Thought I could get away from this for awhile while I move to Rainmaker, but moving makes dust – and dust makes you sneeze. Here’s some sneezes I’ve been supressing:
Why digital sharecropping is dying and will take you with it.
Got a comment on one of my other blogs about how he was going along publishing public domain books on Google Play and suddenly got kicked off. So that income line is permanently down for him, from what I gather.
I imagine that his problem is in not having already built his audience. You build your audience, find out what they are interested in and then produce the books in the format they want. Along the way, you also publish the distributors like Google Play, Amason, iTunes, etc.
This is a lesson I’m only just learning – probably just in time.
An old (March 18, 2013) podcast from Entreproducer with Eric Reis pointed out that many times, when you are trying to fit into Amazon’s mold, you’re actually throwing away income. Think about it – where does Amazon want you to price your book? $2.99 to $9.99. That gets you into their Kindle program, which is a walled garden. Reis sold his as a PDF with lifetime updates, for around $20 – and is still making income off it (at the time of this recording.) He didn’t like Amazon because they were forcing him to put his book up against similar titles priced at $4.99.
In short, Amazon is trying to make a commodity out of your books. The original ones. (Amazon’s weird policies on public domain books is odd, in that they are already commodities and given away for free on the Internet elsewhere. You’d think they’d want to encourage people to add value and submit truly higher-quality versions and then let the market decide. Control freaks? Possibly.)
The bottom line is that like most of the “free” blogging sites, they are just using you as a sharecropper while they own the field you farm. At any time, they can capriciously kick you off and quit paying you anything. (And they remind you of this every single time you submit a public domain book – one of the reasons I haven’t published to them since.)
For those of you who have never farmed: Sharecropping is doing the work and getting a small split of the profit. The land owner pays for the seed and fertilizer. If you also live on the property, that rental is usually taken out of your profit. In the post-Civil-War South, this was a solution that turned out to be just above slavery, since it still kept you on the plantation and too broke to save up and own your own place. It was security, and a living – after a fashion…
WordPress, Tumblr, Weebly – all these tend to be tenant farmers for sharecroppers, as they need your content, but they don’t need you. (In fact, several of my WordPress blogs became orphans because they suspended my account, but not the blog – hint: set up several accounts under different emails and cross-connect the authors to the blogs.) What they constantly push at you is to pay them monthly for the privilege of publishing there – and over-charge you for getting that domain you want (which they own, not you). Once a tenant, always a tenant.
WordPress has been particularly bad about shutting you down when you put affiliate links into your content. But they run their own ads on the site.
Blogger is at the other end of the scale, since you have to enable Adsense ads to run and Blogger doesn’t care what you link to. And they encourage you to get your own domain name while they host your blog for you. That’s why I’ve been using them, until just recently…
You want to have someone else host your blog and take care of the backend, while you then build your audience. Blogger does this pretty well, but it’s quite limited to what it can do. If you integrate Gumroad, you can get membership options and email capture while you sell your own digital products that they deliver for you. And if you’re just starting out, that’s probably the best way to get started. Later you can graduate up to Rainmaker or some higher-value hosting.
If you own your own domain, and pay for the hosting, you don’t have the headaches of maintaining a site with all the updates, and your content is owned by you. Means you own the title and land you’re blog sits on and you can make as much profit as you want from it.
Is there a use for Sharecropper blogs? Sure – you can get traffic from these communities as they all have their various audiences. Using IFTTT, you can syndicate your content from an RSS feed of your main blog over to Blogger, WordPress, and Tumbler. The same strategy applies to posting there – no affiliate links, but you can link back to your own site – and post regularly if not daily, keeping your posts about whatever is trending so that it will show up in their recommended feeds. There is no duplicate content penalty, actually. Post on your own site first, then everything else will show up afterwards – Google will value the date-stamp of your original post as the one they need to show highest. As far a link-love, these free blogs don’t give you much push – but someone searching within those networks for your keyword may clickthrough to that post and then your own site, which is where these bring traffic. It will be up to you to convert that traffic.
