

The candidates:
All these host files and have affiliate capabilities.

Clickbank – Alexa Rank: 280 – cost: numerous fees
JVZoo – Alexa Rank: 309 – cost: 5% of sales
e-Junkie – Alexa Rank: 1999 – cost: $5 per month for up to 10 products
MyCommerce – Alexa: 10069 – cost: 2.9% + $1
Payloadz – Alexa: 13506 – cost: Basic – 20%, Premium – $14.95/mo. and 4.89% + .49
DigiResults – Alexa:21467 – cost: 7.5% + .25 or 5% + .50
BlueSnap – Alexa: 22206 – cost: “as low as 2.9% + .30”
Distribly – Alexa: 460281 – cost: 10%, reducing on volume
Scubbly – Alexa: 711525 – cost: 5% + .30

Discussion:

I’ve included the Alexa traffic rank so you can see what kind of leverage these sites will bring to you. This drops out Scubbly, since you’d essentially have to be bringing your own traffic to them to get sales (and they don’t pay you for 45 days.) Distribly stays in, simply because it is so simple to use – but with their higher fees, this is offset by the fact that their reviews integrate with Google search – plus they have instant payments to both you and your affiliates.

Anything with a monthly cost drops out, or a hosting cost of any kind. Like ebook distributors, they should be free to use and then paid from sales. There is simply no sense in paying for something which may never earn enough back in return.

So, Clickbank and e-Junkie drop out, as well as Payloadz.

The short list is then:
JVZoo, MyCommerce, DigiResults, BlueSnap, and Distribly.

How to use Digital Product Distributors

There are some possibility of interlinking these (DigiResults and JVZoo) but that actually just gives us a better idea on how to put them to use. We don’t need the extra work, but can leverage that same idea.

Like ebooks, this gives us the Lowest Common Denominator approach.

You make a package and compress it into a ZIP file. This would be a series of books in multiple formats, plus video clips, extra PDF files, etc.
Then import this into Calibre as a ZIP file, and write your description there.
Post this to each in turn, working out the sequence of greatest meta-data to least – copy/paste from Calibre.

Simple – like ebook publishing. Same model. It just follows on the heels of your batch publishing.

And you can make several sets up – one for each book with extra’s, then a package of the whole series.

You’ll batch post the ebooks themselves, and then batch post their packages. Much like the ebooks, you’d post logos for each vendor on the book’s landing page so that they had their choice of where to get the package – or sign up as an affiliate. You may also decide to simply make a landing page for the package and link from each ebook landing page to that one.

The point in reverse is to engage the already-existing affiliates on these sites to sell your packages of books for you. Each digital distributor above has their own set of affiliates, much as the ebook distributors have their own regular users. By getting on as many of these as possible, you leave the least money on the table while getting the best discovery you can.

End Result – More Eyeballs, More Profit

This follows the More Eyeballs theory of ebook sales. In this case, we are also reaching out to professional affiliate salespeople.

In each of these five sites, you’ll find various opportunities for special offers in addition to just a series of packages for sale. On some sites, you can give special percentages for a select group of JV affiliates.

Once you build a mailing list of some trusted affiliated associates, you’ll then be able to leverage ebook launches with pre-sale dates and so on.

What we’ve done by searching down this line is to line up a marketing base for you which will leverage those books into a much higher income range. As well, it will drive people to buy your Amazon versions.

Some of these also have physical fulfillment capabilities. This brings in Kunaki for DVD’s and perhaps Lulu or other POD delivery options – if they’ll drop-ship for you.

It’s now up to you to make a fortune with your book – over and above simply getting financial freedom. It also means that you can potentially out-source your marketing so you can concentrate on more ebooks and more binders/packages for sale.

Good Hunting!

Posted in amazon, Amazon.com, Clickbank, iTunes, Lowest common denominator, lulu, Portable Document Format, publish | Leave a comment

How to Publish Your eBook Bundle on BitTorrent

Posted on July 23, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Direct-to-fan publishing is possible by BitTorrent bundles.

(photo: blog.bittorrent.com)

You can publish your own BitTorrent eBook bundles and here’s how…

There are numerous benefits to getting bundles up and online. In most cases, authors are only seeing bundles as additional profit-makers.

Tim Ferris was one of the first to work this route – as I covered here.

It was because he chose an Amazon-owned publisher instead of Lulu or some other organization. That led to a boycott of his books by numerous booksellers. His solution was to use BitTorrent to distribute a torrent which contained additional materials which supported the book and gave a few hints of what could be found inside. Of course it was free.

What BitTorrent is up to now is to create a paywall, which would finance artists in their work. That project is still in alpha at this point.

The promotional bundles have seen over 60M downloads since it was opened in 2013. There’s a Slideshare overview of the process here.

You can now at least take advantage of BitTorrent’s wide appeal to a new audience. That’s the multiple-eyeballs theory of marketing at work.

How to create your BitTorrent bundle

Of course, you have to sign up first. Visit http://bundles.bittorrent.com/publish. Only takes an verified email. Simple.

Their User Interface is quite simple and direct. Their instructions:

Step 1: Create a title & description

Title and your publisher name are how users identify your Bundle. Describe important details in one or two short paragraphs.

Step 2: Upload your cover art

Click upload to open the image file picker. Using the recommended size for the images will ensure that your landing page looks great.

Step 3: Add your content

To ensure your Bundle works in all browsers we recommend these files formats: jpg, png, gif, mp4, mp3.

Step 4: Add an email unlock

Check the box to Turn on Email Unlock for some files.
Drag the Email Required To Download header above any files you want users to unlock.
To preview your bundle, click the Save & Preview button.
If everything looks good, go ahead and click the Publish button!

It’s all pretty much drag-and-drop for your files – and up to you to create the title (which is limited to 36 characters) and your description (which is unknown, practically unlimited – but good copy never needs to be that long.)

You also have a background image to insert as well, a nicety.

And some of the other features is that you can add in a link to the site, your Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube links. Also, you can directly link to get it sold on iTunes and Googleplay.

This means for any individual book or series, this is an added distributor. (Put this one right between Kobo and your affiliate sales packages/binders. Reason being is that it’s a shift to creating and including more materials other than simply publishing single books.)

Once you have your files uploaded, you hit publish – and then get an “Are You Sure?” notice – that you aren’t going to be able to re-edit these files once you publish them.

You won’t be able to change the files or their order in your bundle once you publish, so make sure it’s exactly how you want it. You can change the title, description, and images at any time.

So you want to make sure all the parts of any bundle are exactly as you want them – the only way to remove content is to cancel the bundle and then re-create it. (Been there, done that…)

When you visit that BitTorrent link for any bundle, you’ll be able to see all the free material in their viewer. Images come right up, and PDF’s are given a 4-page sample. The email paygate gives you permission to download the torrent file, then you are able to see 5 pages of the PDF online through their viewer. The viewer evidently only needs to download the individual files they want.

That covers how to build your promotional bundles. It doesn’t replace the other research on how to get paying bundles up on affiliate sales platforms.

Obviously, you’d include an HTML or PDF file in every promotional bundle which would tell them how to get your other books. All the links to the various distributors and any affiliate sales platform you are using.

Here’s an example of the test bundle created for “Masters of Marketing Secrets” series.

[Update: While you can view PDF’s online through their online interface, .epubs and .mobi can only be downloaded and views. Code Alert – Meanwhile, there’s something to do with setting up links – the trick is to add target=”_blank” to your http link. Which means for this bundle, I’ll later make the links to ebook distributors all live where they have a page for that series. Nice. It’s also recommended you use a link-shortener with tracking.]
[Update2: Seeing Amazon images on other BitTorrent bundles, I checked the code – you can add externally hosted images (img src=), as well as alt and title tags – key to SEO, since they already add nofollow tags. Still playing with this. Limited documentation is found here. You then then use the various promo tools which provide an image with them. Not so obvious would be to create bundles/packages of your book series and post them to affiliate sites, then promote by BitTorrent bundle. This of course leads to more work on enabling affiliate sales…]

Posted in bittorrrent, ebook, marketing, promotion, publishing | Leave a comment

The “News” in Self-Publishing is all DIY, not “done-for-you”.

Posted on August 7, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Self-Publishing is the new model which is far more profitable than traditional-publishing lock-step hobbles.

Quit being hobbled by traditional publishing - self-publish your books and earn more income.

(photo: eXtensionHorses)

Hobbles are used on animals to keep them from wandering. They’re usually put on the (front) feet and are uncomfortable.

The model for traditional (legacy) publishing similarly limited the independent author, in many ways.

Because books had to be printed before they were sold, and the only profit was in huge print-runs, only a few books could be selected which would seem to be able to pay back at least the cost of printing. Statistically, about 1 in 10 of the publisher’s selections would pay enough to cover the losses from the other 9, plus make a profit.

With Print-on-demand, and ebooks, this model is completely reversed.

Now the market decides what is a good book and what will sell.

I recently ran into this with Amazon. My trade paperback version of an ebook I edited together was being promoted as “only 5 left!” But what they didn’t say is that they’d order another short run if they needed, and a larger run if it sold well. Because the book was only printed on demand, not in advance.

eBooks, of course, aren’t “printed” at all – so it’s a classic way to earn income without having to spend much more than a few hours of your own time.

This is what is the new “news” in publishing. When you get a traditional publisher, you are just tapping into their ability to set up a better cover, better proofing, and whatever existing distribution lines they have, plus promotion deals they might set up.

Frankly, the argument by Mark Coker of Smashwords and Marc Lefebvre of Kobo is that the indie authors do better pricing low and simply cranking out volumes of books in series (plus writing really long books.)

The surprising news is that the ebook distributors will take care of marketing your book with their own on-site algorithms. Each new book has it’s limited time in the sun – after that, it’s sales will depend on how well it was written.

Series of works come in when the reader wants to hear more about this character’s adventures. Non-fiction books can be bundles of several different authors (such as the Masters of Marketing Secrets series – about copywriting.)

Let the market decide – don’t second-guess.

One fact which showed up in the recent studies about copywriting is the common “conventional wisdom” that you can “create demand” for any product or service. Gene Schwartz was clearest in his “Breakthrough Advertising” (long out of print) where he stated that desires are eternal – you simply align your product to the most powerful desire you can. There is no such thing as creating demand. Demand already exists, depending on the maturity of the market and how many also-rans are present (ie. “competition”).

Your marketing (copywriting) only aligns the perception of your product with an existing desire (demand). The better your copywriting/marketing, the greater the “discovery” – and the better your product, the more a user/viewer/consumer will tell others how it helped them.

That is really the core of how marketing works.

Is there any real need for traditional publishing any more?

Probably not.

I’d say that there is a need for marketers who can create campaigns to launch new books and re-launch book series, that these small companies could provide the service of publishing an author’s books for them.

Those companies don’t even have to be physically located in New York on Publishing Row. They don’t even have to be located in a city or town. They don’t need much for office space (a spare bedroom or den will do.)

They do have to build an online presence, but their growth is more dependent on their quality of delivery than any physical condition of existence.

Practically, a well-run publishing business can run rings around any of the “Big Five” publishers, because they simply don’t have the overhead.

How and Where to Publish as a SOHO Publisher

(Small Office/Home Office – as different from Lower Manhattan)

Rather than where you’re located (physical), it’s where you publish (virtual.)

The “Amazon-centric” strategy is using their KDP-exclusivity, backed by a hardcopy version (which would be Create-Space) and an Audible (exclusive) audiobook – all having the same cover. This is putting all your eggs in one basket, but has the highest profits possible (providing you can get your book to sell at all.)

The “Everywhere else, also” strategy says to get your ebook up on iTunes, Nook, GooglePlay, and Kobo, while matching this with a Lulu paperback and an Audible audiobook. You are still on Amazon, just not exclusively.

The “And Then Some” strategy has you branching out with bundles which you offer on affiliate sales platforms. In this case, you offer digital versions of the entire series, plus audiobooks (you are now not exclusively on Audible, or create a different version just for these.) This also has you getting accepted by OverDrive as part of their Content Reserve program – which can push you into libraries and other retailers where Amazon might not be as welcome.

Note: the SOHO publisher, with dozens, if not hundreds of titles to publish, can leverage the OverDrive connection – which a self-published indie author and his handful of titles cannot. The SOHO publisher also has the economies of scale – having already published that many titles, it’s relatively easy to publish the half-dozen books an indie author will bring their way.

How a SOHO publisher is profitable

In any Gold Rush, the people who made the most money sold picks, shovels, pans, and jeans to the miners. You have to realize in publishing that most books don’t sell well, if at all. Period. Striking a good vein is more than luck – it’s hard work that the author has to do in honing his craft. Good books continue to sell well. Poor books fill up Amazon’s database.

For a writer to make it with original works, they have to stick at writing for a few years, and concentrate on simply creating the best possible books they can. Amanda Hocking became a million-selling (and millionaire) author after she had already written 17 books and started self-publishing. Once she got popular, she got a traditional publishing contract which allowed her to concentrate on just writing.

What an indie author needs is someone who will publish their books for them, and take a piece of the royalties for a certain time period (say, 5 years) with a low up-front fee to cover costs. The SOHO publisher then is interested in the various marketing campaigns (again, mostly online) which will then get that book to sell.

The author doesn’t have to worry about sales. They need to concentrate on their day job to pay their bills, while spending all their free time in writing and improving their craft. They hire the SOHO publisher to do the background work of publishing (proofing, cover, pushing to distributors, creating bundles) so that author can simply concentrate on the two things they need to worry about.

Once their books start to sell enough to support their lifestyle, then the author can renegotiate the contract for royalties. Where the SOHO publisher is doing their job well, they’ll keep that contract going and be able to concentrate more effort into expanding whatever marketing they have going to further increase sales. Win for the indie author, win for the indie SOHO publisher.

The SOHO publisher is affordable, as they take a much smaller percentage of royalties than the traditional publishers have. The author would end up with probably about 50% – 60%, compared to about 25-30% in the traditional-legacy publishing scene.

What’s missing is the advance on royalty. (Like the $15 million Hillary just got which the publisher is preparing to write off as a loss.)

The indie author pays someone else to do the self-publishing work he/she could be doing on their own. Getting a SOHO publisher to take that drudgery off their lines would enable them to concentrate just on writing.

How this is better than Vanity Publishing

The old days (and these slick operators still exist) had the author shelling out a small fortune and would wind up with a stack of books delivered to their home which they then had to sell. Thoreau did this, but also Wil Wheaton caught this bug.

The modern days says you go virtual. Get print-on-demand for your print books, while the ebook is out there forever. Invest the profits from these into producing an audiobook and leverage your original content into greater income.

The author in this case pays someone to line up proofing and cover artwork, then to do the detailed work of publishing to the various online distributors. As well, the author doesn’t have to learn how to publish their own book, or how to market online – but simply can keep to the craft and job of writing.

Vanity publishing gave you a stack of books. SOHO publishing gives the author more freedom to be creative.

The vanity publisher was paid for short-run publishing. The SOHO publisher is paid for the effectiveness of knowing and executing online marketing.

Of the two, the SOHO publisher has less overhead and so a much greater opportunity for profit. Entry-level costs are much lower than any vanity press, but with the right contract, will then be able to ensure future profits while being creative in a different realm of marketing.

Your choice, as always. Stay hobbled or get free to roam.

How to get more information

I operate my own home-publishing business. I don’t take new clients currently. But you can learn how to publish on your own (or learn what your publisher should know) with my book:

Publish. Profit. Independence.

Home pubilshing business guide - earn extra income and financial freedom by publishing on your own.

Available everywhere fine books are sold. ( More links coming soon…)

And do sign up on the upper right so you get the latest installments of this blog.

Posted in amazon, Amazon.com, GooglePlay, iTunes, kobo, lulu, OverDrive, paperback, publish, publishing, writers | Leave a comment

The Copywriting Classics Publishing Post-Mortem

Posted on August 12, 2014 by Robert Worstell


(photo: School of Veterinary Medicine)

Racking up a queue of public domain classics for publishing, does seem like an hygienic assembly line at times.

This post-mortem is a critique of what went well and could be improved on this latest batch of books.

Mission Creep

It started out with probably 6 or 7 books which were really the backbone to this study. I was studying copywriting, and soon found out that most people didn’t have a clue what they were doing. The basics had been known since the 1920’s and most of the “guru’s” since then were simply working on trite third-hand formula’s. The real “greats” of this industry had actually studied these old books and referred to them as their own mentors.

By the end of this cycle, I published a dozen books on marketing and three more of my own (two of which were ready to go and these copywriting books had set them aside. The third was a book on publishing public domain books – which study grew as I created this set.

As I edited and prepared these texts, I found I needed to include books on salesmanship, since the old adage held true, that: “Advertising is Salesmanship in Print.” I already had one great book, but went to find more – particularly Wheeler’s works. Dale Carnegie‘s classic “How to Win Friends…” came up as particularly effective for salespeople. So I added it as well.

Two other books showed up – small fiction pieces, “Obvious Adams” and “Breezy” – as a form of giveaway, but also as illustration how the whole system fit together to get sales.

In most cases, you won’t get into this – as you are republishing classics based on their sales. However, when you are researching a new field, get your huge list of books set from the outgo.

Binders

This was also added to as I evolved my publishing methods as I went.

I resolved to get back into adding public domain books on Amazon, so this series was used as a test. In the middle of this, I found that both Kobo and Lulu were clamping down on public domain, so I would need to publish to iTunes and Nook directly. Adding these to Amazon seemed another logical extension. So my porting to distributors was a bit start-and-stop. Even today, I don’t know if I go all the books everywhere, since more were added as I went.

By the time I got to Amazon, it seemed that binders (aka: collections, box sets, series) were a very sensible approach to getting books up and on Amazon. But the end result with that Godzilla was that if your book is primarily public domain content, you need to only take the 35% royalty. (Much as Kobo’s mandatory 20%.)

Also binders on BitTorrent as promotion became very sensible, as they evolved this scene. I’m now collecting notes on my marketing, which will evolve into a third book on ebook self-publishing once it get more into the meat of this and flesh it out a bit more. (That is another story for another time.)

Assembly-line basics.

In my recently published “Publish . Profit. Independence.” I cover getting your public-domain publishing sequences right.

Select a series based on potential sales.
Set up a folder for all the files needed for each book into an overall folder for that series. (You’ll need some sort of shared folder to get them to the MAC for iTunes publishing.)
Edit these individually into shape, taking care to verify each book as truly public domain (note the first-published date and date author died for each, probably best in Calibre – Amazon may want to know.)
Get the covers done.
Create the PDF files and publish hardcopy versions through Lulu for wide distribution through those channels. Get a proof copy of each and approve when you have any errors corrected.
Ensure you have all the meta-data corrected and set up in Calibre, including both ISBN’s for ebook and print book. Descriptions, BISAC codes, everything.

In porting to distributors, it seems simplest to just follow your series in Calibre for each of these books. Take one distributor and publish everything to that outlet. Then take the next outlet, etc. (Do as I say, not as I’ve done.)

Again: plan your work, work your plan.

Part of this plan is working out what will be the giveaway or intro books to this series. Another is what binders/collections you’ll be creating. The key limit is how many print pages will result, as Lulu will only go up to about 800. You want the binder to link to the print book, as this gives you additional search engine mojo with several authors for each binder/collection. (Of course, fiction by a single author would be different. Still, some people look by title, so you have these in your description.)

Marketing starts once the publishing is done.

All of these distributors now allow pre-sales. Getting everything published complicates this a bit, but only to the degree you allow mission creep. Stick to a precise set of books and then add more later.

There is as much or more to do with marketing than there is in editing the book into shape.

And on the business end, this is where you would actually start with your SOHO publishing business. An organized individual can market faster and more effectively than any tradition-bound publishing house. And the remaining vanity presses don’t market at all – they really only print you up a bunch and ship them wherever you want.

As I said above, I’ll get into marketing as I get there. So this was completely omitted from the Copywriting Series, other than a single BitTorrent bundle, which has actually given me a little site traffic.

Which brings us to landing pages for each book.

You build these as you go along in your editing, especially when you have a cover, so they have a bit of age to them by the time you finish publishing everywhere.

The reason for this is to have somewhere for search engines to go when you need to give more data. GooglePlay is the best at this (and you can send them directly to your high-royalty Lulu checkout link from there as well.) Anything Google will just help you rank better.

What was fascinating here was to update my spreadsheet which generates ISBN-based links to every major distributor. Amazon uses an older version of this (10 digits instead of 13) for print versions, but obstinately only gives you an ASIN for digital ones – you can’t search like everywhere else.

Having the print versions also opened the door for hardcopy affiliate sales, particularly Powell’s and Indiebound. The rest either have some unique code you have to generate for every single book. Which can be done, but is a complete pain – a dozen books with almost as many distributors = 140 links to generate.

One spreadsheet with two dozen ISBNs (two per book) and you have all the links generated as you need them. Much simpler. (iTunes does give you a script to put at the footer of your page to convert any links to affiliate sales.)

The key income you are getting is from distributor sales, not personally generated affiliate sales, so it’s not something to lose sleep over.

There are also substantial extra marketing you can do via iTunes, Amazon, and Nook – you can also set up specials via Google Play that run for a certain time. But I’ll get into all this marketing later. Right now, building a huge backbench is my business plan. Between now and then, the stats continue to generate and tell me which are my bestsellers which deserve the marketing investment.

Practice makes Permanent

The more you do at this, the better and faster you can do it.

As I said (and cover in my Publish. Profit. Independence.) – I found I made more money publishing other people’s works, even with no marketing – than I did on my own.

The more you publish, the easier it gets. I’m way over 150 by now, with some 400 iterations of various titles available on Lulu.)

This is all passive income, which is taxed the least and is the most profitable. The books I publish now will generate income from here on out (other than a massive solar flare wrecking the Internet for a short while.)

So I’m currently concentrating on getting an even deeper backbench built so this income can be leveraged with marketing as I go. While only a handful of books sell extremely well, others barely sell – but all sales are income, even the 99-cent specials.

As you get several batches done, the process gets much simpler. It becomes so easy to publish, it seems a drag to have to market at all. But that is just an attitude which is leaving money on the table.

Once I have a few of these mega-projects wrapped up (which should result in about 4-500 individual titles published on 6 distributors) then I’ll be able to analyze the couple or three years of sales meanwhile to select which need to be marketed first – then simply work these up as an assembly line on their own.

This post is already too long, so we’ll leave it at that. Backbench first, then improve discovery (increase eyeballs) and finally getting into the social signals via trustworthy marketing. Again, this is a cryptic note as the whole cycle will result in a final book for the SOHO publisher.

Summary

Plan your work, work your plan.
Publish in batches.
Leverage everything you can.
KISS.

Posted in amazon, Calibre, Dale Carnegie, google, iTunes, lulu, public domain, publish | Leave a comment

New release: How to Earn Extra Income Through Your SOHO Publishing Business

Posted on August 12, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Publish. Profit. Independence.

Find independence and financial freedom from one of the simplest home businesses you can start from scratch – or less… Learn Tips and Tricks to make self-publishing pay well.

I fell into this by accident. There I was writing away, only to find that I made more money publishing other people’s stuff than I did with my own.

This journey led me into working out the details and shortcuts which made it all simple. Meanwhile, I started making enough income to cover all my bills. Surprise, surprise.

I had stumbled into financial freedom by publishing from home.

Since I just write how-to manuals (beyond my attempts at novels) you get the benefits in this:

How publishing books help you earn recurring income from work you do just once.
Simple ways to have the freedom you never get from working for someone else.
Find peace of mind by becoming your own boss.
Discover the joy of only working with bestselling authors – who are now working for you.
Literally make money while you sleep in countries you’ve never visited – from people you’ve never met before.
Meanwhile, your life is your own.
Earn more income by building a larger audience.

Get Your Own Copy Today!

Now on Amazon and everywhere else as well:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/isbn9781312403574

Trade paperback (6″x9″, 442 pages) available on Lulu and soon on Amazon and all brick-and-mortar bookstores:

Posted in amazon, Amazon.com, iTunes, LibreOffice, lulu, Nook, public domain, publish, SOHO | Leave a comment

How to Game Amazon at Their Public Domain Publishing.

Posted on August 14, 2014 by Robert Worstell

Using a Binder to get around Amazon's Public Domain self-publishing policies.

(photo: aktivioslo)

Winning the self-publishing race can mean gaming the Publishing Godzilla.

(Meaning: you can get around Amazon’s Public Domain policies and still be legal in your agreements with them.)

You might have peculiar books which Amazon will query, but everyone else will readily accept. So how to get them published in spite of being blocked for no good reason?

This is Advanced Binder Marketing Theory. And it can bring you extra earned income.

You’ll only seem to get in trouble when the distributor won’t accept them. Amazon may do this on their own whim, by asking you to prove the date it was first published and the author’s date of death. They don’t check on every single PD book you publish. (My tests have shown it to be about half.) Just give them what they want, as I’ve covered elsewhere. Your books are a little delayed, but they get approved if you do only submit public domain books and can prove it.

They can also simply block any binder which contains a certain book – which is giving them trouble for some other reason, and they don’t want any more copies, even though other distributors readily accept it. Perfectly valid public domain book – but they won’t take it under any circumstances. This situation is where the “gaming” comes in.

There is a simple solution to get around any already-flagged PD book you have – a book which acceptable everywhere else, but not Amazon.

The workaround is actually all within your existing tools:

Give Amazon the binder they want – and meanwhile give all other distributors the one they want.

The Lemonade Solution to Lemons

Binders give you the solution to this. Binders have multiple books in a series – and you match these with a hardcopy version, perhaps even an audiobook series.

As much as I don’t like doing this – you simply create an original version of the book which is questionable, such as creating a book review to take it’s place. Just substitute that new original book for that one in your series that you send to Amazon. You create one binder version for everywhere else, and one special version specifically for Amazon.

While you have to do the work, it’s probably that you get to know that particular book even better. (There’s discussion here about simply substituting an entirely different book – but you want the Amazon binder to be as close to the hardcopy binder as possible, so your readers are delighted with the extra/bonus content in the hardcopy, not disappointed.)

Why binders? Because the distributors love these – because binders have great intrinsic value.

Of course, I also wouldn’t suggest trying to send the flagged lemon-book to any other Amazon-owned company like CreateSpace or Audible. Same reason: internally, they flagged it for a reason – don’t tempt fate. Hardcopies published through Lulu are different – but again, your agreement with Lulu says you own and control the rights. (Making lemonade isn’t advised in self-publishing – except when Amazon is giving you the lemon. Make sure you stay legal in publishing only bona fide, provable public domain works – not “gray area” orphans where no one is defending that copyright. Eventually, such purposeful strategies can bite you back.)

Again, nowhere else (except maybe Kobo – which exacts its own “pound of flesh”) really cares that much about this public domain area to that amount of detail.

How to earn Lemonade Income

The advantage of trying to get around Amazon is in selling your other book versions.

Binders represented by the same cover and title – but having more in the hardcopy than the ebook – will add value to these books.
Your ebook sells your hardcopy version.
As well, your audiobook can be sold as a binder. You’ll then have a set and an added income source.

While I don’t mention this lightly (having to make a distributor-centric version is the main reason I don’t publish to Smashwords, besides their finicky Meatgrinder) – having your book up on Amazon can bring you added income, particularly with the hardcopy and audio versions also available and linked together.

This is again, a binder approach at publishing, not just a single book.

This works out because the other binders also point to your binder-hardcopy and make you additional sales. My own limited experience with this is that you get more hardcopy sales through Amazon with matching binders (cover, title, description) but audiobooks do well giving added income.

You’re after the total income-increasing effect of multiple published versions.

All the distributors love binders. Search engines love binders.

The other distributors are given the binder-product you originally wanted to publish. This approach allows you to have several types of cake to eat at the same time.

And lemon-cake can be very tasty…

[Update: Found that the PD book Amazon had rejected – which started this research – was actually under an unknown renewed copyright, so they rightfully flagged and blocked that book as well as the binder it contained. Oops. So I took it down everywhere. Lesson learned.]

Posted in amazon, Amazon.com, iTunes, kobo, lulu, public domain, publish, Smashword | Leave a comment

Making Sense of Amazon’s Public Domain Policies

Posted on August 17, 2014 by Robert Worstell

When the same policies get different results – it makes you wonder…

(Two McCoy’s… photo: JD Hancock)

We start with very simple Amazon policies regarding Public Domain (PD) books:

In order to provide a better customer buying experience, our policy is to not publish undifferentiated versions of public domain titles where a free version is available in our store. We consider works to be differentiated when one or more of the following criteria are met:

• (Translated) – A unique translation
• (Annotated) – Contains annotations (unique, hand-crafted additional content including study guides, literary critiques, detailed biographies, or detailed historical context)
• (Illustrated) – Includes 10 or more unique illustrations relevant to the book

Books that meet this criteria must include (Translated), (Annotated), or (Illustrated) in the title field.

For example, “Pride and Prejudice (Annotated)” is acceptable, while “Pride and Prejudice (with an Introduction by Tiffany Gordon)” is not. The product description must also include a summary of how the book is unique in bullet point format at the beginning of the product description (maximum 80 characters).

And also this policy:

Public Domain and Other Non-Exclusive Content Some types of content, such as public domain content, may be free to use by anyone, or may be licensed for use by more than one party. We will not accept content that is freely available on the web unless you are the copyright owner of that content. For example, if you received your book content from a source that allows you and others to re-distribute it, and the content is freely available on the web, we will not accept it for sale on the Kindle store. We do accept public domain content, however we may choose to not sell a public domain book if its content is undifferentiated or barely differentiated from one or more other books.

Then there is policy concerning confirming content rights:

During the title upload process there are two areas where you will be asked to confirm your rights to publish your content.

You can publish content that is in the public domain. We may request additional documentation to confirm that it is not under copyright. Titles which consist entirely or primarily of public domain content are not eligible for the 70% royalty option at this time (see the Pricing Page for more details).

A Test of Amazon Public Domain Publishing

Earlier, I avoided Amazon because at the time they had just started publishing public domain again, after having banned those books for awhile. The policy wasn’t exact, and what was there meant I would have to create special books just for Amazon – so I skipped them and worked on publishing via Lulu to iTunes and Nook, direct to Kobo and later Google Play. I made money on all of them with tests in both PLR (Private Label Rights) and PD books . (Amazon doesn’t accept PLR.)

When Lulu started distributing to Amazon and Kobo, they stopped distributing Public Domain books (~~but will still distribute PLR.~~) Since I had to start publishing directly to iTunes and Nook, Amazon came back on the radar. As well, a book I’d published there a couple of years ago went number 1 in it’s category and started giving me substantial extra income once it hit the algorithms just right (and got a lot of great reviews – an Amazon-only foible.)

The test

I was doing research on copywriting classics. This wound up with 12 books which were all public domain editions. In order to make them work under the policies above, I added a selection of essays to each one – same set for each book. In that way, they’d be annotated – which takes much less time than finding images for each book which are appropriate and original.

In the middle of this, I ran into the concept that it’s actually a problem they have in differentiation – they want unique books. Because there are a handful of public domain books which are huge bestsellers that everyone wants to publish. Amazon simply doesn’t need more versions of these. They’ve already got tons.

The other interesting facet is that they will bring in reviews from other versions of the same book. So when you publish a public domain book, you’ll get instant reviews and share the sales which have already developed there. Another reason they don’t need more versions of these bestsellers.

So I made roughly half of these PD books “annotated” and the others mostly had different titles than the original. This was to test this differentiation theory. I was fully prepared to take a lower percentage.

Out of a dozen books, One got blocked right off. Three others were queried. The other 8 were approved right off.

The blocked one was Dale Carnegie‘s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” The exact reject quote was: “In order to provide a better customer buying experience, we’ve stopped accepting and selling undifferentiated or barely differentiated versions of book content previously published in the catalog even if the title, author, and other metadata for new versions may be unique.”

[Update: It was found that the Carnegie book was actually under copyright as it had been renewed – although some questions remain, Amazon was right to block it – even if they gave me some odd reply.]

The three queried books came back with various requests:

To publish your book, please respond with documentation confirming your publishing rights within five days:
Acceptable documentation includes:
– A contract or statement from the author or publisher verifying you retain publishing rights
– An e-mail from the address listed on the official author or agent’s website
– For authors using a pseudonym, copyright registration or statement of pseudonym use.

To verify public domain status please provide the following:
1. A URL that includes all authors and translators (if applicable) and their dates of death
2. A URL that includes the initial publication date of the work.

1. If you hold the publishing rights for this book, please resubmit your book for publishing following the instructions provided below.
2. If the book is in the public domain, please confirm the initial publication date of the work and the author’s date of death. We will contact you if we need additional information.
3. If you do not hold the rights for this book, please remove your book following the instructions provided below.

Two got the same reject in one email. One required several goes at this. You can see that these are cut/paste responses.

Test Results:

As covered, eight got approved immediately. Over the next three days, the other three were also approved.

Only one of the three was “annotated.” The blocked book was also “annotated.” The annotation in each was the same.

But even though two of the non-“annotated” books were queried on the basis of being public domain, there was no instruction (as I’ve experienced on Kobo) to declare them as such. But per their agreement with you as a (self-)publisher, you have to declare them as such anyway – and take the lower percentage.

Just be prepared to have no reviews (and few if any sales) as you’ll be at the bottom of their algorithms.

The general idea that if you want to share reviews, you simply use the same author- and title-name – plus add (annotated) or (illustrated) to the title and a bullet point at the beginning of the description saying how you did.

If you don’t worry about the reviews, then rename it as something else.

But the real scene seems to be whether that particular public domain book is has some behind-the-scenes copyright/DMCA conflicts. (But the other distributors don’t have this problem, so be prepared to just move on.)

Workarounds

1. Rename it and have other ways to drive traffic to the book to get sales.
2. Annotate or Illustrate the book, title it as such.
3. Publish as boxed sets (binders/collections/series) and get multiple placements on Amazon’s search engine for author/title combinations. Box sets/Bundles/Collections/Series of public domain books are uniquely copyrighted as a set, so need no annotation or illustration. This seems the way to get around some of the public domain publishing problems on Amazon – and may actually be the best way to sell PD books by a single author or in a given genre.
4. Always have a web page around with the Author date of death and original publishing date for the book, plus any data such as the renewed copyright expiry. Then you can give them that link simply. A series page can have them all listed.

Upcoming Tests

Watch the sales (or lack thereof) and see how these perform.

I’ll shortly be porting a stack of public domain fiction books to Amazon and will let you know how these go. They’ll be showing up as both individual books and also binders. As these sell well on other platforms, getting them accepted on Amazon for sale should result in near-immediate additional income.

Update: Results are in… Binders of books are queried just as individual PD books are. One binder was blocked as it contained the same single PD book blocked above. It’s that particular book they have a problem – rightfully.

Summary

1. Be prepared for senseless rejects, but answer just what they need. If a book is blocked – move on to the next (and meanwhile you’re still publishing it everywhere else, right?) Unknown PD books don’t apparently get queried as much as the better known.
2. Always match up the ebook with a hardcopy version to max out your possible sales.
3. Always promote all the distributors you posted the book at – both ebook and hardcopy.
4. Either go for reviews with the existing name and share in the existing sales, or create binders and hope they sell well so you can get reviews. You’re competing with a commodity, so add value – you can’t compete on price as they are already available for free. Binders add value.

This is all the effort to profit from Amazon with public domain, but avoid their crap-shoot approach most original self-published books receive there. Once we get the breakthrough – which points to bundles (by any name) – we should be able to get popular sales to bring that package up the ranks.

The point to all this work is to get regular sales and leverage PD publishing for extra income. Nice work for a home business.

[Update: per their terms and conditions, “Books that consist primarily of public domain content are not eligible for the 70% Royalty Option.” So your options are a) to go the “annotated” route and b) create binders with the bestselling name/author as a “collection”. You can only claim 35% royalty on Amazon, so stick with the bestsellers. Or build a new book which is not primarily public domain. I’ll need to check out iTunes for this scene. GooglePlay doesn’t ask whether it’s public domain (and only gives a flat 52%, regardless. Nook doesn’t require you to declare it as public domain, but asks. Kobo does (and gives only 20% royalty.)]
[Update 2: This also means you can’t use KDP select. So make sure you publish your books as broadly as possible.]

Posted in American literature, Andrew Carnegie, book sales, Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, public domain, Self-help book | Leave a comment

Adding a New Distributor for Book Discovery

Posted on August 22, 2014 by Robert Worstell

More multiple eyeballs to add to your list of book-buying promotional outlets.

Adding to the list of Book-buyer promotional outlets with Open Library

(photo credit: Jackie)

Which means more discovery and more sales = more income.

Found it when I was chasing down a new series of books which had fallen in the cracks.

Actually, I’ve been stumbling on it for some time – over and over. Finally saw through my own fog.

Open Library (http://openlibrary.org)

An offshoot of the Internet Archive, this enables people to access an online lending library of ebooks, plus also buy the print version. It’s that last item we are interested in, of course.

You are the first to see this as another income source. I’ve not seen this come up anywhere else. It has the features of being able to offer free books and yet help people buy a copy of their own.

It seems straightforward, but takes a little work. You upload your ebook to Internet Archives – which at this writing makes it free (more research coming.)

From their help section:

I wrote a book, and I have it in digital form. Can I make it readable on Open Library?

Yes! It’s a three step process.

Create an account and upload your book to the Internet Archive (you will need to set up a second account to do this, you can’t log in with your Open Library credentials).

Create a record for your item on Open Library by clicking the Add A Book link in the header and adding the proper information.

Add the Internet Archive ID to the Open Library record in the ID Numbers section. To do this, click Edit to edit the record, scroll down to the ID Numbers section and add the Internet Archive identifier which is the last part of the URL. As an example for this book, the Internet Archive ID is historiaephilipp02just. Adding this link will activate the “read” buttons. Make sure you click “save” at the bottom of the page when you are done adding the link to the Internet Archive.

What’s fascinating is that you can add ID numbers from Amazon, Google, Lulu, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari – all sorts of places.

You can see from that short list above, that this is a nice way to promote the book. Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari – these connect your book to you as the author, and have author pages, etc.

This doesn’t help you if you don’t want to give your ebook away.

However, this is also a way to get your hardcopy versions sold.

For this test, I submitted a book which I had slated as a free promo anyway: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25616736M/Breezy

It’s not limited to giveaways

While I’m working on figuring how to only “loan” books, you can meanwhile promote your hardcopy editions through Open Library.

What this does is give more link-love to your booksellers. This the makes the search engines more likely to offer your books to searchers.

Oddly, I’d recommend a hybrid approach. Both ebook and hardcopy have distinct ISBN‘s.

Google’s ebook link will also offer the hardcopy versions.
Amazon.com giving an ebook version will also list the hardcopy versions.
Shelfari will bring up Amazon’s data, so this makes it simple.
LibraryThing and Goodreads have to be manually edited to make the book show up, so I have more research to do on how to get these showing up.
Many authors use Goodreads to communicate with their audience, so this is a probable site to include in promotion.

You will use the ebook to get hardcopy sales. If you have an option, the general rule is to use the ebook ISBN, unless it specifically asks for a hardcopy ISBN.

The probable sequence

This would be to do this as promotion immediately after your publishing to all the ebook distributors.

You already have all your meta-data in Calibre and this is open on your computer as part of the publishing sequence.
You set up all the distributors with their own browser tab for uploading your books.
Open Shelfari, LibraryThing, and Goodreads in additional browser tabs.
Last tab: open OpenLibrary.
(You published your hardcopy along with your ebook right?)
Of course, you link in your hardcopy with the ebook where you can. (Amazon is supposed to do this automatically – in a couple of weeks, they say.)
Amazon will take a couple of days (or maybe 24 hours, if you’re lucky) to clear – so enter your data, so you’re going to have to port your meta-data to Shelfari, LibraryThing, and Goodreads manually.
Once you’ve posted everywhere else, then port your meta-data to OpenLibrary, and scrape the ID’s from the others.

More promotion possible.

Shelfari and Goodreads (both owned by Amazon) are good places to also connect with readers. I don’t but I’m not in that phase of promotion right now. If you have original works, this is a probable place to start.

The pre-sales aspect of this still needs investigating. However, since all the key distributors have enabled this, it’s feasible you could do promotion to your fan base for an upcoming book. For Amazon, the general strategy is to make it available at a low price and then raise it later, after you have the number of reviews you need to get their also-bought algorithm’s attention. (Amazon doesn’t value free reviews like they used to.)

The key value of adding in these four discovery sites is in getting all these sites cross-linking with each other and your various versions of the book you just released. The search engines will help drive your discovery, but the only way to get your book into their sights is to put multiple remote outposts on authority sites.

Admittedly, this brings a new research line for marketing via these type sites – doing a real book launch instead of simply publishing first. It’s on my list for research.

Your distribution sequence now goes:

1. Lulu (for IBSN)
2. Amazon (takes longest approval)
3. iTunes
4. Nook
5. Google Play/Books
6. Nook
– – – –
7. Shelfari
8. Goodreads
9. LibraryThing
10. OpenLibrary

From #7 on down, it’s use is promotion to drive discovery.

The key advantage is because you are publishing public domain books, these will now all start showing up with your book, particularly if it’s unavailable other places. Public Domain books are peculiarly long-tail in search format, so you should have no problem getting several of the top spots on Google with your book versions.

Additional notes

Goodreads will import from a page with ISBN’s on it, as well you can upload a spreadsheet or text file.

LibraryThing will also import your books that way. Exporting those files is here.

Shelfari also has that import function.

What was mentioned on Shelfari is that you can export your books in a format they can then upload – so once you have done the work to get a series into one of them, you can then export and import to accomplish it on the other two.

Shelfari will import a simple list of ISBN’s, so this might be a short cut. (I’ll try and then then you know…) Since you generally work from a spreadsheet with a batch of books, this could make more sense than not. Saves you importing all sorts of meta-data if they do it right.

Goodreads wants all sorts of data as a CSV file. If we can get Shelfari to do this for us, then we are that much ahead.

LibraryThing will import from Goodreads. This gives you a nice file, but will need to be tested for import into Shelfari.

Sequence right now is to give a list of your ISBNs to Shelfari, then export from there and import to the other two. (Under testing…)

[Update: Testing of these shows that LibraryThing does the best import, but exports some CSV file which doesn’t translate.

All three of these will import (they say) from an html file – so this shows the path, create a page with your series and include the ISBN’s. Make sure both print and ebook versions are available.

So insert a step into the above sequence of filling out your landing pages fully (including creating a series landing page) with all the ISBN’s plainly visible.

We’d import from Shelfari, but this will take some time for the books to clear. The idea is to get it done simply and not have to return in a few days – when you should be setting up other marketing steps or selecting your next series of books.]

The key point is to import into OpenLibrary. The rest of these are nice-to-haves. You can later springboard from these as social channels if you want.

But that’s another article, another time.

Posted in amazon, Amazon.com, Goodreads, google, Internet Archive, LibraryThing, lulu, Shelfari | Leave a comment

Are there Professional versus Amateur publishers?

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Robert Worstell

(photo: BiggerPictureImages.com)

Is there a difference between “professional” and “amateur” publishers?

Technically, no. There seems to be a quality point, however. Even if that quality point is arbitrarily inflated.

Some people are just getting started in publishing, and others have been going for awhile. Some are using various “short-cuts” (such as Public Domain [PD] and Private License Rights [PLR] books) to get started, while others represent an assortment of live authors with original works that they’ve had to arduously bring up the line, no doubt having inherited that company from a time when all books were paper.

What brings this up is trying to get into OverDrive. I spent several hours over the course of months working to get into their scene, only to be summarily rejected after my hopes had been gotten up.

I first had to do an application. It took weeks to hear back.
Then I had to submit an Excel file of all my books, along with 5 samples of my ebooks for quality review. That took several more weeks on their end.
Then my un-named respondent said all I had to do was to again submit an application to that same webpage as I did first and then I’d be set to go.
I also had to submit a W-9 for payment, agree with their terms, etc. It looked like I was finally approved.
Then I was summarily rejected, saying that I’d be better off using one of their aggregators. Said it was due to the type of books I was publishing. (Again, the respondent was anonymous.)