Moving to Rainmaker – bit by tedious bit
The reason I’ve been using Blogger blogs for so long are just a couple:
As above, they host for free and don’t shut you down.
Inherently, publishing on anything connected to Google couldn’t hurt.
This has left me with several dozen blogs where I’ve been testing out content and approaches. The whole idea with Rainmaker is to get all those efforts under one roof – in one basket where I could watch it all very closely.
Of course, you have to export everything, set up categories for all those posts, re-do your tags, and so on. Not an easy task. But it’s like digging a ditch – you get so many feet done a day and then sleep over night to dig your next set the next day.
One advantage is that I can work these all over as I import them. Right now, I’m simply getting them into their best categories and turning them back to draft. When I’m ready to put these live, then I’ll assign tags and restore or replace missing images, etc.
It’s happening bit by bit…
Sidebar note: Workaround for audiobooks.
Just so I don’t forget this again. There’s a way to get around Audible/Amazon’s stranglehold on audiobooks. Produce them professionally, as usual, then submit them to CDBaby or Catapult as “spoken word” albums. Keep your artwork and title the same as your books – and then it will show up on Amazon for any search for that title. Not the same as what they do with audiobooks, but you’ll get a much higher royalty, can set your own price, and can also on CDBaby get the CD created and sold through music stores. Meaning you get into other audiences than before.
How does this fit into your assembly line? Blog your book and podcast it. Saving your original files, offer these as part of bundles for promoting your book (and have your text version promote the audio version) and also just sell the complete set as a “spoken word” album.
While Audible has an exclusive contract with iTunes for audiobooks, you can apply to Apple to upload and sell your audio directly as “spoken word” and so again bypass Audible’s stranglehold.
You can also sell your singles or albums directly via SoundCloud. You can host on Sellfy or Ganxy, as well as CDBaby (which costs a fee for each one.) This means you have extra income from that podcast.
With Ganxy you can also give people a discount for tweeting or “liking” your audio to their followers. Nice promotion work – more eyeballs to see your stuff.
Of course, in Rainmaker, you host right from their platform and sell from it, too. If you want, you can embed Sellfy or Ganxy – but working with the Rainmaker developers should be able to get you a promote-to-pay option.
I’m always looking out for you and your budget. Blogger and Gumroad with Ganxy is a great way to earn enough regular income so you can afford to make the move to Rainmaker. Lean and frugal – that the route to success.
– – – – Make sure you’ve opted-in to recieve these updates in your email – you won’t want to miss out on a single exciting, white-knuckle adventure in this cliff-hanging account of self-publishing…
It’s not that I don’t have stuff for you – I do. About 5 podcasts which have to be recorded and posted so you can be alerted by email or RSS feed/podcatcher/iTunes, etc. (You are subscribed, aren’t you? Good.)
Because I do this all for you.
What’s happened that I don’t want you to fall into.
I went back to my hard-drives and pulled every backup I had. Of course, because I didn’t always have this habit, they only went back to 2005. I look around old files and found that I’d been blogging since at least 2003, but they were on platforms which have since gone extinct.
Anyway, this gave me nearly 5,000 (yes, five thousand) blog posts to sort through. Taking out obvious duplicates narrowed it down to under 4,000. When I simply trashed or turned to draft anything you wouldn’t be interested in (like the details of getting a refund from a scammer company that finally went under last year) – this pulled it down below 3,000.
Finally, I had to go through everything which wasn’t assigned a category and put these where they belonged.
I’ve always liked WordPress, but had a love/hate relationship with the free blog-hosting sites that used it. All free blog hosting sites have trouble with spammers. Some have taken fairly draconian (harsh) measures to protect their servers and financial backend.