Essentially, it seems someone’s nose got out of shape. Arbitrary. They want quality over quantity. This isn’t the case with the ebook sellers who have opened up to indie authors-as-publishers. They know that the market will choose the best. Always.

So someone at OverDrive is doing the same old scene of pre-winnowing the harvest in order to only have the “best” make it through. Sounds like the old traditional (money-losing) publishers.

Just don’t expect anyone to take you “seriously” if you keep working to find the holes in the fence as an Indie author-publisher. Particularly the established players who are dealing with a different scale.

Oh – how does OverDrive make it’s income? Giving only 50% commissions on the sale. Their terminology is that you’re giving them your “wholesale” price. With their “down-nose” approach to indie publishers, they are just a bit better than Kobo, and worse payout than all but Amazon (for PD.) Even GooglePlay gives you 52%, the rest at 70%. But forcing you to use an aggregator means cutting another slice out of your profit. (This is the Smashwords/Lulu scene – or BookBaby, Author Services, etc.) Their point is that if you sell a lot higher priced goods, then everyone makes more money. (The main distributors shut off at $9.99 usually, and cut your commissions down to 35% when you go higher than that.)

Interestingly, the recent Hachette/Amazon feud showed that most of the bigger publishers are keeping their prices at around $15 or better – which is just cheaper than paperbacks. The public – and indie authors – know that there is no real cost to this type of publishing, so can and do keep costs down and work on volume and loyal readers.

The whole point to this is that it’s possible to have an independent finance scene by simply finding books, converting them to multiple formats, and marketing them effectively. Something OverDrive is profiting from, but not very well (IMHO.)

My shorthanded review of OverDrive?

Not worth the time and effort.
Exaggerated quality hurdles to jump.

They are stuck in the old school, and not ready for indie authors or publishers. Lump them in with traditional publishers. Because that is all they want – professional publishing houses and the status that goes with them. (Not us newbies. We’d rather talk to our real audience than spend time in corporate boardrooms with powerpoint slides and stiff suits.)

(And you have to know that I put off even applying to OverDrive initially until I had enough books to appear to be a bona-fide capital-“P” Publisher.)

The Old School of publishing says that Agents and Publishers know best – so only 3% of the authors ever get published. The New School says everyone can throw their hat into the ring – and the market will decide the real winners.

(That said, if Lulu ever gets onboard with them, I’ll ship my original books over there, for sure. Just not worth my [or your] time chasing after them.)

– – – –

Am I offended or insulted? Not in the slightest. While I’ve been at this publishing for going on two years now, and have well over a dozen-dozen books published, it’s not actually my main game. It is profitable, so it’s worth the time I spend at it.

The people who run these massive publishing companies have huge overhead to support. Us indie authors and indie publishers can undercut them in price and appear to be everywhere at once with our marketing. We can move all over the place to make our income and have far more profit than they do.

We can more quickly find and supply a demand than they can, and then move onto the next area once they finally point their big machines to that area. They are mining huge areas for relatively little profit. Indie publishers can mine small areas for huge profit – as our overhead is nearly non-existent. In terms of dollar amounts, the big traditionalists make a lot more, but the indie author-publisher has a higher percentage of their income to spend or reinvest on their next title.

Again, the general theory of Indie publishing:

Having a deep backbench of books
Published to multiple eyeballs/distributors – in as many formats as possible
Caring sharing to social networks (more on this later)
Inviting email memberships to monetize.

– – – –

Next up for me? I’ve got another huge batch of books to publish (which is what I was working on without really waiting on OverDrive to pull-finger.)

After that – another batch as yet another test. Once I have this next dozen-dozen books up to the 6 main distributors, then it’s time to get the rest of the backend created and running – which will be exciting and probably yield yet another how-to book.

– – – –

So what do we have here, with this SOHO publishing? A simple business plan which fills the old Internet Marketing gambit of a low-overhead business running on “autopilot.” It’s the “funded proposal” of the MLM world. And has its roots in a Kiyosaki/Eker passive income approach to personal fortune-building.

All we are doing here is to simply build the whole scene up using scale to leverage a wider set of niches than just one. Again, this is using ebooks to show where the actual demand is.

But that is what indie book publishing is all about – finding the loopholes, and selling books into this frontier of epub-versions which hasn’t really been utilized by many in the PLR and PD fields.

PLR has been pitched to people to sell themselves off their own website – tediously building websites for niches and then driving business to them with ads. Very few are finding their way to the main distributors. It’s a Wild West scene – where the guys who get there first stake out the claims.

PD books are either over-priced (if someone like a psychology book publisher thinks they have the market cornered on a rare book) or usually given away with no marketing, cover, or meta-data points covered. The market is mostly established already by author name and title. You’re just goosing this along by picking winners and putting new versions out there which out-sell existing versions of the same books.

Shipping PLR and PD to the main distributors is a simple way of filling a need by getting the basic marketing done for these books. And it’s both quick and inexpensive. Their authors don’t care. It does runs against the grain of the traditionalists.

It’s also a nice living. How to scale is in terms of using multiple distributors as leverage. Beyond that, you need to do external marketing (SEM is my approach – inexpensive except in terms of time) and then start moving clients onto a membership-and-affiliate backend system.

Book publishing can be actually part of a massive lead-generation funnel.

Of course, you’re giving extra value at every step, so it’s a completely valid approach.

– – – –

But that is leading into Marketing, which is yet another chapter in this journey-story. We’ll get to it shortly, just stay tuned.

(Meaning, subscribe by email or RSS feed above right so you don’t miss anything…)

Posted in amazon, book, BookBaby, iTunes, kobo, OverDrive, Private label rights, publish | Leave a comment

How to Publish a Dozen Books in an Afternoon.

Posted on October 18, 2014 by Robert Worstell

An afternoon’s work can get your next dozen books available to millions within 3 days.

This came home to me today as I (finally) started publishing another batch of books I’d been polishing. Of course, it didn’t go smoothly – as I had to stop and get yet another tool out over and again.

So I wrote it up for you.

Here’s the simple book-publishing steps and tools you’ll need and in what in order:

0. Work your books up in advance. This is your “batch.” As it’s as simple to publish 10 or 20 books as it is to publish one. My current project is publishing Private License Rights (PLR) and Public Domain (PD) books for a certain niche. You wind up with a cover, an epubchecked epub, and a PDF for every book. All your meta data is stored in Calibre – or shortly will be.

1. Open Calibre and create a virtual library of only the books you want to publish. While you have already written your description and tags/keywords, you are going to use this to collect the ISBN’s and printed page count.

2. A spreadsheet with the BISAC (BISG) codes. (See that link – your free copy.) All distributors have some version of these. Google, Apple, and Nook use the exact ones. Everyone else – not so much.

3. The blog where you are creating the landing page for that book. This is opened up to the edit page – you’ll create a new page for each book as you go.

4. In the same (or even a different browser) open all the distributor windows (except iTunes – which requires a MAC with their “iTunes Producer” to upload files.) In that case, use a MAC for all these, or shunt/copy your file over to the MAC and access Calibre over your home network so you don’t have missing meta-data and can still cut/paste. (See note about iTunes use in batches below.)

5. Have Gimp open, but minimized, as you may need to resize or fix a cover here and there. Same for LibreOffice.

6. Have a plain-text editor ready for accepting data.

At this point, the best approach is to shut everything else down so you can just concentrate on publishing.

The one exception (as this gets a bit repetitive) is to have a playlist of video’s running so you can get through some of those video courses you’ve downloaded. One person uses the same tune running over and over on a loop, just as white noise.

The simple book-publishing sequence:

a. Work one file at a time – open the book up in Calibre so you have the meta data available. Do all the distributors for this book before you move to the next.

b. Look up the BISAC data and copy five strings of data to it. This has the number itself, and all the categories and subcategories in it. Google uses just the number, while Nook and iTunes use the categories. Lulu, Amazon, and Kobo use their own versions – but this will give you an idea where to set them. Google and iTunes will allow unlimited BISAC codes, Nook 5, Kobo 3, Amazon 2, and Lulu just one (and it has to be a main category.)

c. Publish your ebook on Lulu. This is to get the ISBN. Note that ISBN in Calibre. If Lulu hangs and you can’t get it sorted out quickly (images and internal links will throw it off) then skip it. (Personally, I get almost no ebook sales on Lulu itself, but a few now and then still pays for being there.)

d. Publish your hardcopy book on Lulu with the PDF. Note that ISBN in Calibre as well as the page count. (Nook wants a page count. iTunes and Google want the ISBN.)

e. Now use the metadata and cover to create your landing page. Simple. You can set up icons and links which can be copy/pasted into the page for each distributor – then come back and generate the links by ISBN to replace what’s there. I set up a spreadsheet to generate the links based on ISBN (Amazon uses ASIN for ebook – but sends it to you, and you can use ISBN-10 via a Powell search to generate the hardcopy link. See this post for a better description.)

f. Port to the distributors in this order: Google Play, iTunes, Nook, Amazon, Kobo. That’s in order of complexity and meta data they require.

Once you’re done with one book then take the next, until you’re done with the list. By test, this is the easiest way to get a batch of books published.

Why it can take 3 days to reach millions of potential customers

You have that amount of delay in the 6 main distributors approving your work. Amazon and Kobo can be the worst, but it’s better on all of them than it ever has been. Mostly, you’ll see them approved in 24 hours if not just a few.

Do recall that by getting on iTunes and GooglePlay, you are now on 98-99% of all the smartphones and mobile devices out there. Amazon is the big gun with several million viewers of it’s own, but Kobo is in more countries than anyone else. And yes, people will buy your hardcopy book through GooglePlay if you give them the right link (remember that landing page?)

If your batch is set up as a series, they tend to feed each other. And you can come back to do a bundle of several (or all) of them together.

Notes and Additionals

Note1: You may want to have boilerplate “About the author” ready – GooglePlay and iTunes like this.

Note2: The most efficient way to do your batch-publishing is with a MAC (and dual monitors.) If you do all the distributors on Windows or Linux except iTunes, then iTunes is probably best done by itself, after you do the rest. Reason being that you need to get the ISBN from Lulu for both ebook and print versions and enter these into Calibre. (The use of ISBN’s is to enable search engines to list your book more effectively, as well as making your site links – as noted above.)

PS. What do you do after you publish your batch? Go get a beverage of choice, and relax. Then get started on creating your next batch of books for your next niche – or set up a book launch for that batch as a series. Your list interaction during that launch will tell you what the next batch of books should be about.

Have fun with this.

PPS. And subscribe above right so you don’t miss the next issue. Be sure to leave a comment below about what you’re thinking now. Did it help you? Motivate you? Discourage you? Tell me. Let me know.

Posted in amazon, Calibre, google, ISBN, iTunes, LibreOffice, lulu, Nook | Leave a comment

Even Orphans Can Get Published and Find Success

Posted on January 4, 2015 by Robert Worstell

Orphans have rights too – but they’d rather be well-known than forgotten.


(photo: opensource.com)

The story is too common. Some author comes out with a book, then dies – but no one cares. Or an author publishes under a corporate name, but that corporation dies – and no one cares.

In both cases, the works which sit around may or may not be public domain – but there’s no one who can tell you whether they are or aren’t.

If you try to publish as public domain (especially on Amazon) you will hit a reject, as you can’t prove it’s in the public domain.

There is a trick. The logic lies in your business plan. Simply re-publish the book (and be prepared to un-publish it at anytime.) You leave the copyright as owned by the original author or company, but go ahead and publish your own edition.

Unless you do something greedy, the worst you will get is a “cease and desist” where you have to take these down. Meanwhile, you’ve had some sales and more than paid for your investment. Low risk, chance of profit.

Even if you spend a great deal of time marketing these books, the search engines will simply send them to your “missing” (404 error) page, which you can rig to promote your other books.

The advantage is yours, since you’ve done the research and found a real treasure that no one else cares about, but fits into your own niche and the bliss you are following.

I found a classic book, which was being republished in hardcopy (somewhat) but not marketed or provided widely as an ebook. The copyright was 1965, which is two years after the public domain copyright extensions took effect. However, the copyright was owned by a company which didn’t exist, according to any amount of research I’d been doing. That hardcopy edition was running as pure profit, since the publisher had a contract (apparently) with the original company, but was able to simply reprint as needed with nowhere to send the royalties to.

What I saw was that this book wasn’t being marketed and wasn’t being provided as a ebook much of anywhere – so the potential for a few hours work and years of profit appeared. But I couldn’t say the copyright was mine. I could, though, do the same trick this hardcopy publisher was using – leave the original copyright as it was and simply become yet another publisher.

Again, all I had to lose was a few hours’ time editing the book, creating a new cover and meta-data, and porting this to the book distributors I normally use. If it did ever come back to bite me, all I’d need to do is spend a few minutes taking it down from the various sites. Meanwhile, all the sales I’d had up to that moment were mine – and that moment would probably never come.

The only reason I would do this is because the book fit into a series I wanted to produce as a bundle with 5 other books which were all public domain. The author had willed his published work with a non-profit association (which wasn’t working at publishing these books very hard, offering only poor-quality PDF’s with errors in them) and his unpublished works and papers had been willed to a long-time student and supporter.

So the publishing company which originally published that orphan fell into the cracks. But that’s as far as my research took this.

Now that I have a breakthrough (don’t re-copyright, just re-publish) I have a solution to a few more books than before. Yes, it will still take some time to establish that the books are orphans. And there are greedy publishers which may be trying to corner the market with their over-priced hardcopy versions.

But “nothing ventured, nothing gained” very much applies.

Good luck with this. (And this isn’t legal advice. It’s just a description of the journey I’m on. Your mileage will vary. Consult a professional. A great discussion of orphan books – and where the image comes from – is found at opensource.com)

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Huna – Max Freedom Long – Recovering the Ancient Magic

Posted on January 11, 2015 by Robert Worstell

Discovering / Recovering the Ancient Magic

Huna, Recovering the Ancient Magic - Max Freedom Long

(Photo Credit: Palash Biswas)

AFTER an eighteen-year study of Magic in its various forms—not the spurious magic of the stage, but the genuine magic that works miracles—I come as a layman to report my findings to other laymen.

Fourteen years of my study have been spent largely in Hawaii endeavoring to penetrate beyond the externals of native magic and discover its basic secret. I have been trying to learn the very secret of secrets which is guarded so carefully by those who know it.

Months and years slipped by. I accumulated more and more data concerning the externals of kahuna magic. From that data I constructed theory after theory only to be forced to discard each in turn. I drew on psychology, psychic research, spiritualism, religions of all ages and kinds. I gathered more data, sorting and sorting, trying to match this odd bit with that, trying always to find some clue to the secret of power.

And only when logic has been applied to the familiar can we come to the unfamiliar without some complexed belief promptly blinding us and making it impossible to judge with any degree of accuracy.

It is my hope that those wiser than myself may be able to correct my theories, add what data I have been unable to uncover, and so help forward the full recovery of Magic toward the day when even the humblest of God’s children will be able to share in the bright heritage so long lost.

– – – –

eBook now available (soon on Amazon):

Trade paperback (6″x9″, 276 pages) available on Lulu and soon on Amazon and all brick-and-mortar bookstores:

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Update: The Distributors Discriminate (against your profits.)

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Robert Worstell

In any book sales, it’s bulk vs. originality. There’s room for both.


(Photo Credit: Phil Roeder)

Viable book sales depend on volume of books first, quality second, originality third.

But this isn’t how the distributors see it. No reason for you to lose at this.

Yes, I’ve been busy and haven’t kept up with keeping you informed. Sorry.

I’ve had some home renovations get in my way, which has kept me from publishing for a couple of months right before Christmas. The good news is some insanely cold weather allowed me to bundle up in front of my computer and play catch-up.

The Recent Book Publishing Project

I was doing yet another test. Just before I went into hand-on carpenter-plumber-electrician-builder-mode, I had been working up about 70 books to publish. These were all PLR (private license rights) or PD (public domain) books, along the lines of my interests, as well as harvesting any and all books I had sitting around on my hard-drive.

This was based on earlier tests a couple of years ago which gave me financial independence so I could publish books full-time and not have to work for anyone anymore.

The short-version results:

The good news is that it’s still relatively easy to find, edit, and publish books.
The bad news is that it’s not as easy as it used to be.

The bottom line is that aggregators punish non-original book submission. They simply won’t send them on.

However, the individual distributors still readily accept all sorts of books (except Amazon, which needs it’s own post.)

These 70+ books were submitted through Lulu, which used to forward PLR and PD books to iTunes and Nook readily. Since they got Amazon and Kobo on board, they don’t. While only about a third of the books got through Lulu’s conversion process (they all pass epubcheck) all were rejected in distribution. PD and PLR alike.

All of them.

Lulu has started to fail as an aggregator.

Here’s what they said in the reject:

• Our retail distribution partners no longer accept content that is freely available elsewhere, including but not limited to public domain material, content aggregated from online sources, and content that is identical to existing publications by other authors or publishers.

Their loss.

First, they have gotten lousy revenue deals with Kobo and Amazon – you receive less than 50 percent of your price if you go through Lulu to get to them. Individually, both Kobo and Amazon will pay you 70% revenue (minus VAT for EU sales). We’ve known for some time that the highest profits were from publishing direct and to as many distributors as possible.

Second, they are now refusing to distribute anything except original content anywhere (per this test, anyway.)

Third, a perfectly good epub usually won’t get accepted (but you can get the free ISBN from them. The reason is the changes they had to make in their automated review script.

They still have a use in this process, though.

What is Lulu’s best use? Publishing your hardcopy books.

Yes, still get your free ISBN’s for ebooks from them. But back up your ebooks with hardcopy versions via their Global Reach. It’s simple, cheap, and you’ll get PD and PLR books into Amazon where you can’t get them in as ebooks.

And revise your bulk-publishing plans.

There are only two distributors I know which will take a bulk of books:

Google Play/Books
Overdrive (yes I owe you a post on this one, but it’s still in progress…)

Everywhere else, you have to submit your books one at a time.

But everywhere else (except Amazon) will accept PD and PLR books directly.

This then leads you right into a sensible marketing plan and out of any idea of building a deep backbench of titles quickly. Yes, it’s the end of an era, but a new door opens.

I have another project, which is taking the 100 all-time best-selling PD books and republishing them everywhere, including Amazon. But instead of getting 100 ready, I have to do them about 5 at a time. Because Lulu used to carry my water, but now won’t.

Meaning you can make more money off each book, but have to work harder.

The good point is that you can adjust to the various distributor demands as you go. Better than having to go back to revise all your books based on yet another change (like Lulu just did for us all.)

And even better, your marketing can keep up with your publishing. (More or less.)

In an ideal world (like you write and publish original stuff) you’d take your few books, publish them everywhere individually, create spin-off promotion like PDF excerpts and video-trailers, then promote them on social networks, while building your audience from each release.

For PD, PLR books, my marketing has been short-changed, since I have been concentrating on getting a deep backbench built. So I’ve been missing sales as the books are not readily discovered other than the “also-bought” and “also by this author” algorithms. As well, I’ve been avoiding Amazon as they really don’t like PD or PLR books. (In fact, I discovered that Amazon has created free versions of most of the commonly popular PD books. PD books simply won’t get accepted there.)

Which means you are going to spend a much greater time editing and adding value to every PD book you post there. (Another post upcoming which expands on this…) The key is that when you find a valuable niche with PD books, you create a campaign from the beginning. Books are just one part of helping people improve their lives. Publishing is not the end-all.

The Full Book Marketing Cycle

What I’ve gotten worked out so far is relatively simple:

Deep Bbackbench
Multiple Eyeballs
Social Proof Promotion
Audience Velvet Rope
Everyone Wins Better

Deep Backbench – profits are made from multiple titles in a series. So find and publish many, many books in your niche area. Add value to each one to make them distinctive and not a commodity.

Multiple Eyeballs – publish them to as many distributors and in as many formats as possible. ebooks, paperbacks, hardbacks, PDF’s, videos, audiobooks, images. People prefer different versions of your book. Plus, all these link to each other and build authority.

Social Proof Promotion – get these versions known on social networks. If you can, get and use Synnd this. A new one, Pixxfly, is upcoming and will be a game-changer in this area.

Audience Velvet Rope – build your audience using a membership. Means you can now talk directly to them with emails. The Rainmaker platform seems the best for this right now.

Everyone Wins Better – incorporate affiliate sales into your mix, so people can promote your book and get a split of the income for themselves. Readers can become evangelists. This can also be expanded in to product launches, which point to “evergreen” launches as least time-consuming.

There’s a whole book coming up as I build and test this scene for you. Yes, it’s been years. Above is the short version of the strategy I’m working.

Even shorter:

Publish lots of books.
Promote them to search engines (lots of fresh content and social proof.)
Collect email addresses with permission.
Use launches and affiliates to expand sales.

Batch publishing is best:

Finding a niche,
finding helpful PD or PLR content,
editing these into acceptable and value-added shape
publishing them everywhere you can
promoting them via search engines and social networks
setting up a membership backend with ecourse on autoresponders
building evergreen launch systems, which encourage affiliates to help you (as well as your loyal fans.)

Obviously, working with around 5 books at a time would make the most sense – as you can them keep your marketing up to date.

My approach is to build the backbench first, and then market based on what has already proved to get sales – letting the distributors show me which books are worth my time investment (especially PLR books, but also long-tail PD books.)

-Whew-

OK, I’ve got more electrical to do today. So that’s all for now.

Luck to us all…

Posted in Amazon Kindle, Amazon.com, International Standard Book Number, iTunes, Kobo Inc., LibreOffice, lulu, Nook, public domain, publishing | Leave a comment

The new and streamlined assembly line for book publishing online.

Posted on January 22, 2015 by Robert Worstell

Anything can be automated, even book self-publishing.

(Photo credit: Pascal)

We aren’t’ talking about how you publish books by machine, but we are talking a pretty set procedural system to make your publishing life continue easier. Publishers publish many books. Use the same series of steps to get you many books which all sell well. In short: an assembly line.

Your overall goal is to get a volume of books published to serve a particular niche. A volume of books, such as a series, is how any author makes (or has ever made) real money. The authors who only ever wrote a single bestselling book usually got famous after they died – check it out.

My approach has been to test the self-publishing lines with other people’s books. And it’s gotten me financially free. I can do whatever I want and still get the checks deposited to my account with no other work. (So if I need to take a month off to renovate a house, I have that option. Like what I’m just wrapping up instead of keeping this blog more active…)

Earlier, Lulu used to do a decent job with whatever you threw at them. When they expanded to include Amazon and Kobo, they got picky.

My recent reject: • Our retail distribution partners no longer accept content that is freely available elsewhere, including but not limited to public domain material, content aggregated from online sources, and content that is identical to existing publications by other authors or publishers.

Lulu, like Smashwords, only wants to distribute original works. But they will publish your book on their own store for you.

A General Series of Publishing Steps

0. When you are publishing, you have to have the publishing mindset. You aren’t an author, you aren’t an editor, you are there to publish books. Publishing also means marketing.
1. Select your niche. Best if this is something you are absolutely fascinated and love to find out new information about. Something you could talk all day about. Research this thoroughly with Market Samurai or something similar to find out the demographics, potential profit, keywords, etc.
2. Find some books which add value to this area. Many PD books have been poorly marketed now that they are in the public domain, and many have never been marketed well. The push to create ebooks has resulted in a bit of a boom-town mentality, which you can use to advantage. But don’t stop there. More value is needed.
3. Create some great value in the books. Find a set which make sense (same author or same area or fills a missing need.) Get these into shape so they are available. You’ll also be publishing in many formats, which helps to bring more authority to these books. Also consider publishing a binder or collection of ebooks – in addition to the single volumes. All books get hardcopy versions as well as ebooks.
4. Get these edited into shape. I’d say publish around 5 books at once is simplest. Watch out for Mission Creep. I’ve started with 7 and wound up with 13. Too many and you start losing track of details. The money is in the details.
5. Distribute these books. Print version via Lulu to Ingrams, Amazon, etc. Get your ISBN for that version through Lulu, then go ahead and publish your ebook version. If PD or PLR-based, don’t distribute through them. The other distributors are Google Play, iTunes, Nook, Kobo. You can publish PD books on Amazon, and that takes more details than this one. Overdrive is another. Also, consider publishing PDF version on Scribd (if it’s not already there) and DocStoc. Once you have published many, many books, you can qualify to publish on Overdrive.
6. Part of your distribution will be creating a landing page for every book, which is part of the ebook itself (they’ll have the link in front and back to go to for more material and related books.) Google also want’s this link to send people there to buy it.
7. Create a podcast, presentation PDF, and video (from those two combined) for each book and publish these everywhere you can. Slideshare for the presentation PDF, as well as another 8 or so other doc-sharing sites. Ship the video to as many different places as possible. (The search engines don’t consider these duplicate content.) Consider getting an audiobook made for each book. There is also an upcoming release of Pixxfly which will do your distribution and syndication for you.
8. While you promote the book via Google+ when you publish, you’ll then also go further to get social signals by using Synnd. These “prime the pump” so that the search engines find the landing pages and push people onto the sales pages of the distributors.
9. If you want more traffic, buy ads from Stumbleupon.
10. Create an opt-in lesson series to build your audience and collect their emails by permission.
11. Offer that list special deals on print versions to your list (you can create private address hardcopy books via Lulu at a much lower cost) and similarly sell ebooks that way.
12. Start blogging about each book, with chapter excerpts and reviews. Ensure you also put these up as PDFs on Slideshare and other doc-sharing sites. Review each book in the series and add any additional data about the author as well as your own thoughts about how people could use these to improve their lives – or be entertained, at least.
13. Set up a digital set of these on affiliate sales sites and promote these to your list as well – if they like the books, they can make some extra income promoting them.
14. If you’re energetic, you can create an “evergreen launch” which is a set of videos which give a special offer to those who arrive on that page. Affiliates love this if they convert well.

About this point, you start your next set.

Key points to this self-publishing assembly line

a. You add value always.
b. You publish everywhere possible, in all formats possible. Let the distributors do the sales for you.
c. You use Search Engine Marketing to get your books discovered on the distributors. (Affiliate sales sites are just additional distributors.)
d. You build your audience by collecting email addresses – which can be used to create “instant bestsellers” on Amazon.
e. The whole thing has to fit together hand-in-glove. Your next book series has something to do with the earlier series you just finished. Narrow your focus to exactly what you like to talk about most – and become an expert in this area.

I’ve got more to do in order to flesh out this scene. The above is the broad strokes of how to market your book as you publish it. An overall hidden point is that the book you publish isn’t the end-all – it’s just the beginning of a journey for you and your readers.

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The genius reason behind the madness of publishing as a home business

Posted on January 22, 2015 by Robert Worstell

Genius publishers can get financial freedom if they want to work hard.

My job is to make it easier by leaving a back-trail anyone can follow.

The idea is to create a self-publishing home-business which earns you financial freedom.

I started on this a few years ago, when I saw that Lulu was getting into the ebook business in a serious way. The logic I saw was simple (and I’ve covered this before):

Most books don’t sell well or at all. The chances of getting a true bestseller are slim.
Authors who have a deep backbench of works make more income, particularly if they write for a narrow genre (Stephen King, Amanda Hocking).

In my work with tracing down the workable self-help books, I found that public domain (PD) works which were well-written continued to sell well. Their brand had already been established.

Private Licensed Rights (PLR) books came up when I was studying Internet Marketing. They were touted as one of the quick-and-easy ways of “making money online.”

So I did some tests, which Lulu carried my water for – I put up 28 topselling fiction books and 30-some PLR books which I’d collected and already had good covers.

Both sets were published as 99-cent offers and went everywhere I could get them, ignoring Amazon as they had peculiarities. This was Lulu, iTunes, Nook, Kobo, and Google Play/Books.

I started getting sales right off from some of each category. Books I’d put up on Amazon, some based on PD, took almost a year before I started getting any serious income. Then one book took off and still makes me over twice what the rest of the books did combined. Meanwhile, I made enough from the other books to literally quit my day job as all my bills were being paid, plus some went into savings.

I’d achieved Financial Freedom, if not yet a millionaire (my current and on-going project.)

The reason I blog about this is two-fold:

Helping you get your own financial freedom makes my own freedom grow.

Self-Publishing Lessons Learned

It’s a lot of hard work. And it only expands and becomes more profitable the more you refine your approach. Left to itself, the sales will ebb and flow, gradually working down in time. So you have to keep adding more books and marketing the books you have.
Marketing is enabling discovery. Online, this is making them easily accessed by search engines (SEO) also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM.) While you can run ads, they are expensive and are mostly ignored by online viewers. What is most effective marketing currently are a) Content Marketing (Native Advertising), b) Direct marketing to a list, or c) A combination of the two, such as building a membership from your online presence which builds your list so you can give special offers to those who pay to get behind your “velvet rope.”
Because of the work and marketing involved, the actual competition is low. If you look over the bulk of the ebooks available for sale, you’ll find that they have lousy covers, and lousy descriptions. Yet these are the two points which people use for buying. Sure, they look at the preview and price, but not the reviews so much, if at all.
You never stop learning and improving. Marketing and the Internet are both evolving at a rapid rate. But the old axiom that 97% of conventional wisdom is bunk also holds true. You need to test everything and look for the 1-3% of recurring truths which keep showing up (providing you are keeping your eyes wide open.)

Why PD books make you money

Their audience and word of mouth has already been established – all you have to do is dust them off, repackage them, and make them enticing and available. In short, ADD VALUE.
Because 97% of the people on this planet won’t take the extra steps to make something succeed, they won’t do the hard work it takes to build up these passive income streams. (Actually, they are trained and want a wage-slave JOB so they can pay for their entertainment. That’s their life.)
97% of the wanna-be entrepreneurs out there are in search of the “get rich quick” approach and won’t see the Field of Diamonds they are already standing in.
In today’s world, people want their information pre-digested and summarized. This is why you use a blog to Content Market. What you are offering is solutions to common life problems. It just happens that humankind hasn’t changed much in 10,000 years and the writers who successfully told people how to solve those problems left behind their writings. You are just making them discoverable again.
The Velvet Rope approach (as Jay Abraham refers to memberships) is how you develop a captive audience who will digest the flow of useful and valuable information you are providing. This is how you can take any of various books and create an “instant bestseller” on Amazon, earning you a tidy sum which will continue for a very long time – even if you don’t do much of anything to market it later.
Continuing marketing (which most companies don’t do, but the successful ones do) of a set of books or course (the “Do You Make These Mistakes in English?” campaign was a great example) is what builds momentum and sales. You don’t have to run ads – you do have to keep telling people that you have the solution to their problem(s).

The reason I continue to do what I do

Is to help you earn your freedom. Because the Golden Rule applies – in order to get, you have to give. The route to peace is through prosperity, which is through commerce. We all want a more peaceful life. We’d all be better off if we were rich. To get rich and have peace of mind, you have to help others get rich and their own peace of mind.

The books I publish help you to this end-result – and my end goals.

Your well-being is my highest concern.

Because if you do better, I’ll do better – we’ll all do better.

A permanent, ongoing world peace is the ultimate goal.

It will happen if we all help everyone around us live prosperous and free lives.

And so, I publish.

You can, too.

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Your Next Challenge in Publishing – Finish What You Started

Posted on January 23, 2015 by Robert Worstell

Editing Great Books Doesn’t Get Them Selling or Sold – Publishing Does.

(Photo credit: Kev)

It’s an easy trap to get into. Many niches have lots of books hanging around which beg you to bring them back to life.

And just in research alone, you can stumble onto fascinating projects which lend to even more interesting work.

The trick is to narrow your focus to the job at hand, and trust your research that you are working on the right product for the right niche.

I say this as now I’m in the middle of several incomplete publishing projects. Luckily, the changes at Lulu now force me to simply complete some of these shorter ones. Since all my PD/PLR books now have to be hand-submitted, it forces some choices. (A back-handed thanks, I guess.)

Some of the profitable approaches worth noting

Finding overpriced textbooks and simply republishing at a slightly or much lower price can be profitable. (Just watch for where they added additional material to the original PD work.)
Finding and publishing an out-of-print set of books with a new set of covers which binds them into a series – particularly where no one publisher has all of them, and most have been out of print for years.
Finding books which have not been ported over as ebooks – or only to a single distributor (like Amazon).
Building collections of books – very useful on Amazon, but they’ll sell well on all the distributors.
Really doing the market research before you start and then sticking to the keywords and successful actions you found.
Evergreen launches.
Memberships with private links to discount versions in the paid area, but plenty of free material in the free area.
Finishing the marketing of one project before you start editing the next batch.
Getting your membership to buy discounted new releases and leave honest reviews. (The “instant bestseller” strategy.)
Surveying your email lists to find out what they actually want – and then publish that type of book.

Errors in publishing

Too many projects started, even published, and nothing marketed. You’ll make some money, but are leaving tons on the table.
Exclusive publishing on Amazon or any single distributor – same resul
Publishing only ebooks and not making the hardcopy available (from POD like Lulu.)
Getting dispersed with all the great books you can edit into shape. (Start with the highest quality digital files you can find.)
Buying conventional wisdom about spending a huge amount of time on social media “building your platform.” (Get your reading audience to join your membership and interact with them by email.)
Only publishing a few books or spending an extreme amount of time “getting the marketing just right.” Publish, Market. Then: publish, market. Then: publish, market. Some of your projects can overlap, since it takes time to proof hardcopy books. The solution to publishing income is to publish regularly and market when you aren’t publishing.

– – – –

The end result for any home-business publisher isn’t a lot of published books that sell well. That’s just the whipped cream topping on top of that dessert.

A regular income from selling books just frees you up to really follow your bliss. This is also known as a “funded proposal.” It pays for itself as it goes.

Your bliss-progress is gained only by helping other people find and follow theirs.

All this is designed around that central idea. That is also where you’ll get your inspiration just before you dive into another editing-publishing-marketing project.

P. S. The reason for this post is to say – finish what you start. If you have a lot of incomplete projects, line them up by which is the quickest to finish and wrap them up on that order. Work on one project at a time from then on. Sure, download and file away books you want to work on, but get things completed. Review what you did earlier and do it better next time – don’t go backwards, but simply do better with your next one. “Plan your work, work your plan.”

Luck to us all.

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Why Aren’t Authors Happy Publishing Their Book?

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Robert Worstell

Most authors don’t make a lot of money from publishing…

(Photo: Diana Brown)

…and what they don’t know is killing them.

I’ve done my own study of DBW’s author survey. In addition to their earlier year’s surveys, this also adds to the Taleist survey which got such headlines in 2012.

Here’s the link to compare the DBW results yourself: Survey Results

(Note: I’m no fan of DBW’s writing in general. They are too literary in style, meaning that their sentences are too long. Their words are too big. So they don’t make sense quickly as you’re reading.)

Here’s my take:

1. Over 3,000 people answered the 2014 DBW survey, with over 75% of them having successfully published.

2. Over 53% have a manuscript completed (although this question was missed by 75% of those surveyed.

3. 71.8% were self-published, 28.9% got an advance (traditionally published.) 24.8% got no advance, and split royalties with the publisher.

4. Over 50% published their first book since 2012. 15.7% first published 2003 or earlier.

5. 97.9% have another book they want to publish.

6. Over 53.5% would publish either traditionally or self-publish, although they have preferences. 23.9 only want to self-publish; 14.4% only want to traditionally publish.

7. Reasons for publishing:

Most important – Publish a book that people will buy, to build my career as a book writer.

Moderately important – to get validation for my work, to see my book in a bookstore.

Least important – to share my expertise, to get prestige.

8. Time devoted to writing – 10-14 hours per week (17.4%), followed by 20-24 hours per week (16.6%)

9. Time devoted to related activities (such as marketing) – 10-14 hours per week (17.6%), followed by 7-9 hours/week.

10. Income from writing books (pre-tax): $0-$499 42.9%

11. Satisfied with this? 31.4% are neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, but 51.6% are slightly or very dissatisfied.

12. Primary source of income? No – 78.3%

13. Do you earn income from other writing-related activities? No – 73.5%

14. Approximate pre-tax income from these other activities? $0-$3,000 – 31.4% (note: 75.7% ignored this question.)

What’s the takeaway?

Writers publish wherever they can, and don’t make a living at this – or even enough to cover their expenses. They publish to get a book out there, hoping to make a career at this, or even just sell a book at all.
Writing is a hobby, not a profession – they still have their day jobs.
Writers don’t effectively get any marketing done (or their books would sell better).
And they aren’t happy about it.

DBW took the traditional publisher’s view on this, which isn’t useful to authors – it’s second-guessing. (And shows how embedded they are with the Big Publishers.)

What this survey really says is that there is a market out there to publish books for authors, splitting the royalties for doing the work. Most authors don’t know how to do their marketing, but spend most of their free time writing.

Only 5% paid someone to publish their book for them, but over 70% published it themselves. Adding the self-publishing industry leaders (the distributors who all take a percentage of the royalties and usually charge nothing) brings this up to 96.6%. (Note: questions were multiple choice, apparently.)

Vanity publishing (paying someone else to publish your book, royalty-sharing or not) is sucking bilge-water at getting any decent market share. No wonder their prices are so high.

Compared to Taleist

First off, they both are selling their survey results. (Thanks a lot.) I kept track of this DBW survey page when I got the result, and kept updating it.)

A good overview of Taleist survey showed:

72% of respondents lived in the US (UK survey)…
One third work full time
Authors who got outside help earned 34% more on average
53% self-published for the first time in 2011, with 20% having gotten a start in 2010
the 29% who went from a traditional publisher to self-publishing earned twice as much on their own as they did from their publisher
Only 60% of authors either could or would answer questions about their earnings
Average earning was $10k per author
Half of the authors earned under $500 in 2011 from their books
10% of authors earned over 75% of the revenue
97 authors indicated that they could live off of their ebook sales

Note that the Taleist survey only had 1007 respondents, compared to the nearly 3,000 at DBW’s.

What’s changed in 3 years?

More authors have published their books than ever before. (1155 for 2012-2014, compared to 1092 up to that point.)
Their income hasn’t improved, even despite inflation, as around 46% still make $499 or less.
Those able to make a living were just under 10% in the Taleist survey, and 17.6% made more than median U.S. income in the DBW survey. (Note: the DBW respondents were more forthcoming about their income.)
The DBW top 3% made more than nearly 90% of the rest. These few made over 36% of the total income.
Average DBW income was over $22,000, over double the Taleist.
Like Taleist, the top DBW 10% made around 72% of the income.

While neither survey is “scientific”, they both say a lot about the industry – and tell us that they are pretty close to the mark as they compare well.

Short summary:

More authors are making a living at writing and self-publishing than ever before, but…

Those writers who effectively learn both writing and marketing will earn their financial freedom – while everyone else has to be satisfied with a digital and/or print copy of their self-published book.

And that’s at least more rewarding than never even publishing that manuscript.

If they want to be truly happy, they’d better learn to both write and market better.

Posted in Amazon Kindle, Amazon.com, E-book, Ebook Publishing, iTunes, Kobo Inc., lulu, OverDrive, public domain, publishing | Leave a comment

A Review of Overdrive – Underdriven?

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Robert Worstell

Where Overdrive as an ebook distributor might have some gears loose.

(Photo: Drew Brayshaw)

I’ve had not the best experience with Overdrive and wanted to let you know what I found.

Overdrive, per their website:

“Generate revenue from our worldwide network of library, school and retail partners by reaching millions of avid readers. We distribute premium digital content for more than 5,000 publishers through OverDrive Marketplace (formerly Content Reserve), our secure digital warehouse and admin portal for publishers. More than 30,000 libraries, schools and retailers worldwide rely on OverDrive to supply the best selection of digital titles in the industry.”

This boils down to getting your ebooks, audiobooks, and videos into libraries and colleges. Their retail apparently consists of being the backend function for major publishers.

Now, the caveat: Don’t Try This At Home.

It’s really only for very patient publishers (who have personnel to throw at getting and keeping this running.)

For your average indie author – skip this and go onto my following post. For the indie publisher, you may want to try this – but stock up on your patience, first.

Main rub: They’re stuck in the Windows legacy loop.

This means you have to have a Windows machine to access their backend. Because their website runs on some Windows-only scripts (ActiveX) and no other browser besides Windows Explorer can effectively access it. (Everything besides Safari on a MAC will just get a notice:

Operating System – Content Reserve requires Microsoft® Windows® 98 or higher.

Browser Version – Content Reserve requires Microsoft® Windows® 98 or higher.

(Yes, I know – even XP isn’t supported anymore.) And even a MAC will get a notice that you have “limited capablity”, which means you can look but not change anything.

Here’s a long critique I sent them, after they told me I had 30 days to submit something:

While we work on our first submission, may I offer a critique and some suggestions at this point?

We publish to 6 major distributors directly, using their self-publishing author interface. While submitting several books at once to these is time-consuming, there is one which allows mass-upload – Google. Simply re-titling these books according to the book’s ISBN is the minimum needed. A form on Google’s site allows you to drag-and-drop the books, which are auto-uploaded.

This last week, we submitted over 70 books to them and it took under an hour for the whole process. They read the embedded metadata and filled their forms from this. We will need to perhaps invest another hour for these 70+ books to tweak the metadata online – as we had earlier set up a template which filled out many of the meta-data categories, such as pricing and distribution.

While it took months to produce these books – shepherding them through editing, getting attractive covers, and effective descriptions, as well as all the minute meta-data details to get them ready, it took very little time to submit them as a batch, with no additional cost.

When comparing this to Overdrive‘s requirements, we found several hurdles in our way which needed to be crossed:

1. It took us months just to get approved on your lines. There was the initial submissions, then having to be resubmitted, then having our login details misplaced and having to be re-sent.

2. On accessing your interface, it was found that this requires a publisher operate a Windows machine, as your web interface can only effectively be accessed with a browser which runs on Windoes (IE.) This is is due to your site programming using Microsoft-specific ActiveX scripts. Due to Microsoft’s proved security flaws, we use MACs and Linux machines – and had to acquire a single machine just to access your site.

3. That done, more time was needed to go through the mass of materials on your site which told us to now apply for an FTP account.

4. The next was to download your Excel spreadsheet in order to submit the metadata for each book. While there are some questions on what some of these columns mean, some study is clearing this up.

5. After that, we will have to specifically email you to tell you that our files and spreadsheet has been sent.

Even as a small publisher, we have several hundred books – and the task of uploading these with individually extracted meta-data is daunting enough. With new titles being discovered every week, as well as marketing existing titles, having to now convert this line to include Overdrive requirements is a bit discouraging.

It is not like there are idle personnel which can be simply devoted to submitting books to you.

But we do intend to have a few books up this week as a trial.

Comparing Overdrive to Google, you can see that there could be some improvement to encourage small publishers to provide their unique content to you. Google doesn’t require special hardware, and they have scripts which will automatically process ebooks to utilize embedded meta-data – instead of requiring this be extracted and submitted in Microsoft-specific spreadsheet format.

While it may take days of devoted work to get a first submission up to Overdrive, you can see how this is frustrating to be now told that we are about to be kicked off your lines if we don’t.

I have checked out Overdrive aggregators that were earlier recommended, finding out that these each require upfront costs per book to do all the steps above. As we both know, most books don’t sell well, if at all. Any small publisher can hardly afford any additional cost per book which will never be repaid. This further motivated us to continue working with your application process.

Another point is on a CRM viewpoint:

Why don’t you have people’s names at the bottom of your emails?

This impersonal approach unfortunately gives the impression that Overdrive really doesn’t care.

I am less concerned with being handed off from person to person than I am that any of our emails are not valuable to you as they are to us – that boilerplate responses are used instead of actual customer/client support. I’m sure this is not the case, since I’ve had some very personal and supportive emails from Overdrive, whoever they actually came from.

There are only a handful of “big” publishers out there. I’m sure they already have accounts with you.

Overdrive‘s expansion will be by attracting and servicing new and smaller publishing companies.

Being treated impersonally, and without taking the view of the hurdles they have to jump through – Overdrive is throttling it’s own expansion.