WordPress.com was one of these. I’ve had more blogs and profiles turned off on that site than I can easily count. They simply won’t tolerate obvioius affiliate links. And will ban you at the drop of a hat. (While meanwhile labeling you a spammer – hope you’re not using your real name…)
Since I need to make an online living by offering products (my books) – I had to get onto a platform that would not just tolerate this, but encourage it. So I went to Blogger.
And I was happy, overall. I knew it was more limited than WordPress, but the minimalist simplicity of it didn’t keep you from feeding your muse and working to get paid for it.
Blogger has one major drawback – it doesn’t have categories, so exporting and then re-importing to a WordPress platform leaves you with a huge stack of stuff which is “uncategorized.”
Then the fun begins.
(I did see, after a couple of days at this, that it’s possible to turn tags [“labels” on Blogger] into categories. And then within WordPress, to move from one category to another, or combine them.)
Since “uncategorized” is a default on WordPress, I had to move all these over into a new temp category, sort them, to where they needed to go, and then delete that temp one.
It took days, close to a week of my part-time schedule working at this (the farm chores and other duties still take their fair share.)
And Just When I Thought I Was Done…
…I found out how deep this rabbit hole goes.
Rainmaker is an amazing platform. Amazing. As I don’t use that word often, it means a lot.
I was down to about 1200 posts (with at least that many as draft or trash to revive as needed.)
Unfortunately, it isn’t really like Blogger or WordPress, where you can pick out a nice template and just start in. It’s way more powerful with built-in memberships, podcasting networks, online courses, and of course – the ability to directly sell digital products.
I’m getting this podcast out to you on the old system to let you know what’s coming up. Because I’ve got a lot of work to do – still – just to help you get the data you want the way you want it.
The problem is that it’s going to take some time before I can get a nice base set up and turn on stuff bit-by-bit.
There’s no reason to have to have everything ready at once, but let me lay out what looks to be possible at this point.
The Grand Design Revealed
…drumroll, please.
You should really go over to livesensical.com to sign up. That’s my new site. Nice video there that starts to explain it.
This site will really be in four parts, which is how I’ve organized my 50+ years of research and all the workable resources I’ve collected so share with you.
There are going to be both free and paid memberships, which allow me to fine-tune this material. To begin with, it will all be a free membership – but I’ll have a lot of blog posts which live free out there to get people to sign up at all.
These four areas will each have their own podcast, probably bi-weekly, as that’s a lot of work.
Just in the self-help area, I already have 4 or 5 ecourses which can be revived. In the online marketing area, there’s another 3-4 or more. This is just what I’ve found when I was moving stuff around. Other courses exist on video and PDF which can be brought in and connected. Then there are PLR video and audio courses which I’ve got stashed away and are still fairly useful.
I’ve mentioned before that I have a couple dozen-dozen books out there already. Some are very applicable to your studies, some were just tests (aka: cannon fodder). There are a great number of these I want to make available for free, and then offer the other version of them (epub, mobi, audiobook/podcasts, videos) for small fees – well, at least higher than they are sold on Amazon.
Eventually, I’ll get onto some major projects I’ve been laying out and putting off – such as
a set of classic evergreen fiction bestsellers made available to authors to improve their craft.
There’s also an online marketing training course to enable people to really think with what they find online and be able to spot real winners and the scams. This has particular use to people who have been into Network Marketing.
My series on Masters of Marketing needs quite a bit more work – and porting to LinkedIn for their use.
There’s a final book on selling books online, which takes all the data I’ve set out here and packages it up in various formats. This also needs to be a course, plus bundled with audio.
Eventually, I’ll be caught up and will start in on Children’s Books, both writing and illustrating them, but they’ll have a companion set of books so anyone can train themselves on this genre. (It will probably be it’s own site, although that’s a future scene I haven’t fully figured out as yet.)
The Rainmaker platform has built-in SEO scripting, so all the surviving posts need to be gone through and updated. That alone would take weeks if I didn’t also have some forward progress to make (and bills to pay, and promises to keep.)
The backend bells-and-whistles to set this up take a bit of study – but there is an excellent set of tutorials and walk-throughs which tell anyone how to build their own stuff.
The great part of Rainmaker platform is that this is the same tools that Clark & Co. have used to build Copyblogger into a multi-million dollar annual income. Same tools – just like they use. In short: it’s truly powerful.
What happens to these old blogs?
Well, they stay right there. One datum you must know is that you never, ever delete a blog once you set it up. Fill it with usable content, put an opt-in form on it, update it if you can here and there. But like vintage wine, it gets more valuable with time, not less. Google gives them more authority (meaning: higher rankings) the longer they are out there. Even free blogs. Put them on a spreadsheet and drop some content in on them from time to time. (If you can set up IFTTT to syndicate your content, that fine.)
You see, each of these free blog hosts have their own community. So they recommend your stuff to their followers differently. That means more people can find your stuff that you’d not necessarily connect with otherwise.
Meanwhile, the search engines can link all these in on very long-tail basis to help other people find your stuff.
I don’t really have a system in place to deal with all these. Like I said, I’ve got a spreadsheet which hs most of them on it – some will stay forever lost to my access, but will never be deleted.
In some cases, like that scammer content, this can be posted back to specialty blogs just on that subject – the history of a particular Utah scammer company. Might even become a book if I can ever get around to it. But having this content on a Blogger blog is a fitting bookend to this chapter of my own history.
You also never throw away old content – you just re-purpose it when you can.
Well, thanks – Gotta run.
I really, really appreciate the time you spend listening to these rambles. It’s all designed to help you learn from my mistakes and earn your own extra online income faster.
I’ve got a long post (just written last night) on free blogs all by themselves. Another on how to effectively promote on social media without having your time sucked away with no income. And some others I wrote last week about what I’d been inspired on through this journey.
These are all waiting for me to find them, record them, and get them out to you.
Today, though, I though you deserved an update.
Let me know what you need covered in more detail. I’ll get to it when I can – you can see above that my schedule is a bit packed now…
So this blog post and podcast is a thank you note.
What did you do to deserve this?
It all started long ago – or maybe a few minutes for some of you. You decided to click on a link with led you here, or bought one of my books, or otherwise set yourself up to hear from me.
My story started over 50 years ago, when I started wanting to figure things out around me.
Those two paths converged at some point. And I’ve been working to deserve you ever since.
OK, let’s break that down a bit further.
There’s this thing called a Golden Rule. You know: “treat others like you’d like to be treated.” All those variations. Every religion and philosophy mentions that as a truth somewhere in it’s texts or scriptures.
The funny thing is that this works as “As you give, so you get.” or as Napoleon Hill had it: “You can’t get without giving.”
My bottom line is that to the degree I’d like to be successful, rich, and all that – I have to help you achieve these too.
Good question – I’m getting there. (Sometimes I can get long-winded.)
You know, if you’ve looked up my back trail, that I’ve been talking to you about how to make a success of it with book publishing. Nice passive income, financial freedom, take the day off to go fishing and still earn income while you’ve sat in the shade all day and drank your tea (or equivalent beverage.)
That type of lifestyle. Great, huh?
I did it with an assortment of books, but saw that if I wanted to take it to the next level, I was going to have to ask for your help.
So, thanks.
You’re here, you’re listening to this, you’re aboard.
Where are we going, then?
Boy, are you right on the money with your questions today…
If you want to make a really decent income (like into the “getting rich” category) you have to open up and help others get rich on their own.
Looking around found that the best tool to do this was to form a membership where you could help people more directly than just anonymously selling them a book. I mean to really help them.
Actually, that research found the model for all online passive income. It’s true for spammers, it’s true for their brothers, the Internet Marketers. It’s even true for pure rip-off schemes like the Government and their cronies.
Advertisers use this plan, as does Facebook and any social media. Even our book distributors use this. They are all memberships after a fashion. Anyone who gets your email and sends you stuff uses this.