I do consider that we have a great deal to offer each other. And that we can expand together.

That is the point of this overlong email.

And, again, our first submission to you should arrive this week (via FTP with XLS file and an email notice.) This is taking effort to drop everything else (literally) and work only on this project to get content ready for you. (Submitting these books to Google was actually part of the process, since these books are now renamed and ready for you.)

While it has taken months on this journey so far, it has been an interesting learning curve. And thank you for all the time your various personnel there have spent on our behalf.

Expect our first batch within a few days.

Yes, this is months to get started…,

not overnight like all the other distributors. And as I said, I can and have uploaded 70 ebooks at a time to Google (I’m close to breaking the 200 mark there) and so know what it takes to get something somewhere.

I was doing their FTP scene today, and found that while it runs OK, even on Firefox on Linux (yea, I’m a geek) – the problem they have with requiring Java to run their advanced version for multiple drag-and-drop (only on Windows, it turns out) gives even more problems. Just because you have Java, it still doesn’t mean it will run.

A close study of their ReadMe file on the FTP site says you can simply make a ZIP file of everything and upload that one file.

The sequence of uploading to OverDrive

Get a Windows machine and make sure the firewall and anti-virus is up to date (no, you don’t have to do this on a MAC or Linux.)
Get all the files you are going to upload and re-name them with their ISBN (like you do with Google to get them uploaded.
Fill out an Excel file with the metadata for all these books. (Template available from Overdrive.) But, yes – that’s Excel, not CSV like everywhere else. Windows-happy.
ZIP all these into a single file (all epubs, covers, and that .xls file) and FTP this up.
Send them an email telling them they are there.
Upload all these via FTP

I kid you not. It’s that nutty.

Is Overdrive worth it?

My tests are incomplete. Once I get the uploading figured out (couldn’t get back into the FTP site on any machine I had tonight – so back at this tomorrow am.)

I thought it was a stretch when Lulu went wonky on distributing ebooks, which forced me to invest in a MAC to submit to iTunes. But at least that gave me more A/V capability.

But having to get a Windows machine is a bit extreme. (And a security hazard, even just sitting there and connected to the Internet.)

I’m going to need to port a few dozen books (I’ll select from my bestsellers) to see if anything moves on this platform. At least it’s only cost me time.

And now you know what I do – and what I’ve gone through as a SOHO indie publisher.

Again, if you are writing and self-publishing your own books – get them up through Smashwords to Overdrive. Otherwise, either pay someone to do it (per book) or fugetaboutit.

Us crazy indie publishers can follow these odd back channels to see what can be done.

But you’d think they could get an HTML5 site on a Linux server…

Meanwhile – I’ll keep you updated on this dinosaur walking tour.

Update: Couldn’t access their FTP site last night from any machine, on a couple different Internet providers, but did early this am.

So I sent them an email notifying them I had some files up there.

Here’s part of their response (most of it):

If your email concerns a delivery of content or metadata, please ensure you have provided all necessary assets and data for the processing of your delivery. Failure to include all needed assets and data with your initial posting can result in significant processing delays.

Your delivery will be processed only upon receipt of all needed data/assets under the following general timelines:

– Frontlist ebook, audio and video formats will be processed within 7-14 business days.
– Backlist ebook, audio and video formats will be processed within 21 days.

There are occasions where this timeframe is expanded; if there will be a significant delay you will be notified via a notice in this email or in the email confirming receipt of your delivery.

Please note that OverDrive business hours are 8:30AM to 5:30PM Eastern, Monday through Friday, and we are closed for major U.S. holidays.

As a comparison, Google has their books up and online within hours. iTunes and Nook can take about 24 hours, but usually not. Lulu and Kobo can take a couple days. Amazon can take a few days to a week sometimes.

Overdrive figures that they can take the longest in the industry. “Backlist” would mean updating books you’ve already ported there, I imagine.

Not are they the only distributor which has told me that if I don’t upload something pretty soon, I’m off their lines – but they are also the hardest to work with and are hands-down the most inefficient.

As I’ve said above, pack plenty of patience before you start this journey with them. You’ll need it.

BTW: they haven’t responded to the longish email I quoted first above. Go figure.

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How to Throw Away Perfectly Good Marketing and Make No Sales

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Robert Worstell

What to Do When You Have Legacy Brand Mojo

(Artwork: Wacky stuff)

Public Domain publishing is profitable if 1) you take advantage of the brand awareness that already exists, and 2) you don’t do something stupid to make it undiscoverable.

Right now, I’m just finishing up the publishing of a long out-of-print classic which has an underground following and tons of positive reviews.

The funny stuff is that someone took great pains to find and market the earliest version of it he could find, only to throw it away by changing both title and author.

Oh yes, he did.

It meant that anyone looking for the book couldn’t find it. And while he was trying to sell it as an “exclusive” PDF, it was showing up all over the place in various formats under it’s new name. (But not, interestingly, under it’s original title.)

I researched the book and of course found that this 1957 book had never been renewed under that name or title. So I went ahead and converted one of the free Internet versions and published it. Not too surprisingly, I started getting sales.

Then that guy contacted me, all pissed off. When we talked it through, (and I explained how public domain copyrights worked) he said I just needed to change the title, as it was “his”. So he told me the original title – and sure enough, it also had never been renewed. Also, there were a lot of positive reviews about the book with the actual author’s name.

Regardless of the fact that this guy was missing out on all these sales by getting it up and on the major ebook distributors lines, the point that he was marketing it as an unknown book by an unknown author put it back at square one for marketing.

Of course, he also edited this new title all through the book, so I had to re-edit the book and get a book sent to me by the library system so I could check to see what other changes had been made. Unfortunately, all I could get what a 3rd edition – but the editing which had been done wasn’t major and showed me what had to be fixed. Mostly a search-and-replace job.

The lesson is this: these authors spent a lot of time and effort (and many times lots of advertising dollars) getting that book known and sold (or their publisher did.) That is branding.

When you simply put a new cover and updated description on a book, making it available in all sorts of modern versions (ebook, tradepaperback, even hardback) – then it takes off based on the original popularity.

When you change the title and change the authors name, just take yourself out back and give yourself a swift kick in the posterior – or shins. Because that’s less painful than shooting yourself in the foot – which is what you just accomplished.

Build your new marketing on the existing brand awareness of both the book and the author. Amazon and Google look up these reviews and put them with your book if you use the original book’s title. So this puts you miles ahead.

And makes your book start selling right off.

What helped me get ebook sales even with the new title and author? The preview – because when they started reading it, the author’s original great content still sold them.

Now that I have everything back to where it started, I figure it should really take off. I might even have another Amazon bestseller on my hands – simply because this is one of those public domain books which has no competition from the other PD resellers.

That other guy could have done this.

Now you can.

Posted in Amazon.com, Assembly line, E-book, Google Play, International Standard Book Number, iTunes, OverDrive, Private label rights, public domain, publishing | Leave a comment

Your Life Career: How to Find and Follow Your Bliss

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Robert Worstell

How to Find and Follow Your Bliss In Your Life Career

An Excerpt from The Power of Myth, by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers.

Of all mythologist Joseph Campbell’s work, the easiest I’ve found to follow was a several-hour interview conducted over nearly a week by Bill Moyer, shortly before Campbell’s death. The interviews appeared on PBS and this book was edited from these, being published posthumously.

This is the clearest statement I’ve found of how to help people find out what they should be doing, their purpose in life, etc. Finding your bliss isn’t a big problem to solve. It seems to be most easily described as “what you like to do most, all the time.”

This review is brought to you so that you have the tools you need, as part of your business plan, your belief-system, your journey at this time and in our world.

– – – –

(Note: Most of the below can be found in Chapter 4, Sacrifice And Bliss – The Hero’s Adventure.)

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a land of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.

Wherever you are – – if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

. . . .

CAMPBELL: The majority’s function in relation to the spirit is to try to listen and to open up to someone who’s had an experience beyond that of food, shelter, progeny, and wealth.

Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt?

MOYERS: Not in a long time.

CAMPBELL: Remember the last line? “I have never done the thing that I wanted to in all my life.”

That is a man who never followed his bliss. Well, I actually heard that line when I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence. Before I was married, I used to eat out in the restaurants of town for my lunch and dinners.

Thursday night was the maid’s night off in Bronxvile, so that many of the families were out in restaurants. One fine evening I was in my favorite restaurant there, and at the next table there was a father, a mother, and a scrawny boy about twelve years old. The father said to the boy, “Drink your tomato juice.”

And the boy said, “I don’t want to.”

Then the father, with a louder voice, said, “Drink your tomato juice.”

And the mother said, “Don’t make him do what he doesn’t want to do.”

The father looked at her and said, “He can’t go through life doing what he wants to do. If he does only what he wants to do, he’ll be dead. Look at me. I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in all my life.”

And I thought, “My God, there’s Babbitt incarnate!”

That’s the man who never followed his bliss. You may have a success in life, but then just think of it — what kind of life was it? What good was it — you’ve never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off.

MOYERS: What happens when you follow your bliss?

CAMPBELL: You come to bliss. In the Middle Ages, a favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune. There’s the hub of the wheel, and there is the revolving rim of the wheel.

For example, if you are attached to the rim of the wheel of fortune, you will be either above going down or at the bottom coming up. But if you are at the hub, you are in the same place all the time. That is the sense of the marriage vow — I take you in health or sickness, in wealth or poverty: going up or going down. But I take you as my center, and you are my bliss, not the wealth that you might bring me, not the social prestige, but you.

That is following your bliss.

MOYERS: How would you advise somebody to tap that spring of eternal life, that bliss that is right there?

CAMPBELL: We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be.

You have to learn to recognize your own depth.

MOYERS: When did you know yours?

CAMPBELL: Oh, when I was a kid. I never let anybody pull me off course. My family helped me, all the time, just to do the thing I really, deeply, most wanted to do. I didn’t even realize there was a problem.

MOYERS: How can those of us who are parents help our children recognize their bliss?

CAMPBELL: You have to know your child and be attentive to the child. You can help. When I taught at Sarah Lawrence, I would have an individual conference with every one of my students at least once a fortnight, for a half hour or so. Now, if you’re talking on about the things that students ought to be reading, and suddenly you hit on something that the student really responds to, you can see the eyes open and the complexion change. The life possibility has opened there. all you can say to yourself is, “I hope this child hangs on to that.” They may or may not, but when they do, they have found life right there in the room with them.

MOYERS: And one doesn’t have to be a poet to do this.

CAMPBELL: Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss. Most people are concerned with other things. They get themselves involved in economic and political activities, or get drafted into a war that isn’t the one they’re interested in, and it may be difficult to hold to this umbilical under those circumstances. That is a technique each one has to work out for himself somehow.

But most people living in that realm of what might be called occasional concerns have the capacity that is waiting to be awakened to move to this other field. I know it, I have seen it happen in students.

When I taught in a boys’ prep school, I used to talk to the boys who were trying to make up their minds as to what their careers were going to be. A boy would come to me and ask, “Do you think I can do this? Do you think I can do that? Do you think I can be a writer?”

“Oh,” I would say, “I don’t know. Can you endure ten years of disappointment with nobody responding to you, or are you thinking that you are going to write a best seller the first crack? If you have the guts to stay with the thing you really want, no matter what happens, well, go ahead.”

Then Dad would come along and say, “No, you ought to study law because there is more money in that, you know.” Now, that is the rim of the wheel, not the hub, not following your bliss.

Are you going to think of fortune, or are you going to think of your bliss?

I came back from Europe as a student in 1929, just three weeks before the Wall Street crash, so I didn’t have a job for five years. There just wasn’t a job.

That was a great time for me.

MOYERS: A great time? The depth of the Depression? What was wonderful about it?

CAMPBELL: I didn’t feel poor, I just felt that I didn’t have any money. People were so good to each other at that time. For example, I discovered Frobenius. Suddenly he hit me, and I had to read everything Frobenius had written. So I simply wrote to a book-selling firm that I had known in New York City, and they sent me these books and told me I didn’t have to pay for them until I got a job — four years later.

There was a wonderful old man up in Woodstock, New York, who had a piece of property with these little chicken coop places he would rent out for twenty dollars a year or so to any young person he thought might have a future in the arts. There was no running water, only here and there a well and a pump. He declared he wouldn’t install running water because he didn’t like the class of people it attracted. That is whspiritualere I did most of my basic reading and work. It was great. I was following my bliss.

Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat, Chit, Ananda. The word ” Sat” means being. ” Chit” means consciousness. ” Ananda” means bliss or rapture.

I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.” I think it worked.

MOYERS: Do we ever know the truth?

Do we ever find it?

CAMPBELL: Each person can have his own depth, experience,and some conviction of being in touch with his own sat-chit-ananda, his own being through consciousness and bliss. The religious people tell us we really won’t experience bliss until we die and go to heaven. But I believe in having as much as you can of this experience while you are still alive.

MOYERS: Bliss is now.

CAMPBELL: In heaven you will be having such a marvelous time looking at God that you won’t get your own experience at al. That is not the place to have the experience — here is the place to have it.

MOYERS: Do you ever have this sense when you are following your bliss, as I have at moments, of being helped by hidden hands?

CAMPBELL: all the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time — namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

MOYERS: Have you ever had sympathy for the man who has no invisible means of support?

CAMPBELL: Who has no invisible means? Yes, he is the one that evokes compassion, the poor chap. To see him stumbling around when all the waters of life are right there really evokes one’s pity.

MOYERS: The waters of eternal life are right there? Where?

CAMPBELL: Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

. . . .

MOYERS: What’s the journey each of us has to make, what you call “the soul’s high adventure”?

CAMPBELL: My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.

MOYERS: Is it my work or my life?

CAMPBELL: If the work that you’re doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it. But if you think, “Oh, no! I couldn’t do that!” that’s the dragon locking you in. “No, no, I couldn’t be a writer,” or “No, no, I couldn’t possibly do what So-and-so is doing.”

MOYERS: In this sense, unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we’re not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.

CAMPBELL: But in doing that, you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.

….

MOYERS: What about happiness? If I’m a young person and I want to be happy, what do myths tell me about happiness?

CAMPBELL: The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you really are happy – – not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you.

This is what I call “following your bliss.”

MOYERS: But how does mythology tell you about what makes you happy?

CAMPBELL: It won’t tell you what makes you happy, but it will tell you what happens when you begin to follow your happiness, what the obstacles are that you’re going to run into. For example, there’s a motif in American Indian stories that I call “the refusal of suitors.” There’s a young girl, beautiful, charming, and the young men invite her to marriage.

“No, no, no,” she says, “there’s nobody around good enough for me.” So a serpent comes, or, if it’s a boy who won’t have anything to do with girls, the serpent queen of a great lake might come. As soon as you have refused the suitors, you have elevated yourself out of the local field and put yourself in the field of higher power, higher danger. The question is, are you going to be able to handle it?

Another American Indian motif involves a mother and two little boys. The mother says, “You can play around the houses, but don’t go north.” So they go north. There’s the adventurer.

MOYERS: And the point?

CAMPBELL: With the refusal of suitors, of the passing over a boundary, the adventure begins.

You get into a field that’s unprotected, novel. You can’t have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.

Now, there’s an Iroquois story that illustrates the motif of the rejection of suitors. A girl lived with her mother in a wigwam on the edge of a village. She was a very beautiful girl but extremely proud and would not accept any of the boys. The mother was terribly annoyed with her.

One day they’re out collecting wood quite a long way from the village and, while they are out, an ominous darkness comes down over them. Now, this wasn’t the dark of night descending. When you have a darkness of this kind, there’s a magician at work somewhere behind it. So the mother says, “Let’s gather some bark and make a little wigwam for ourselves and collect wood for a fire, and we’ll just spend the night here.”

So they do exactly that and prepare a little supper, and the mother falls asleep. Suddenly the girl looks up, and there is a magnificent young man standing there before her with a wampum sash, glorious black feathers — a very handsome fellow. He says, “I’ve come to marry you, and I’ll await your reply.” And she says, “I have to consult with my mother.” She does so, the mother accepts the young man, and he gives the mother the wampum belt to prove he’s serious about the proposal. Then he says to the girl, “Tonight I would like you to come to my camp.” And so she leaves with him.

Mere human beings weren’t good enough for this young lady, and so now she has something really special.

….

MOYERS: Would you tell this to your students as an illustration of how, if they follow their bliss, if they take chances with their lives, if they do what they want to, the adventure is its own reward?

CAMPBELL: The adventure is its own reward — but it’s necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control. We are following our own way, not our daddy’s or our mother’s way. So we are beyond protection in a field of higher powers than we know.

One has to have some sense of what the conflict possibilities will be in this field, and here a few good archetypal stories like this may help us to know what to expect. If we have been impudent and altogether ineligible for the role into which we have cast ourselves, it is going to be a demon marriage and a real mess.

However, even here there may be heard a rescuing voice, to convert the adventure into a glory beyond anything ever imagined.

….

CAMPBELL: Any life career that you choose in following your bliss should be chosen with that sense — that nobody can frighten me off from this thing. And no matter what happens, this is the validation of my life and action.

….

CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s the individual.

The best part of the Western tradition has included a recognition of and respect for the individual as a living entity. The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.

MOYERS: But what happens to institutions — to universities, to corporations, to churches, to the political institutions of our society — if we all just run off and follow our love? Isn’t there a tension in this? Individual versus society? There has to be some legitimate point beyond which individual intuition, the individual libido, the individual desire, the individual love, the individual impulse to do what you want to do must be restrained — otherwise, you’d have tumult and anarchy, and no institution could survive. Are you really saying that we should follow our bliss, follow our love? Wherever it leads?

CAMPBELL: Well, you’ve got to use your head. They say, you know, a narrow path is a very dangerous path — the razor’s edge.

MOYERS: So the head and the heart should not be at war?

CAMPBELL: No, they should not. They should be in cooperation. The head should be present, and the heart should listen to it now and then.

….

CAMPBELL: Wait a minute. Just sheer life cannot be said to have a purpose, because look at al the different purposes it has all over the place. But each incarnation, you might say, has apotentiality, and the mission of life is to live that potentiality. How do you do it? My answer is, “Follow your bliss.” There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.

MOYERS: I like the idea that it is not the destination that counts, it’s the journey.

CAMPBELL: Yes. As Karlfried Graf Dürckheim says, “When you’re on a journey, and the end keeps getting further and further away, then you realize that the real end is the journey.”

The Navaho have that wonderful image of what they call the pollen path. Pollen is the life source. The pollen path is the path to the center. The Navaho say, “Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me, I’m on the pollen path.”

….

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Cracking the Lulu ebook Reject Problem

Posted on February 19, 2015 by Robert Worstell

A faster way to clear up those cryptic Lulu ebook rejects.

Just a note in passing…

I was working away converting and uploading when I stumbled on a faster and surer way to get your book through that meatgrinder that Lulu uses to process it’s ebooks.

This is when you submit an .epub file to them. (I long gave up on anything else. I test them locally and submit – much faster. Epubs are also faster on Smashwords, btw.)

All you get is a text file telling you where the problem is according to it’s script. Unfortunately, these are less than useful in many cases. Some are really stupid (like naming your graphic wrong will show up as something like “‘id’ isn’t a valid reference.”

I used to export my files from LibreOffice with a plug-in called Writer2Epub. And that’s a very nice tool, but I’d have to go back and fix the style sheet as it wasn’t easy to read those files – space between paragraphs are what people are used to, and makes it easier to read. And on a smartphone, justified text will break up a book so it can’t be read unless you turn your phone sideways.

Today, I ran across a reject which shouldn’t have been a problem. I’ve been using Calibre‘s ebook editor as it has epubcheck built in. Yesterday, I found that “id” reject was caused by images when I ran something that passed Calibre through Sigil.

But I had this nice file all ready to go, but wouldn’t fly on Lulu. In the past, I’ve shrugged it off and then ignored Lulu for it – I don’t get all that many sales directly from Lulu, even though I get a higher royalty there than anywhere else, hands down.

This time, I had Calibre convert the epub from the original LibreOffice .odt file. I epubchecked that output file on the Calibre ebook editor and then with Sigil. Since Sigil passed it, I then uploaded it to Lulu and it now passed.

Nice.

Yes, I have more tests to go – and a lot of rejected files from a past batch to run through this.

Thought to give you a heads up, through.

Luck to us all…

Posted in Amazon Kindle, E-book, epub, Google Play, HTML, LibreOffice, Portable Document Format, public domain, publishing | Leave a comment

Tips to Increase Direct Sales From Google Play/Books

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Robert Worstell

An Idea Came Up to Increase Your Sales and Commissions from Lulu

I had last told you that I didn’t get much sales from Lulu, but they had the highest commissions. That’s if you use them to distribute your books (and is not a bad idea for most authors, who are writing their own books and should concentrate their time on this.)

But I’d dropped a big batch on Google and was busy cleaning up the missing details in the meta data.

Here’s a shot of what I ran into:

You have a buy link, and a publisher’s website link.

Note: This is the buy link for the hardcopy edition:

Both are great for SEO, but wouldn’t it be better to get sales? I was sending them to that book’s landing page – which is great SEO, but not direct sales. (And yes, these days I’m making a hardcopy version of every book, whether I distribute that book to Ingram or not. This tweak means going back to ensure all my earlier ebooks are represented by Lulu in hardcopy…sigh.)

So I now have the Publisher Website with the landing page for that book (was formerly http://midwestjournalpress.com) and use the Buy Link to get real sales.

The real leverage on this is to get the person to go ahead click through. Lulu gives you a direct shopping cart address to use for sales. You don’t go there, then click again to buy the book – it’s a shopping cart. You next click to get delivery.

[Update: The plus side of this is that you get from 2-4 times or more royalty from your hardcopy book from Lulu than you do from anywhere else. Like comparing $10-14 there to $3-5 elsewhere. Nice Ka-ching when you can get it.]

The drawback on this is that Lulu isn’t in as many countries as Google, Amazon, or Kobo. The plus is that the links can be to your own storefront with something like:

But it will probably get more sales if you send them directly to the shopping cart (the link is in their sales button code – but you have to know their proprietary content ID.)

They can’t get back to your other books, but the next button is to checkout – which is one less than your site.

Why not send them to iTunes, Nook, Amazon, or Kobo?

The model I use, and the one I recommend for indie publishers and self-publishing authors, is to get the free ISBN from Lulu first, and then port your content to all the rest. You don’t have to get an ISBN, but it makes generating the sales codes quite easy, as you can search by ISBN on all the sites except Amazon (which has their own proprietary code.)

[Update: when you set up that book on Lulu, you’ll be able to get that proprietary number they assign. Just note it on Calibre somewhere, along with the tradepaperback ISBN and the hardback ISBN (if you go that far) – plus the Amazon number when it’s assigned. Then you can enter these all into your spreadsheet to generate the links for the buttons on your landing page. Sounds complicated, but it does speed things up.]

In other words, Lulu always has all your content. (You can even sell PDF versions there.)

Other reasons to use Lulu:

1) Amazon isn’t popular with everyone, they give you lower royalties, insist on being the lowest price, and only give you back an ebook version you can only use on their ereaders. And there’s that extra step of finding out what that special code is.

(ex: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NH9X8DM)

2) For iTunes, you need a MAC – or download their special program.

(ex: http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/isbn9781312821941)

3) Nook is OK, but I haven’t ported all my books there.

(ex: http://barnesandnoble.com/s/9781312821941)

4. Kobo gives me the absolute worst royalties on PD books – 20%

(ex: http://kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q=9781312821941)

My landing page currently goes to Google Books, but should probably go to Google Play: (ex: https://play.google.com/store/search?c=books&q=9781304420114) Now, that will take extra clicks to get a sale from that search, but these links all show up as buttons on the landing page, so we expect that they prefer to have their books on Google Play (syncs between devices, you can download your books anytime you want for local viewing, as many times as you want.)

One other point: if you follow those links, you can see the relative approaches these sites have. Amazon and Nook give “also-bought” recommendations which aren’t your books. iTunes and Google tend to show my books which are by the same author and in the same series. Kobo doesn’t give recommendations (at least for that link I gave) – but with such poor royalties, it’s a desperation play to eke out some sales I wouldn’t get otherwise.

Other option is to set up your own site with a shopping cart. Disadvantages are

EU VAT you have to pay to the buyer’s country as the sales point – 20%.
Lack of traffic compared to the big boys above. The sell for you – you just have to keep adding books and link to them with your marketing.

You can always sell digital products via iAmplify or JVZoo, etc. But this is actually in addition to selling through the major distributors – something you use with your mailing list. The distributors finance expanding your direct marketing.

Summary:

Lulu should be number one place to refer buyers to, as they give the best royalties and aren’t auto-discounted like Amazon and Google. Nook would be second – and I’d also have to wait 60 days to get paid.

Your mileage may differ – leave a comment if you’ve a better approach.

The takeaway: Use Google for SEO to link to your site. Any sales should go to your Lulu storefront. You make more income on your hardcopy books by sending them straight to Lulu.

Posted in book sales, google, iTunes, links, Nook, self-publishing, Web search engine | Leave a comment

Market Research Starts With Amazon?!?

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Robert Worstell

Indie SOHO Publishing needs market research to succeed. Start with Amazon.

(graphic: Chris Piascik)

Why? Because they will tell you if your book as even a fighting change of breaking into the big time.

While Amazon has been consistently shrinking their market share (now below 50%) they are still the godzilla in the room. With some “nutting-out” you can find all sorts of interesting data here.

Sure, I’m no great example of what I’m saying here, but when I got a bestseller there, it kinda tipped me off to making real money.

My own stats had me making 2 and 3 times on almost every other site besides Amazon for the first year, and then one of my books took off. I doubled down on that with print versions and an audio book, so this has now reversed, as Amazon is making twice to three times what everyone else is bringing me. Yes, it’s a bestseller in its category.

These tests are most all with public domain books. Which is said to be a tough row to hoe.

Reason being is that any search of many books will find that someone at Amazon has already taken tons of books (usually from Gutenburg) and made them available for free downloads. So any popular book you want to reproduce is probably already there. (I think this was an early strategy to popularize Amazon itself, by giving away all these free books.)

What Amazon needs

What Amazon is looking for is not just more of the same, but actually distinctly different books. And it’s not just another cover. Mainly, it’s in the title.

All my research pointed to that one scene. A small test I did gave me quick approvals of books which were now arriving with a slightly new cover, but plainly PD books. (The other change was not to put my own name as the copyright, but a publishing imprint.)

But that’s given that there are already other versions of your book out there. That isn’t necessarily the case, but with PD, it usually is.

I did some research recently which backed up the strategy of using binders to increase value and get a product up which Google will accept simply. One of the two books had two different Kindle versions up there. And yes, they both were the same book with different titles (as well as covers and descriptions.)

The simple solution was to build a book which had an extra or bonus in it. One book I created had an article from a magazine which was related to the book. Another included a small book which had also been articles in a magazine earlier. In this last case, both titles were used, and both authors – so that the SEO value would be better. The two books complimented each other, of course. Adding value, always.

In another case, this book was wanted from the view of the small niche I was targeting, but simply wasn’t represented online at all – so publishing it is simply not having to change anything at all. Nice.

The real interesting scene I’ve run across several times is where a “textbook” publisher has the only version of a book out there – and is charging a few hundred bucks for a simple text. I have a test on this right now, where I have not only ebook, but tradepaperback and hardback as well. (It’s key to raising cattle, my other lifestyle, so that justifies it.) If these sell at all well, it opens the door to some fascinating price-wars to grab some of that traffic. The real problem is that it’s keeping some very valuable data out of the hands of farmers who could be using it meanwhile.

Upcoming projects?

There is a project I haven’t gotten back to, which is to take the top 25-30 all-time topselling PD books and create “study guides” by adding a section to each which gives tools on how to improve as a writer. The idea overall is to create a mailing list and a challenge for someone to read each of these in an average of 2 weeks, then get the next book in the series. That project is a fair distraction from what I’m into otherwise, but these books are a key part of my income otherwise (mostly at .99 price-point) so this could raise my income markedly if they were a success. The trick with these is that there are already so many versions out there and they’ve all become commodities.

(I did a test recently by creating a 3-book collection of the top erotica novels, in conjunction with the “50 Shades of Grey” hubbub – I’ll let you know how that turns out. “Her Secret Needs” Tradepaperback. Ebook.)

Simple How to Publish (PD) Tips for Amazon

For all the warnings and what-not, this is the simplicity of what it takes to publish Public Domain on Amazon.

Pick books which are in demand, niches which are profitable. Be suspicious if you see no book competition at all. Do your homework – start with Amazon.
Only take the 35% royalty. (They’ll eventually bite you on this, so go for more volume.)
Change the title slightly.
Publish under an imprint. The checks cash just the same.
Make sure you use striking covers and gripping descriptions.
Always improve the quality of life of your buyers.
Publish everywhere else as well, in addition.

PS. If you want to work at it, you can reverse engineer all the free books from Amazon – but it’s easier to get quality free public domain content in epub format. And sometimes the .mobi/.azw books don’t translate accurately.

PPS. Geekalert. Simplest way to combine two books (or more) is in Calibre. See this writeup.

Posted in Amazon Kindle, book, International Standard Book Number, iTunes, Kobo Inc., LibreOffice, lulu, public domain, publishing | Leave a comment

How to Publish Public Domain Books and Profit Nearly Forever – Part 2

Posted on February 23, 2015 by Robert Worstell

(continued from Part 1)

The How-To Tips of Publishing PD and PLR to Profit From Here On Out

(Photo: Simon Cunningham)

Sorry I didn’t give you exact steps last time. (Of course, you can get this from my books, “Just Publish!” [ebook] and “Publish. Profit. Independence.” [ebook | tradepaperback])

Here’s the simple logic of it…

The strategy:

Build a big backbench of titles,

Publish these to as many eyeballs as possible.

Encourage search engines hock your books for you.

Most authors make their big bucks from creating books for a certain niche in a series. This was the real secret behind (the over-hyped) John Locke and Amanda Hocking, as well as the perennial Stephen King.

These all write to a specific niche and for that particular audience.

You can do the same thing with Public Domain books, even PLR.

The problem with writing original fiction is that it takes a damned long time – like maybe 2 or 3 books a year. So you have to keep your day job meanwhile. Hocking is a hit now in her 20’s, but she started in high school. Stephen King only wrote weekends until he could get enough books selling so that he could go full time. (Years and years.) Locke took about 7 years, and profited from loopholes in Amazon’s system at the time (you can’t even use his cheat-system anymore.)

The other point, particularly in non-fiction, is that there are a lot of great books out there which are poorly marketing and mostly out of print. Where these fall in to the public domain, where they are picked up and re-published, even if the quality is decent, the marketing usually sucks. (Just check out the public domain covers at Amazon for a hint.)

You can take any pre-1923 book and republish it as public domain and profit from any sales from there on out. About 94% of the books published between 1923 and 1964 were never renewed or never registered, so can be sleuthed out (see link) to see if they are public domain.

PLR is similar. No, you can’t publish PLR on Amazon. But iTunes, Google Play/Books, Nook, and Kobo will take them as ebooks. And if you publish as hardcopy, they are accepted anywhere.

How to build your PD or PLR publishing empire

Know this, it’s both easier and harder than it used to be. I got started by shoving a great deal of works up as a test through Lulu and they ported them to iTunes and Nook for me. They won’t do that anymore. You simply have to port them all yourself. Google allows a mass upload, but Kobo is still an individual book-by-book publishing scene.

Using Calibre, you can pretty simply create and edit any ebook. LibreOffice will help convert it to a print version for hardcopies. Lulu will publish just about anything you want to publish, they just won’t distribute it. See my two books above (and this blog) to get all the details of it. Calibre improves almost weekly, so it’s a great tool that has continual updates.

1. Find your passion, find your niche.

This isn’t get rich quick. You are going to be at this for awhile. Publishing is the simple part. And it will pay for the marketing you need to do to leverage your sales into something sustainable.

You have to be fascinated by the subject and interested in finding new things about it, as well as talking to anyone who will listen – and that is really all that marketing is, if you think it through.

So narrow down your passion and find a niche in that passion where people will pay good money to listen to you. Searching on Amazon or Google Shopping is a good start. There’s a lot said about too narrow or too broad niches – so study up on this.

2. Get a series of books on the subject which are public domain and/or PLR.

PLR is mostly about Internet Marketing, but there are some great books out there on other topics. Frequently, you’ll find a series of articles about a topic. These can be edited into a book (which is where most of the PLR ebooks out there started.) The great value to PLR is that someone has already done the research for you – you just have to re-write it into something useful. Most of PLR has already been published somewhere. I pushed several dozen books up on the main distributors as a test, and they’ve been selling like most books – a few sell regularly, and some every now and then. None are great hits – but they haven’t actually been marketed, either.

Public domain is even easier to find. Start looking at the original publishing date and you can find some great ones. But just because a book has been registered, it doesn’t mean the original wasn’t already public domain. I found one recently which had it’s copyright renewed in 1943, but it’s original published date was prior to 1923.

A point here – make sure you are working with original text. Many public domain books have been edited and additional, newer data has been added. That new data is under copyright, but not the original. (See this discussion at Public Domain Sherpa.)

2a. Make sure they are public domain.

Use the Stanford database. Simple. Again, visit Public Domain Sherpa.

3. Get a batch of these and convert them into all possible formats.

Told you it wasn’t get rich quick. You are going to have to know how to edit, some spelling, and grammar. You’re going to have to know how to make great covers, or pay someone to do it. You are going to have to know how to write great copy for the descriptions. (Suggested here is to learn from Eugene Schwartz.)

Note: you want landing pages linked into the ebook versions – even if you don’t flesh out those pages right away. People will want to find more books by that author/publisher. You probably want to start a blog or have a website – it’s own topic of discussion.

4. Port these books to all possible distributors.

Lulu (get your free isbn’s without Amazon discrimination), Google Play/Books, iTunes (needs a MAC), Nook, Kobo.

5. Additional marketing:

Covers to Pinterest, Flickr.
PDF excerpts to Slideshare.
Create/update book pages on Open Library.
BitTorrent Bundle, etc.

6. Now, take your best book in this series (the one you can talk the most about) and make it your representative.

Discount the price everywhere – not free, but very low. This is your loss-leader.
You want to take each chapter and create an ecourse out of it.
Then you set up an opt-in form for an autoresponder (Mail Chimp is free for the first few hundred subscribers) to enable people to give you their email addresses.
Blog about all these books in the series so you have landing pages for each book
Then set up some hidden pages on your blog/site which have direct links to discount books on Lulu.
Promote these special offers to your list as exclusive specials. Note: set these up so you make some money on each one, but they are obvious values.
Create videos for each lesson and get these posted on YouTube and Flickr, as well as DailyMotion, etc.

7. For any new book, set up pre-release prices and do proper releases to your mailing list for new books coming out.

This is the Amazon Instant Bestseller Tactic. If you can get enough people to buy them at a low price, then leave nice reviews, you will rocket your book up Amazon’s algorithms and get more sales. If your book is in a particularly narrow niche, you’ll rise to their “bestseller” status – but that takes more homework, again – see my earlier books above.

Then if you leave the Amazon link embedded in all your Pinterest, Flickr, and video posts (as well as your blogs) then the returning link-love will also help your standings on Amazon.

Meanwhile, your Lulu sales, as well as your other distributors’ ebook sales will pay for your other marketing expenses.

8. From there…

All your books can have special releases on their own. Each re-release can become an “Amazon bestseller.”
You can create binders/collections of the books and release them on their own.
You can get someone to create an audiobook of your bestseller, and get this on Audible (sold on Amazon)
You should create hardcopy versions for each ebook as you go – but the bestselling books should be put out into “Global Distribution” via Lulu, so can be sold everywhere. (You can even get a hardback version created via Lulu – which is even better revenue.)
More ecourses.
Create digital product versions which can be sold via affiliate sites (such as JVZoo) and iAmplify. Your readers can get paid for promoting your book – and should.
Weekly blog posts with audio/video will improve the discovery potential for all these books.

(Note: there may be more money in selling courses based on the book, especially in non-fiction. Check out Udemy.)

9. Then: rinse, repeat.

Once you’ve done all you can for this niche set of books – and carefully published and marketed any additional books you’ve now found for this series – then you can do the market research to find a new niche (or related one) and do the above steps on it.

Note: now you have a mailing list, so your work can become even more popular and profitable.

The trick is to work our your own assembly line and market as you go. Stick to a simple batch of books before you start any further ones. Believe me, there’s a great deal of satisfaction helping people find a long-dead author’s work. But you want to get paid for your efforts. So marketing the books is key – and it’s what sets you apart from all the other PD re-publishers.

Why this works – Long Tail Marketing.

Mainly because it’s self-supporting. Publishing books and doing the minimal marketing of an attractive cover and enticing description will leverage on the existing brand of any author and their books. Distributing as ebooks to every possible ebook distributor should (depending on how profitable the niche/author is) give you regular income to reward you for your work.

When you use modern online marketing efforts to ensure the search engines know about your books, then you fuel a greater fire under that book – which improves discovery. Up to a few years ago, you couldn’t find these books other than in a used-book store. And in many cases, this is still true on Amazon.

By creating ebook versions, you are now introducing a new version so people can see if they like it. Then you also offer the hardcopy version, which most people still prefer.

It’s all Long Tail Marketing – meaning there are a lot of people out there for any particular niche. You don’t have to have bestsellers all the time, but they are nice. The trick is to give your niche some great value continually. As you add on more and related niches, you build a set of inter-referring web pages and marketing content (“if you liked this book/author/publisher, then you may also like…”)

This can leverage you into being able to publish full time – when your book sales approach approximately twice what you make at your day job. (That means it will pay for your monthly bills and Social Security, etc.)

For now, just have fun with this.

Posted in Amanda Hocking, Amazon.com, Google Play, iTunes, LibreOffice, lulu, public domain, publishing, Stephen King | 1 Comment

Staring an Indie SOHO Publishing Career and Making Income Immediately

Posted on February 23, 2015 by Robert Worstell

You Can Publish Your Friend’s, Neighbor’s, and Strangers’ Books From Your SOHO Publishing Business…

Staring an Indie SOHO Publishing Career and Making Income Immediately

(photo:epSos .de)

…with no more than the tools you already use to publish your own books.

It’s long been said that there is more money selling picks and shovels to gold miners than there is in mining gold itself.

The same is true for the publishing industry – which is what made vanity publishing such a hit.

I was reminded of this from a critic of John Locke who pointed out she was making more money with non-fiction courses than she was from trying to follow Locke’s model for her fiction books.

The recent DBW Survey pointed this out. While authors weren’t ecstatic to not make any money after they published their book, it at least made them happy that they got a copy in their hands, and some to hand out to their friends and family.

Not everyone wants to become a publisher. And I have been approached many times about publishing a book for someone else – but didn’t want to go through the whole scene about setting them up with a Lulu account, and so on.

Once you’ve worked out how to get books published – especially through public domain re-publishing – the actions become a bit second-nature.

The trick is how to send them their royalites.

While I haven’t tried this yet (disclaimer) – I know it to be possible.

It’s called Sharing Creator Revenue on Lulu.

You, as a publisher, can retain a percentage of their sales, while giving them the bulk of what they made as an author. They don’t have to do the work of publishing the book, and can opt to simply pay you a percentage of the royalties in lieu of (or in addition to) paying your publishing costs.

How to Share Revenue With Authors:

(This is from their page linked above.)

You may choose to share your earnings with co-authors, contributors, illustrators, or editors.

To create a Payment Contact record:

    Log into your Lulu account.
    Go to My Projects > My Revenues > Payment Contacts.
    Click Add New Payee.
    Complete the Payee record.
    Click Save.
    Repeat steps 3-5 until all contributors with whom you wish to share your revenue are entered.

To set up a project with split royalties:

    Log into your Lulu account.
    Go to My Projects > Project List.
    Click the Revise link next to the project for which split revenues are to be set.
    On the Project Details page, click the Edit button in the Creator Revenues Split field.
    The Revise Creator Revenues Split section displays a list of authors in your Payment Contacts list. Enter the percentages you wish to distribute to the listed contributors.
    Click Save.
    Creator Revenue will be allocated based on these percentages for all future sales of this content.

Once Creator Revenues percentages are set on a project, the revenue earned by each creator can be viewed from the My Projects > My Revenue page.

To view Creator Revenue Splits:

    Log into your Lulu account.
    Go to My Projects > My Revenue.
    Click Switch to Payment Information to view upcoming payments.
    Select the name or organization to view from the drop-down list.
    Click Apply to display revenue information for the selected payee.

Please Note:

Creator Revenues from all distribution channels (Lulu, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBookstore, etc.) are displayed on the My Revenue page. The displayed revenues are estimates based on retail sales and the creator revenues associated with each work. However, since all works are offered in all country stores, the exact amount paid to the author may vary slightly from the displayed, estimated revenue total. This is due to daily fluctuations in international currency conversion rates.

The payment creators receive is calculated based on the officially posted currency conversion rates on your “payday” – not the day on which the title sold.

Now you can hang out a shingle to help people publish their books!

Of course, you’ll likely make more income selling publishing training course, and then offering a “special discount” for anyone who started the course to have you publish your book for them.

The point is that you can help people get their work published, while setting up for extra income for yourself.

Note: this is just a work out for Lulu. I see Amazon won’t do splits (and I don’t recommend CreateSpace as independed bookstores discriminate against Amazon, sometimes.) Google also has nothing along this line.

Since you are going to be publishing original works, you simply have Lulu do the distributing, and so you’re set.

Legal notes – beware the sharks…

I found this great write-up on how a couple of authors would get a book printed. Even between friends, this means having contracts. Read what is recommended here. You may want to set up a separate Lulu account just for your publishing other people’s stuff – it would help keep everything perfectly straight.

As a matter of fact, I’d recommend that completely – set up a real business scene and keep everything completely separate. If there were ever any difficulty – or you ever wanted to sell the business – then you’d be able to turn it over quickly.

I can turn a PD book into a publish-able work in an afternoon. Cover, description, everything. So figure that’s around 5-6 hour’s specialist work, I could easily charge $1,000 plus a percent of any sales from there on out. They could make changes if they wanted, but would have to pay for any proofs, etc. If I had five clients every week, then I’d make $5G’s a week. Plus maybe 10% of their royalties. (Never do it for free, but that would increase the royalty split to 50%.)

That has no marketing in the mix. But I’d cover the how-to’s for authors in the course I’d be running – so they’d know what they needed to do if they wanted to really make the book take off.

Essentially, you’re running a vanity book publishing service, but not really. You might have the next “50 Shades” author on your hands – but he didn’t use any traditional means to get found.

You are charging way less than Bookbaby or that lot. If you’re a local publishing firm, you can have local authors find you – which is great for Google Local promotion. (And that takes me down a completely different line of thought – it’s very possible, and for Missouri – very poorly represented. No one is doing this, and anyone could.)

– – – –

Frankly, I’m better off simply having a contract only with myself. The authors I represent never complain.

It could be done, if you want to start your own business. The above gives you the backbone of it.

Luck to us all…

Posted in Amazon Kindle, Amazon.com, book, iTunes, lulu, Print on demand, public domain, publishing, SOHO | Leave a comment

How to Keep the IRS From Nickel and Diming Your Book Income

Posted on February 24, 2015 by Robert Worstell

A Little-Known Way to Get the IRS Off your Self-Publishing Back

(Graphic: DonkeyHotkey)

Just a (hopefully) short note about author earnings on Lulu.

Stumbled on this while researching my recent posts and thought you’d want to know.

Disclaimer: this isn’t financial advice. Even Jesus said to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.”

TIP: When Lulu gives you an ISBN, they have to report your earnings to the IRS. Use no ISBN (ebooks) or provide your own (hardcopies) and Lulu stays quiet.

From Lulu’s FAQs:

Creator Revenue: Frequently Asked Questions

What are Creator Revenues?

Creator revenue is the total money you earn from the sale of your published material. Creator revenue includes Royalties and Other Revenue.