My approach is to find out why this works and tell everyone I can how to do this for themselves.
Of course, what I researched before this tells a great deal about how the universe works beyond this – and the tools which help you earn income online are the same which help you improve your health, lose weight, enjoy your life every day, live with no cares and a calm, cheerful expectancy that everything you want to be and have is coming your way.
That’s a bit thick, you might be saying.
And you’re right. Let’s just stick to book publishing.
This new site I’m building is taking a bit of time. And while I have some other blog posts describing what I’m going through – this one is a filler for now just to keep you posted in general.
That’s because the sawdust is still flying and you can still hear the distant noise of hammering and screwguns as all that construction happens.
We’re standing over here to avoid all the trucks delivering material and the concrete being poured.
Go visit livesensical.com and you’ll get a preview. No big deal. Your choice.
What I’m still going to give you – no strings attached.
Yes, we were right in the middle of a Case Study. And we’ll get back to it – promise.
That case study led us to the brick-wall-solid fact that an author or publisher of any type needs to build their audience from square one – even before they create their first book.
And that’s why I had to stop everything and get my own membership built.
You can count on me to eat the dog food I make – just to ensure it tastes good enough for your pets.
I’m into Rainmaker as the platform of choice (and that link should wind you up with a free trial, if you want it.) What I’m finding is that this really does have all the tools you need for publishing and a lot more.
Most of these, we’ve already covered. One example is putting all your links inside the book into Bitly links so you can track them better. In Rainmaker, they have this built in so that you can track where people come from and go to. In Bitly, you can’t have several links going back to the same spot – but if you have several book versions pointing to one page (like the PDF, the Kindle, and the epub version) you want to know which one is bringing you the most traffic. That way you can promote that version more.
Can’t we just do this for free?
Sure. I’ll always tell you how to do the same thing for nothing but sweat-equity. If you want to do a membership with on-page sales, use Gumroad on a Blogger blog. Lulu will still sell my hardcopy books and port my original works to all the main distributors. But I’ll be selling books directly, where I can make 100% royalties.
The point is that you need to get independent from having to depend on distributors. You need to sell directly to the audience you serve.
And while you can create bundles on Gumroad (and BitTorrent, plus Sellfy, Ganxy, and Distribly, among others) – you can also do this directly from Rainmaker.
One last pitch for Rainmaker – and you don’t have to use all sorts of different sites and logins to do the same thing. (OK, there – I’m done.)
What the future holds…
We’re going to spend a few podcasts describing how to start up a membership as a complete unknown. You could set this up under an existing domain you already have, but we also need to take the idea of where someone starts from scratch.
At that point, I’ll do a series on just how you start up from nothing – as these podcasts started in the middle of a project I was already on. So we’ll just fill in the foundations as we go.
Meanwhile, I’ll be busy in the background setting everything up on that beautiful new membership so you can find everything you need. (You’re always moving furniture around in a new house as you unpack and put everything on shelves – and wondering how you ever collected so many knick-knacks…)
Once we restart that case study, then we’ll open that up as a section of the membership all on it’s own – and you’ll be invited to try it out first and let me know what you think. Lots of wheels to kick and test rides to take.
That will pretty much wrap up that last book in this series about self-publishing. Of course, you’ll be able to have access to the complete set, plus all my notes and everything.
Because you’re worth it – aren’t you?
After that, I’ll test out that plan on a new book series and podcast that as I go. But don’t be concerned. That next series has everything to do with how you promote your books and yourself and your business.
I can’t see how I’ll run out of stuff to share with you, as I’ll be re-marketing all my books, series by series – and there is something to learn with each one. Things also change all the time – like right now, it’s easier to have Lulu create your ebook than do it yourself. That throws out quite a few other datum’s, and puts wrenches into some other works.
All you need to know is to sit back and enjoy the ride. I’ll be doing the hard work of testing everything and you get to try out the streamlined, polished version for yourself – and let me know how it worked for you.
Which brings up – Let me know what you need.