Royalties
When a creator buys a Lulu distribution service and their material is assigned a Lulu-owned ISBN, Lulu becomes the publisher of record and all earnings are regarded as royalties for that material, regardless of delivery format. The creator revenue generated by sales of material with a Lulu-owned ISBN meets the true and legal definition of a royalty. Royalties are reported to the IRS and are subject to withholding according to United States of America tax laws.

Other Revenue
If your book does not have a Lulu-owned ISBN, then your earnings are not royalties but simply, “Other Revenue,” which is the amount of money you make on each sale of your published material. “Other Revenues” are not subject to withholding and are not reported to the IRS.

It’s a bit complicated when you get the IRS involved, since they think all your income belongs to them – or apparently.

You give Lulu your Tax ID and tell them you aren’t subject to withholding (otherwise, the government forces them to take 30% off the top.)

This “Other Revenue” scene can easily be done with your ebooks (but not with print books as simply.)

How to get book income that the IRS isn’t told about.

While Lulu ISBN’s make your book easy to find, they also get all your book sales reported to the IRS – since (more or less) you are a “contract worker” for Lulu, as they give you the ISBN and act as your publisher. So Lulu has to report your earnings to the IRS.

None of the self-publishing ebook distributors require any ISBN. They have their own reporting requirements, however, so that doesn’t mean you won’t get reported.

This really works best if you use Lulu to do all your distribution (except they don’t distribute to Google, which you really should utilize.) While you can use your Lulu ISBN for anywhere else you publish, Lulu only reports what they sold for you via their own services. I haven’t seen them reporting what I make from the other distributor sales – one reason is that they don’t know, and probably don’t care.

Lulu only distributes original works, but that’s no problem, right?

The IRS-free solution: either provide your own ISBN (extra expense) or don’t get a Lulu one. Then have Lulu distribute your ebook for you. All the income doesn’t get reported to the IRS, but you are going to have to go to each distributor to get your links – and your payments are slowed down, as well as analytics, etc.

Means you only have to report once a year on your own and no one is alerted about your income until you do.

The same would apply to your print books, which require a separate ISBN for each version. Provide your own in order to get them distributed by Lulu through their Global Reach (Ingrams, Amazon, et al.) and the IRS isn’t notified about your earnings.

How to make the most book royalty income hasn’t changed.

Take the free Lulu ISBN, but port to all the ebook distributors yourself. (Saves you distribution fees the other distributors charge to Lulu.)
Back your ebooks up with (ISBN-enabled) hardcopies which are at least available on Lulu, if not also through their Global Reach – so Amazon has your hardcopy listed with your ebook.
Build your list of readers with their emails, and alert them to new releases. (This can cause ranking-jumps in Amazon’s algorithms, particularly if they leave nice reviews for you.)
Give them special deals on hardcopy versions which are only available on Lulu (highest royalties.)

Takeaway:

Lulu ISBN’s are free, but they have to report your earnings to the IRS.

If you want the IRS off your back, but still want your books on Amazon, etc., then buy and provide your own ISBNs.

PS. Why do I recommend Lulu?

There are no upfront costs to publishing books.
There’s no discrimination on your hardcopies compared to CreateSpace (which is Amazon owned.)
Lulu has been around longer than most other indie author self-publisher services.

PPS. Theoretically, this would also apply to Smashwords – but they don’t do hardcopy books. I use Lulu as they do.

Posted in Amazon Kindle, author, book, E-book, Ebook Publishing, hardcopy, lulu, print version, publishing, self-publishing | Leave a comment

You connect with your readers via their story.

Posted on February 26, 2015 by Robert Worstell

It’s a point of how well do you fit in as a symbol, or an archetype for their journey.

This is a point of how well your marketing is able to be absorbed.

Thought you might be interested in this for your book marketing.

See Masters of Marketing Secrets series in order to get a better grip on these concepts.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Publishing 30 books in 5 hours on Amazon

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Robert Worstell

It is possible to publish over 2 dozen ebooks to Amazon in an afternoon.

Publishing a couple dozen books on Amazon doesn't mean you won't have a few that don't make it.

(photo: Alan Hudson)

Of course, there’s a great deal of work to get to that point. Over 2 months of preps.

And you should see how many were left on the cutting room floor. Over 70 others I didn’t bother submitting.

It took that long and I had so many leftover – because I didn’t really do my homework before I started. This was learn-as-you-go, and also making use of books which got rejected on an earlier test.

The good part is that now I have (or will have, once the smoke clears) around another 20 – 30 books on Amazon to add to my passive income, which has already make me financially free. (Now, I’m following Jim Rohn‘s advice and concentrating on getting rich…)

The point of this celebration post is to tell you that it is possible, and to lay out how you can do it on your own.

This posting is, of course, yet another test. All these tests are narrowing the target and becoming more remunerative.

While these 30 books were all ebooks, I’ve spent the couple of months getting them ready – or more accurately, getting several versions of most of these ready.

What worked really well

0. Using Public Domain books as source material. The editing is much quicker – especially if you use good quality material and don’t spend a lot of time on proofing OCR errors. The point here is to find niches which need and can use this material. Then find high quality versions of them in one form or another and re-publish them with fresh, attractive covers and enticing descriptions. Part of this is to do the homework before you invest even minimal time on them. I’ll cover that below.

1. Getting the print versions published ahead of the ebooks. I was surprised to find out that my print books were already there for several of these ebooks I was just publishing. Not all, but several. (I didn’t create hardcopy versions for all of them, only the ones which seems to be most profitable.) It does take some weeks to get the proofs back and then approved.

This is a marketing advantage, since the paperback is always higher than the ebook, so it looks to be a bargain. Many people get the ebook first, then the paperback (as they can be easier to read than an ereader, just bulky.)

2. Looking over these books from Amazon’s perspective – giving them new identities, rather than worn commodities. This is what sorted out quite a few of them. I’d only done a straight edit, and then slapped on a nice cover and found a description to use. What is really needed is to study out the book you find, as well as your niche, so you can present what is factually needed.

Collections always work. New titles can work. Amazon is looking these over for duplicate titles/authors in their metadata. Giving them something new bypasses that scrutiny.

I also suspect that by having a publishing imprint, rather than my own copyright on these books, has helped them move more quickly through the process. These are all copyrighted and published by “Midwest Journal Press”. So it fits their model of a company coming along and finding these books, then pushing their version out. The other point is to take the 35%, as they are public domain sourced. Yes, they are technically your new copyright, but the agreement is to take the lower percentage if they are mostly public domain material. Don’t want to run afowl of Amazon, now do we – meanwhile, you can crank out several dozen or more books in a month, compared to writing a single book in that time (most authors will only do 2-3 new books a year, so…)

There has been some change on Amazon’s algorithms, as many were approved and available for sale before I was even done submitting. Very nice.

The key is to not give them anything which will alert them.

What needed improvement

This started as another bulk test. I had yet another bunch of PLR books I wanted to test, as well as a nice chunk of books on agriculture which I found while looking for answers about some of the farming questions I had.

Throwing these up via Lulu got them all stalled.

But I kept finding more books to work up. Mainly because this is the last big test (probably) that I’ll be doing. So I wanted to get everything wrapped up, as I’ll be hitting the marketing scene massively right after I get all this batch published.

a. Not doing full homework first. Which is simply searching for the title on Amazon itself. You’re looking for:

Will they be able to get published on Amazon – so you can leverage the income from them?
Are they actually public domain?
Has someone already gotten them published there? (Many of these were published by Amazon themselves, at a $0 price point.)
Is there a market for them, or are you just amusing yourself?

The general sequence in such a scene would be to verify that the niche you are interested in can be monetized by selling books. Most can, as the people in any niche are usually rank beginners and are looking for everything they can find to tell them how to succeed at this stuff. But is the money they can pay you enough to keep you interested?

In my case, it was:

Publish the PLR as I already had it sitting around and this is a way to find out if people actually want the material you have. (I only published the material which already had good covers and the text was in decent shape.)
If the PD books I had been downloading to answer my own questions about farming were in decent shape, then I’d create a new cover and description for them. Figuring that if I was interested in these, some one else was as well – and would pay me for them (hope springs eternal.)

b. Working from a large batch, and not watching for mission creep – which was compounded by my lack of homework.

It ended up being 101 books, total. That’s way too many. I’d say that 10 is a big batch, if you are going to do any real marketing after you’ve published them.

Again, I started with some PLR, which is a crap shoot, since no one knows if this stuff is worth anything. This accounted for around 40 of the titles. And you market the ones which sell, then decide to do something with the rest when you can get to them. So marketing is started only when the title in question develops some sales without any marketing besides the cover (which came with the book) and description. Amazon simply doesn’t accept PLR as ebooks. (Print versions are different.)

The public domain books were then about 60 books, and only half of them were able to be published on Amazon – as they weren’t distinctive enough.

Closer to the end of this project, I started in on testing print versions as simultaneous releases – so I was keeping a better eye out for books which would publish on Amazon:

making collections
changing titles (radically)
finding a rare few which no one had ever made a Kindle version for.

c. Putting it off for fear of rejection.
When I had done this earlier, I had something like one in three being rejected. Of course, I then went back to find out what I’d been doing which caused the reject. Correcting this (making each book distinctive) gave me more courage to forge ahead.

As well, since I had built up a huge amount of books to submit, I had numbers in my favor. The key point was faith in what worked – which was the observation of others (plus my own testing to prove) that a “deep backbench” of books was the key to book income: Most books don’t sell well – some don’t sell at all – but a tiny handful sell extremely well.

Perhaps “fear” is too strong a word. But I really was avoiding the annoyance and extra work of the rejections.

d. In almost all these cases, I’m running blind in terms of marketing.
A small handful (about 6) out of these, I created collections to get these books onto Amazon. They are popular and sell well for me, but have other versions out there already. Those I had already worked up print versions for.

Another small set is following a passion point – the books fill a need which can be marketed. But doing this without a real marketing plan means, at worst, I will have some nice paperweights around my home-office to press leaves with, etc.

One nice scene was finding a very over-priced textbook which is a high-demand book. Now I have the hardback, paperback, and Kindle versions up – at lower price point. Just a little marketing should send most of this demand my way. (Again, that eternal hope, based on my own wants.)

You develop the marketing as you develop the product. There’s a great deal to sort out along this line. That’s the subject of my third and final book along this line. (Then I’ll make a collection of all three together, and hopefully they’ll start selling at that point – otherwise, a nice effort.)

The statistics so far:

70% failure on porting to Amazon. All 101 will be able to be posted to iTunes, Nook, Kobo, and Google.
Of those 30 that made it, I still have a small handful which are in draft (typically for typo’s) and perhaps will have to field some questions tomorrow or by Monday. With this new script they have running, I don’t see getting much blowback on these.
12 are currently in Review or Draft. (I see that I already have 3 email queries to answer from these. So close to 50% immediate success, which is about 15% of the total I started with. And that’s just about 6 hours after I started submitting.

All this is much better than the last time I was submitting to Amazon. I’ve gotten better at submitting, and they’ve gotten better at reviewing and accepting.

Where to next?

The entire set of 100+ ebooks will get posted to the other distributors as noted above. Using Calibre, this is pretty much a cut/paste scene.

Out of those, I’ll then start getting some additional sales.

The hardcopy versions I’ve approved for distribution will also be tests of income. I’ve a few more to proof and approve, which will tend to back up ebook sales.

As these complete, I’ll then have built a decently deep backbench of authors and titles to afford the upcoming marketing of the smallish handful that routinely sell.

What about the rejects? None were key books I feel to be basic to my marketing approach. I can revisit them whenever I feel a test is needed. Now I know more of how to make them a success.

Real market analysis will be a next action.

The main approach is to get titles that should start generating list opt-in’s, such that I can start generating “instant Amazon bestsellers” by doing real releases for these books. Again, all this will build as I go. The backbench passive income will pay for investing it more extensive marketing costs.

Upcoming as part of that is a membership setup, which will then leverage all this content (as well as giving opportunities for other services) – even as I keep adding to it by linking in all these books, as well as creating low-cost digital and hardcopy versions. DVD’s also are on the horizon as additional products to offer.

Yes, there are several marketing tests which are going to be needed. So you can stay tuned for this (subscribe by email or RSS feed on the above right. The opt-in isn’t yet ready, sorry.)

Sidebar: Why all this work on ebooks when hardcopy versions show up on Amazon?

Short answer: Because ebooks and hardcopies help each other sell better. Ebooks are also cheaper and faster to create.

Right now, there is a boom on ebooks, which appears to be leveling off (depending on who you read.) More book sales means more of each.

Ebooks can also send people directly to your website to join your list – which is still the most effective way of monetizing your readers.

And the more you earn, the more you can help others improve their lives.

Update: The rejects

The speed of these acceptances shows that this is a near-automatic scene. Most rejects were kicked back or put on hold within that first few hours:

16 were approved right off.
12 are “in review”.
2 are “in draft” from spelling errors.
1 is “in draft” after being summarily rejected.
1 was blocked after being summarily rejected.

Those in review had titles very close, if not near identical to existing books.

3 books are needing some handling before they can be accepted.

The key word in the rejects is in “undifferentiated.”

One of the books which was rejected was simply put into “draft” mode. Nice, as I can then edit it into some other shape. Essentially, combine it with another book and re-title.

Update2: at nearly 24 hours, I still have

8 “in review” – 3 of these have been queried to me.
5 are in draft, one with uncorrected typo’s, the other 4 rejected.
15 are Live on Amazon Kindle
1 was blocked.

Of 29 books submitted, I’m still potentially able to get 24 Live on Amazon within the next several days (figuring that publishing on Thursday gave them a problem, since 5 of the 8 in review have not been responded to – probably needing human attention.)

Legal issues will get you rejects.

The one that was blocked I strongly suspect has some sort of prior legal claim on it. A similar book with a different title had a lawyer contact me about a trademark infringement, so I pulled it back and retitled. Much earlier this year, I had mistakenly posted books which had actually been under copyright, as I found from re-researching them. Those two books were blocked as I had used the content and title for these two (now-blocked) books.

In this current case, the book is in public domain, but that doesn’t stop the lawyers from threatening – which Amazon and any large corporation will avoid. Funny enough, the trade-paperback is up on Amazon – but they aren’t the publisher for that one, so it’s not on them. (The lawyer who emailed me seemed intent on badgering any new publication of that public domain work from showing up.)

This new version had two additional titles included as a collection, so it wasn’t a case of being “undifferentiated.” The legal restraint explanation seems to hold the most water.

(Update: In a search on Amazon, I’m finding that it looks like that particular title is slowly being eradicated on Kindle by the lawyers. Where there were several different versions available a month ago, mostly this has narrowed down to almost only books by the client those lawyers represent. Apparently.)

When they don’t think your book is different enough (Update)

Again, Amazon wants unique books. “Differentiated” is their term.

Here’s what they said about another three of them:
Differentiated books must include (Translated), (Annotated), or (Illustrated) in the title field. For example, “Pride and Prejudice (Annotated)” is acceptable, while “Pride and Prejudice (With an Introduction by Tiffany Gordon)” is not.

While it’s possible that other features may make books unique, we only allow the criteria noted above. Examples not considered differentiated include a linked table of contents, formatting improvements, collections, sales rank, price, freely available Internet content, etc.

If your book conforms to one or more of the criteria listed above, please edit your book details to reflect this differentiation by updating the title, and resubmitting it for publishing following the instructions provided below.

Claiming differentiation when your book is not sufficiently differentiated may lead to account termination or loss of access to KDP optional services.

Mainly, a search on their site would have predicted this. If you have more than two others, you are going to have to do something different. Right now, the best solution is to combine books into collections (binders) and title them as completely unique as possible – again, a search on Amazon will tell you this.

These three books had similar, but not identical titles – close enough for Amazon to say, “Close, but try again.”

The Amazon PD solution seems to be collections.

This is simply done in Calibre with the epubmerge plug-in. Just edit these after you are done merging – such as converting it to html and then opening that file up in LibreOffice to convert via Writer2Epub plug in. (It’s so easy, I almost started setting all these up with new versions – a perfect solution for the books I already didn’t submit based on competition.)

For instance, two dairy books make one decent one. Two agriculture textbooks make a nice fat one. Two books on raising vegetables and “fast cash crops” combine for a new binder with a different approach. My favorite one is two early books on horses – one on breaking wild horses, with another on how ladies ride sidesaddle – becomes, “Wild Horse Taming, Simple Training, and Elegant Riding – A Guide for Horsewomen and their Gentlemen: Two Classics with Practical Methods and Preferred Etiquette”.

Frankly, I don’t have any more time for this right now. I could see that this takes me down a line of work (rabbit hole) which distracts from the immediate goal of simply getting these books published and out (more mission creep).

What the above does tell me is how to publish books which are similar, but need to be differentiated from other works there – even where Amazon doesn’t have their own copy available.

The rule is – if you are using the same title or close, include “(Annotated)” or “(Illustrated)” in your book title per their instructions.

Again, I’m already over my head with work, so this will be another time – and you can expect a follow-up blog post…

Competing with Amazon will get you rejects

One interesting note is that two books I submitted are well-known to be in the public domain, but these were queried by Amazon. But interestingly, they asked for my proof of my license to publish them. I found that they have been selling these books on Kindle and making a nice profit from them. No, they probably don’t have any particular proof of their right to publish them, either.

The solution to this is to treat them as public domain per their requirements – add material and make them “annotated”. Since I already have added an additional essay to each, this should be a simple matter. Or, I can simply combine the two into a single book collection, or combine other short books with them.

Lots of solutions when you know what rules to play by.

The timing says it’s more computer than person doing the sorting.

Statistically, nearly 50% were approved right off. I have notices for three books which can simply be answered, which should put them in the right. I suspect that the rest of that dozen in review will all either pass (after a probable human review) or need some minor “herding” through.

Of note is that the algorithms seem to run in batches:

Amazon acceptances of published books by Midwest Journal Press appear to run in batches.

The first on that list was a minor edit I did for a price-change, which was before I started adding the new books. Most of them started coming in just as I was quitting for the night, about 7 hours after I’d started.

I suspect that sometime today the rest will show up in one column or the other.

Thick skin, hard shell, whatever – PD publishing is brave work.

And it’s really a numbers game. The more books you have up there, the greater chance you are finding and giving value which someone will appreciate. Commodity approach to publishing won’t cut it – there are already free versions out there. Ebook readers are getting tired of free – they don’t read them right off, if at all, just no value in them. Stick to paid books as they are more valuable.

This project review: starting with just over 100 books:

40 were self-rejected as being PLR. I’ve looked this up – they simply don’t make it on Amazon.
Another 30 were self-rejected after I checked to see if I wasn’t giving them the same title and book already there.
3 have hit the review pile – needing queries answered.
Only two have been summarily rejected – which is around 7 percent of the 30 I published.
There are still around 12 more which are in limbo at this writing, just under 50%.
The other 50% (about 15% of the total I started with) are now live on Amazon.

So I successfully published 15 books in a handful of hours, with another dozen in the wings, ready to take flight. Months of work in publishing gave me a complete education on how to break into the biggest bookseller with other author’s works.

The trick is to have your vision and hold it in front of you all the time.

You do indeed make your own reality.

What’s next in publishing?

Other than shepherding these remaining few through Amazon, I’ll be back to bulk publishing shortly.

As I noted, all the others will take these books with no problem: Kobo, Nook, iTunes, Google. They just don’t do hardcopy versions – but will link to them.

I’ve already started with Google, since that’s a simple bulk upload, and they do differentiate by meta-data and don’t reject.

With Calibre holding the data, it will be a simple scene of just porting each book to each distributor. Work, yes, but in this volume, they should start paying off within the month.

Again, the great point here is the passive income which keeps coming after I did the original work.

After all the dust settles from this publishing, then I’ll be getting into marketing for real. There are some very simple point of posting their covers with links, going to OpenLibrary to update about the titles I’ve just published – and leave more links. There’s the landing pages for these books to update.

When you really look over marketing, book publishing becomes a small part of the whole media production scene. Yes, I’ll still be publishing books, but not individually or with a shotgun approach. The next ones will be part of a media production roll-out/launch.

Books aren’t a path to success, but they make great stepping stones. (So get out the concrete mix, we’ve got some muddy spaces ahead to travel over…)

Some publishing-on-Kindle takeaways:

Know the rules, and know if they are following them. For the most part, Amazon applies what’s convenient for them. Too many competitors, and they reject your book as yet another commodity they already have. Legal issues unseen may block your project. Competing with Amazon itself may get your book rejected.

If you find a book which isn’t on Kindle, get your ebook up there and it should sail through.

If you have an ebook which Amazon is already giving away, then either
a) make a collection by combining it with another book and radically change the title – or
b) follow their annotated/illustrated/translated approach

But note that just because it’s a PD book, you don’t have to declare it as such to get it on Kindle. None of the above were declared to be PD, but I also didn’t take the 70% royalty and published under an imprint, not a person’s name. That may or may not matter, your mileage may/will vary.

My potential of 82% publishing success rate on top of these lessons was encouraging.

Now I can get back to publishing all these original 100 books on the other four distributors.

Update – 24 hours later:

It’s been very nearly 24 hours now since I wrapped up my submissions. I finally heard back around dinner time on the other 5 books held in review.

In each case, they asked me to either verify I had publishing rights or that the books were in the public domain. All of these books except one were collections, meaning they had at least 3 authors (one had 6) – so I then had to find a site which said when the author died, and when they published their book for every single author. Since many were post 1923 and pre-1964, I had to then give the Stanford database link to show that they’d never renewed their copyright (proving a negative is sometimes impossible.)

Amazon is the only distributor which does this. This is exactly why I didn’t want to jump into this scene with them. PITA. But now I’ve answered all their questions and these should all now be approved. I’ll have two books to edit so that they are no longer competing with Amazon as Kindle books, and then I’m done.

Thought I’d be working on another distributor by now – but having all my books reviewed within 24 hours is probably the drill which will need to be expected.

Addtitional rule out of this – where possible, create the book’s landing page ahead of time for that book with the links you need, especially for the collections. Then it’s sending them only a single link with everything laid out. A bit anal, yes. Book publishing is full of details. You already do the research – just note it down somewhere so you can get back to it – like Calibre.

I did have to make such a page for one of my books – the rest allowed me to simply send them the links in an email. Only Amazon. Sigh.

Update – over 48 hours later:

Now its

16 approved and live
7 in review
5 in draft
1 blocked

Breakdown:

All the books which were not represented on Kindle were approved right off. Meaning the title was distinctly different from anything they already had.
4 of the books which were too similar to Amazon’s free Kindle books were returned to draft. (The fifth book in draft has a typo, even though this particular book was also queried to me.)
1 book with an apparent (and unknown) legal problem in the title was blocked (see below).
3 books were queried on the basis of publishing rights – meaning Amazon itself was the only author selling a version on Kindle. (All of these books were public domain, but their query was publishing rights.)
5 out of the 10 collections I posted were queried.

Additional data came to light – that Amazon wants a single URL for each book which gives the author date of death and first published data. This can simply go into the landing page you were building anyway – like at the bottom. These links generally go to Wikipedia or OpenLibrary.org, so will just increase the authority of your page anyway. (Giving them the link in response to their email simply got a succinct request for the single URL.) More than likely, you simply need to respond with that URL to begin with.

Update – nearly 72 hours later

19 live
4 in review
4 in draft
2 blocked

We are running up against/over Amazon’s own limits to reviewing books. I’ve asked (again) that two of these in review be returned to edit mode so I can “fix” them. I re-sent the URL’s for the other two books.

The books remaining in review all have problems:

Two are only sold by Amazon, no competitors – I’ve asked these to be returned.
One is a collection of classic erotica, with a suggestive cover – may violate their “porn” policy.
The last has pages and pages of Kindle competitors – none are collections of three books into one.

On the face of it, I can understand if all are rejected. I could also understand all of them being approved. Either way, it’s been a real learning experience. (And has backed up why I haven’t been too keen to publish on Amazon. Prior research and homework would have made a much simpler experience – but that is what tests are for.)

Final update – over 96 hours since I started:

Only 2 left in review.
2 were sent back to draft making 6
19 live
2 blocked.

The email I got back a couple of hours ago (just opened) said for me to re-send a URL which gave the public domain status of those two book still in review.

I checked, and the other two books were back in draft, as I’d requested.

At this point, I simply asked them to put the other two books back to draft so I could remove them. I’ll probably leave them in draft until I have time to get back to this. Obviously, I overloaded their system. And got tired of the hassles.

Results: 19 out of 30 were approved. The others weren’t so lucky. End of test. Lots of lessons learned.

Note: Another solution is coming out of this – how to sell books directly from my own site and also give the links to other distributors. Meaning anyone can get the books which Amazon won’t offer – and be able to load these into the Kindle reader. I also get 90% royalties!

Meanwhile, I can also offer the PDF for sale – basically any digital product. Nice. And bundles of things. Very nice. Free to set up, they’re paid by your sales. Paypal or credit card. Very, very nice. Blog post upcoming…

Takeaway –

Search on Amazon first, even before starting your editing. You need to know if you need to build a collection and how wildly different your title needs to be.
Build your landing page before submitting your book. Always. Collect the author’s death and first published data as you check for copyrights. Hold this data in Calibre, along with the links – or a text file you won’t delete somwhere. You could also build a “for record” (draft) blog post to start with, and then flesh this out with the cover and description – as well as buying links – when these become available.
Keep your batches small(ish).

How this affects your sequence of publishing and marketing

Generally, you follow your bliss. You can collect up a bunch of books you thing would help, and then research them to see if they pass, based on a) copyright data b) Amazon competition.

Keep your batch to 10 or less books.
Take only those which pass as public domain. You may find orphans, but you won’t be able to get them through Amazon, as they’ll ask you for proof of publishing rights – which you can’t provide, as the author is dead (and usually that publishing firm as well.)
Books that are only being sold by Amazon on Kindle are going to get some scrutiny. Also, where Amazon is giving the free version away.
Amazon research will tell you your title – or inspire you for it. Mentioning another existing book title even in your subtitle will alert their algorithms.
Save all your the above research data to Calibre, so you can build your landing pages before you publish. A draft (not live) page with this data and hard links would help.
Finalize your marketing approach preferably before you start editing, and then tweak it as you go.
Part of this marketing is to survey your biggest affiliate partners to see when your launch would work in with their schedule.
Publish in Lulu first, to get their ISBN’s (unless you’re buying your own).
Get your hardcover approved first, which takes weeks due to proofing.
If you are setting these up for pre-publishing sales, this has to be started with Lulu, and then continued with all the distributors you port to later. You don’t have to send these books out to wide distribution (Global Reach) from Lulu until you’re ready. Also, make some hardback versions which are Private Access and lower price just for your “velvet rope people” (mailing list).
Build your landing pages for all books, and save them to draft. If Amazon needs that URL to verify your book, it can be set to Private Access.
Publish to Amazon, Google, iTunes, Nook, and Kobo. Do each distributor one at a time, preferably in the order of greatest meta-data required – so later ports go faster. The order above generally seems the simplest.
Get all your book launch material ready. Opt-in forms, ecourses, video’s, etc.
Announce to affiliate sales people to get more in on the launch.
Do your pre-launch promotion.
Do your launch promotion.
Pay your affiliates in full and get their feedback.
Do your post-mortem analysis after the launch is complete.

The emphasis on Amazon research is because this is the biggest leverage you have on that book’s income.

The reason for also publishing everywhere else is to not leave money on the table. No distributor’s audience matches the others. You may not make as much money as on Amazon – or you may make more.

Another reason is to let the search engines know, spreading link-love from one to the other, and taking multiple spots on Google’s front page for that search.

An initial price of .99 will get you the reviews, and then your price goes up once the release is off. (You can also send them PDF or epub versions once they send you a copy of their receipt for buying on Amazon. Maybe even a hardcopy version – for the first 25-50-100 or so.)

You’ll then have follow-up releases for the next books in this series, as well as collections of part or all of the books. With the email list you have of buyers, you can simply make each one an “Amazon bestseller”.

After all of this, you also can then do a release to affiliates, with a bundle of all these digital properties and the videos, etc. Low price during the release, and then it rises up to the full price – until you do another launch, where people get a special offer, or you take down the bundle temporarily. These make your launches evergreen – meaning that they earn you more income all year ’round.

Properly done, you’ll make more income with affiliate sales than on Amazon. But getting a bestseller on Amazon will help your affiliate sales take off.

I don’t cover the idea of running paid courses or a paid membership. The more books you have, the more material you can offer, the more income you can make. The key approach is to market as you go, getting all you can from every book you publish. (Do as I say, not as I’ve done. But someone had to scout this trail, didn’t I?)

– – – –

There’s a lot more details to this marketing approach – these are just the highlights. I’ve got a lot more blog posts to do. This one is way too long – it’s a place to lay everything out as part of an upcoming book. Print it out as a PDF or hardcopy and mark it up for study.

Again, don’t get serious over this. Books are stepping stones on your journey, not any key make-or-break point of your life. We are moving from self-published author to indie publisher to media producer.

Enjoy the journey.

– – – –

13/3 – Final Final Update (hopefully.)

Got a brainstorm this afternoon to go back to cross-check those emails. It seemed significant that some emails were signed and some not.

When I put them all on a spreadsheet, it became pretty obvious:

A computer algorithm is handling all the initial requests (the no-name responses). If the title is decidedly different from anything they already have, then they let it through.

If there is any query, you’ll get a personal email after you reply.

But the automatic query can still ask a few things:

If the title is close to a PD book they already have, then it’s rejected as needing to be “differentiated” and put as draft.
If there are legal problems, you’ll be either blocked directly (and told it wasn’t differentiated enough) or queried for publishing rights. If your book still lives, then politely request it be put back to “edit” mode so you can delete it. (And yes, then promptly delete it – tell you why in a second.)
If they ask for information about the author death date and first publication date, then give them a URL with this information. Otherwise, they’ll simply ask for a URL in the next email.

Note: These automatic queries all came after a delay of some hours after the original approvals, most the next day (which could have been early am.)

After you respond, as I said above, the next query email would be from a real person, however their pat responses are all cut/paste unless you ask them a direct question.

They will ask for a URL as it’s apparent that the books are built from public domain content. (7 out of 29.)
They will ask for proof of publishing rights. (Twice out of 29.)
They will tell you your book isn’t differentiated and block it. (Once twice of 29.) You won’t know about the legal problems until after your book is blocked – and even then, it’s a supposition. They only say “not differentiated” or “not publish at this time.” But it’s blocked either way.

If you don’t give them a URL, or give them a URL where it’s not obvious about the data they want, then they may ask you again. The funny part happened when I told them to simply return them to draft so I could edit them. Something kicked in with the auto-computer and the books wound up blocked as “I hadn’t given them the URL in five days.” When I quoted their email back, they again put it in draft – where I promptly deleted them (along with everything else in draft.)

You don’t want to mess with these guys. Every single email has that threat that they’ll cancel your account if you keep up sending them questionable books.

Publishing public domain is a very fine road. With a steep drop-off on both sides.

I even found one of my books was auto-approved and then later was simply “not available for sale.” So I put it back into draft on my own. Something not quite right about that book – again, I didn’t research what was out there – so it’s probably duplicate in content, if not in title, to something else. The computer algorithm erred, so they simply put it into a quiet blacklist status. Result is the same – it’s not available for sale.

Bottom line: Research everything before you post anything. Change the titles utterly – it seems that subtitles and series count as the whole title. Look for duplicate content to yours.

No, you won’t know about the legal hassles Amazon has already been through. But when you have extremely popular books, with lots of copies available – on both hardback as well as Kindle, then you should probably leave it alone – or publish an extensive study gude, an original work.

Original works are always wanted – only as long as you don’t duplicate someone else’s title.

Posted in bestseller, book, book sales, E-book, Ebook Publishing, Free content, kindle, Lowest common denominator, Print on demand, publishing | Leave a comment

The Numbers Racket and Amazon’s Public Domain Problems.

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Robert Worstell

Amazon’s problem with public domain books are overcome by sheer numbers.

You beat Amazon at public domain by having a lot of dogs hunting for you.

(Photo: Conor Lawless)

You beat Amazon at public domain publishing by having a lot of dogs hunting for you.

Recently was in the middle of a test which had 30 public domain books submitted to Amazon to see how many I could get approved (thinking at the outset – all of them.) Also, I wanted to test their policies in this area.

Looks like it may have a great deal to do with their internal policies which aren’t available.

What inspired this post was a reject which simply said:

Thank you for the information you provided regarding the following book(s):

….

We have reviewed the information you provided and have determined that we will not be making the book(s) available for sale in the Kindle store at this time.

And…?!?

Since each of these books had been carefully researched to be in the public domain, the only other problem is that it directly conflicted with a book which was being sold by Amazon itself which had the same or similar title/author. The problem with this reject was that they are giving no solution or recommendation – like “not well enough differentiated.”

So the book was just blocked.

It could have been the personal problems and attitudes of the person having to deal with the decision on a Sunday evening.

It does make Amazon look a bit heartless.

And we are talking Kindle here. Just Kindle. I’ve got epubs everywhere else.

Otherwise, if you look up this book, you’ll see my hardcopy version is sitting there.

These are the three points I learned from this test:

When Amazon has the only Kindle book for sale, they won’t be letting you put up competition to them any time soon.
If other people have other public domain items there (and especially if Amazon is giving that title/author away for free) then you have half a chance, provided yours is “(annotated)” or “(illustrated)” in the title.
If no one else has a Kindle version of that old book up there, then you can shoo right in.

It takes searching for your book title before you put your dog in the hunt.

The other option is to make the title completely different from anything seen before. (So that new title sounds like no book they’ve ever seen before…)

The bottom line here: Amazon doesn’t really seem to like competition. They like unique, single, different items.

Everyone else who published ebooks simply let the market decide. The better cover, description, and price wins. Except on Amazon.

However, I’m not going to worry about it much (after I get this particular rant done.)

Look, in just under 72 hours since I submitted 30 books to Amazon, I’ve gotten 2 blocked, 4 are in “Draft”, 4 are still “In Review” and 20 approved. Almost all of the books I submitted this time have hardcopy versions as well. Ebooks and hardcopy books supposedly sell more of each other (that’s another test being done with this.)

The most important takeaway is what you can learn from this:

Amazon doesn’t apply it’s public domain policies unless they are the exact same book with the exact same title. Technically, if you create a new version, it’s not now in the public domain – whatever is yours about it, if it’s only the cover – that gives you a new copyright. However, your agreement with them is that if it is composed mostly of public domain material, you can’t claim the 70% royalty.
If you compete head to head with Amazon, expect a query and a reject. Learn to research your books before you simply try to “float another book” up to Amazon.
Amazon now has somewhat less than 50% of the ebook market. If you also publish on iTunes, GooglePlay, Nook, and Kobo – you’ll have the rest of the market.
Amazon is the pickiest of all of these. (Except outlets who won’t even accept anything except original works – Smashwords, Leanpub, Scribd.) All the other distributors will take just about anything. And they don’t base their “if you liked” recommendations on inflated reviews – only Amazon.
The only reason you are at Amazon at all is to get better leverage over your sales. The bestsellers I have at Amazon generally sell well everywhere else as well. I am getting sales on the other distributors which are from PLR or PD books which haven’t had to be specially edited or combined to jump over Amazon’s higher bar. Meanwhile, any hardcopy book I’d publish will pass that Amazon bar easily. It’s all leverage. Some leverage is better than having no book selling out there.
Finally, recognize that Amazon is trying to keep a walled garden growing with their Kindle books – and failing. Their market share has been dropping every year for the last decade. (Something to do with how they are treating people.) If you make your book available everywhere else and are making income off these – it’s more income than you’d make off Amazon alone. If you are also making money from those same books you have on Amazon, you are still making more money than you would have made on Amazon alone.

That is the key takeaway to this rant: show up everywhere you possibly can with as many offers as possible. (And meanwhile, don’t sweat the small stuff.)

I’m now busy porting those same 30 plus the other 70 I didn’t even bother putting up on Amazon to get them to work hunting up sales for me. (I can just about hear those hounds calling…) I’ve got 4 more distributors to post these works to, and little time to be distracted by arcane rejects. Posting 400 versions is still a lot of work.

But you can see that 400 hound dogs will do a lot more hunting than 30.

Just because you were handed a mystery sandwich, don’t get stuck on it. Just swallow hard and fuggetaboutit. Like I had to tell myself – I’ve got 20 out of 30 approved. So this is 20 more books which potentially can give me more income.

The six I’ve had rejected I’ve learned from. The four still in review I’ve got a 50/50 chance. Two of those, I’ll ask (again) to withdraw so they don’t get blocked (they are both competing directly with Amazon and look to be a problem – pulling them now would prevent them getting blocked.)

That would bring me up to eight which didn’t make it. So it’s just shy of a 75% success rate. Used to be about 66%. So now I know.

The other point is that it’s just been 72 hours. Sure, with these other distributors I may get some rejects, one or two maybe. So 398 books out there is still a much better reception than what I got on Amazon. But it’s really their loss. My hardback is up there, and could be giving them a two-for with the ebook. My ebook looks better, has a better description, and will sell better – making them more profit than they will get by rejecting that one book. Again, it’s their loss – I’ve got a lot more hounds to hunt with.

Frankly, I won’t be trying a bulk test like this again. It’s a lot of stress. I’ll do my homework better, and then I should be able to raise it to closer to 95% or more. (Working on unique titles is the key, little else.)

So Amazon can stick their rejects where it could do them the most good. I’m just little fish to them. Not worth getting in a snit about this, or doing something which would reflect badly on my account.

I’ve got a lot more dogs doing my hunting than just one. So it’s back to work.

Posted in Amazon Kindle, Amazon.com, book, E-book, Ebook Publishing, epub, Goodreads, ibookstore, iTunes, lulu, publishing, smashwords | Leave a comment

Solving Competition and Making Profits by Indie Publishing

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Robert Worstell

Competition Can Be Both Good and Bad For Indie Publishing – Particularly With Public Domain Books

(photo: Ronel Reyes)

Some ebook distributors don’t want you competing with other titles, others encourage it. Amazon and Google seem to be at different ends of this scale.

Publishing the same books to both of them shows why.

Amazon hates Competition

Just finished up a rant on getting a reject from Amazon (that made 5 out of a recent batch of 30.)

What this showed was that you want to only submit unique titles to Amazon for them to process as Kindle ebooks. On hardcopy books, they don’t (can’t) care. If you go head-to-head with an ebook which Amazon itself is selling or giving away, you lose – unless you change the title radically so it’s now a “different” book.

The two solutions to dealing with Amazon are to a) Submit content with only new, radically different titles from the original – which includes “(annotated)” or “(illustrated)” tacked to its end, or b) Offer collections of ebooks, which also have titles which aren’t in their database of books.

The titles are the key.

Google likes Competition

But on the other hand, submitting those same books to Google Play/Books showed the opposite. Google took them without question or reject.

With Google, you profit when they send people to your ebook and they buy it via Google – or are sent to Lulu to buy your hardcopy book. And in this case, you want to have the exact same title, or very close. Because then you fit into their search patterns for “other editions”. And getting your book so Google will index it and send people to you – that is the Holy Grail of online marketing.

Here, having the same title works to your advantage – since Google now sends them to your ebook and your flashy cover shows up better than the stodgy versions that are sitting there. If they want your hardcopy instead, it’s just a click away. (And when you sell a hardcopy book on Lulu instead of through Amazon, you can make 2-3 times the income off the same book.)

The titles don’t matter.

Caveats

A couple of caveats here: for both Amazon and Google, it doesn’t matter if the epub itself is called something slightly different than the book cover.

When you upload your epub to Google, they read it for the embedded meta-data, which includes the title – and so match it up with other books that have the same title.

Amazon takes the meta-data you give it when you submit via KDP. So you could have two titles for the same epub, in theory.

This isn’t true for hardcover books. I’ve had to re-proof books on Lulu going out through their Global Reach where the title page of the book didn’t exactly match the cover – at least the title and subtitle and author(s).

Your meta data has to match your cover on iTunes and Amazon, not so much everywhere else. Since we are dealing with an assembly line here, it pays to be excruciatingly honest.

How you win on both counts.

It’s all in your marketing. The whole point of commerce is to add value to people’s lives. Your bliss has led you to books which are out of print, or poorly offered. And you’ve done your research to find out that they are in an area which people will pay good money for those solutions. You know where you want to go in order to add value and get rewarded for your efforts.

The trick is in what you are offering.

Ideally, you create a single book which is published everywhere. Just assembly line your batch of books for this area and get them all ready.

But Amazon doesn’t want what you post freely to Google, iTunes, Nook, Kobo, and everywhere else (that accept PD books.)

Solution:

Edit the books into shape with new covers and nice descriptions, etc.
Post these to Google, iTunes, Kobo, Noot – everwhere except Amazon (yes, the hardcopy versions will show up there, anyway.) That’s unless Amazon doesn’t have that title in their Kindle database.
Create collections of these works and give these unique titles and flashy covers/descriptions, as usual – and post these to Amazon as well as everywhere else. (Now your 6 books can become 9 or more…)

Everyone wins at this.

All your readers get high-quality books in the format(s) they want.
You choose the races you want to win, and win all the races you choose.
The race tracks have their nice little races just the way they want them.

Have fun with this…

Posted in Amazon Kindle, Calibre (software), google, International Standard Book Number, iTunes, Kobo Inc., LibreOffice, lulu, Nook | Leave a comment

GooglePlay just recently worked out a nice little sequence of steps – a checklist – you can follow to publish your books there.

(See also their troubleshooter.)

Step 1. Create an account

Step 2. Set up your payment profile

Step 3. Specify a bank account

Step 4. Add sales territories

Step 5. Enable currency conversion (optional)

Step 6. Tell us about your book

Step 7. Provide prices

Step 8. Configure distribution settings

Step 9. Configure preview settings

Step 10. Upload content

Step 11. Enable the book for sale

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Kobo’s recent piggy approach to public domain self-publishing has a lesson.

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(photo: 401(k) 2012)

PLR

Doesn’t Apply to Printed Works

A New Business Plan

Some reference links:

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Some places to check for copyright orphans before you give up on that great public domain book.

Now, what do we do with this?

PLR

Next for me is a 30-day workfest

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Is the business plan for publishing public domain and PLR books dead?

Here’s the rundown on who accepts public domain:

Can you (still) publish PLR books?

What was the problem Lulu is having to solve?

Is a profitable business plan still possible with public domain?

The lowest-common denominator (LCD) approach.

Is PLR the same?

Why haven’t I been doing this all along?

Google’s strange copyright scene.

Why publish public domain if it’s all this hassle?

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iTunes, unlike Amazon, doesn’t seem to be a walled garden. But there are hurdles which they put in place to keep indie authors out.

Lulu put a crimp in my business plan

Why it’s cheaper to do it yourself – a review of aggregators

What the major distributors pay

What the major aggregators cost

DIY vs. Aggregators (per ebookdesigns.com)

So what about publishing on iTunes now that Lulu won’t?

Can public domain publishing earn sufficient income as a business plan?

A possible assembly-line for public domain books

Summary

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Adventures in Apple-land: Using a MAC as a Self-Publishing Platform

When we last left our hero, he had made the decision – and leapt into the mist.

Back to business.

The blow-by-blow continues…

What you’ll need to simply get started creating your ebooks just like you did on Windows or Linux:

Whoring the MAC to get to iTunes.

An alternative work-flow

Additional marketing goodies

Hardware wars – over?

Batch production

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Publishing public domain books means volume and repetitive tasks – an assembly line.

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Affiliate Book Sales can earn you even higher book royalties. Some tricks, though.

Here’s the breakdown:

Do you want to run your own affiliate program?

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Sequence and Feeding of eBook Distributors – How to take it easy and make extra passive income meanwhile.

The Lowest Common Denominator versus the Covers-All-Bases approach

Notes:

Then what?

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Getting More Distributors Means More Eyeballs, More Income

That brings us to Leanpub.

Don’t do what I did – Build your book in Leanpub first.

A Critique of Leanpub

Problems I ran into on Leanpub

Current publishing-distributors sequence:

How to make money with these distributors

Notes on how to start your own home publishing business

Building an Audience