The question is: What is the biggest problem facing you?
Just answer that for me, and I’ll see what I can do to help you with it. I’m sitting on a half-century of research and I probably have something around here somewhere that gives a clue on how someone else made it through that particular problem already.
Very little of what we are doing currently is really new. Most of humankind hasn’t changed in 10,000 years – so the answer to any particular problem was probably known in ancient Greek times, as well as in Victorian England, or maybe the Roaring 20’s.
If it’s something to do with publishing books, I’ll probably have covered it somewhere.
Oh – and that brings up: Look for some Q-and-A podcasts coming up. They might be longish, like webinars, but I’d like to cover what people have as questions in this area.
Of course, you don’t have to wait, you can just go ahead and email them to me (of course, you’re subscribed – aren’t you?)
When I get a big enough stack to make it interesting, then I’ll throw one of those into the mix.
– – – –
Hope that brings you up to date. And that you’re life is half as interesting as what is going on around here.
See you next time.
– – – –
Make sure you’re signed up for updates through your email – so you don’t miss an issue!
With all the false “conventional wisdom” out there, it’s surprising that you’d be reading something like this. I mean, all that stuff is supposed to work, isn’t it?
Well, not too surprising, since most self-publishing authors still can’t quit their day job – because their books simply don’t sell. And “most” is about 97% or so. So the smart ones like you are still looking.
So – Welcome.
There’s a reason some authors sell and some don’t – it’s audience.
Not “platform” – Audience.
Your actual audience will buy your current books, your earlier books, and tell you want they want you to write next – setting that up for an “instant bestseller.” Audiences buy things. Platforms just sit there.
The term “platform” has been used to include all the things you do to market you book which take you away from anything that actually gets the earlier ones sold and the next ones written. It comes from traditional publishers, who want to make you feel good about all those things you do which are supposedly marketing, but are mostly time-wasters. Big numbers of Twitter Followers and Facebook Friends doesn’t equate to sold books. Tweeting or liking someone’s cat pictures doesn’t get your books promoted.
Real promotion means building your audience. Anything that doesn’t do that isn’t worth your time. Might as well go off and perfect your horseshoe game.
After the decade of study I’ve done to narrow down and isolate the basics which actually do help you sell your books online – this is the bottom line. Everyone talked about it, or around it, but no one would say exactly how to get it. Meanwhile, there was a lot of justification for doing all sorts of things which never wound up as sales or building a verifiable audience.
I was talking to a couple of self-published authors recently, and they had the same exact problem – no audience and no clue how to get one. But it brought up that they missed the point: Build Your Audience First.
This post is how to build a foundation to your continuing online book sales, not just a “platform” where you maybe, might just possibly get someone to think about buying one.
How to Get an Audience (not a platform.)
The bogus term is to call it a platform – it isn’t. Social media isn’t something you build on – it’s just a time suck. That is, unless you are actually using it to get people to join your audience.
Since you already have a book published, we are going to fill in the missing steps:
0. Get an autoresponder. Do nothing else until you get this done. Don’t make my mistake. If you don’t have an autoresponder, you aren’t building any audience, and your book sales are poor (if not non-existent) without one. Every single multiple-hit author I’ve researched had one of these. Every one. When others put in the time to set one of these up, their continuing sales took off – not just a spike from a “one-shot wonder”.
A recommended autoresponder to start with is Mail Chimp as it’s free for the first few hundred emails you collect. (There are other autoresponders with free plans as well. Mail Chimp is just really easy to get started.)
Go directly to your autoresponder and sign up. Like I said, it’s free. And will take you maybe 15 minutes.
Do not pass “Go”. Do nothing else.
Get this done first.
(No, it’s not particularly logical, but it is the single one thing which separates profitable winners from starve-in-the-garret wannabe’s. Get This Done First before anything else. I’m not kidding.)
1. Get a domain. This can be anything. Your name is fine, your pen-name is fine, your dog’s middle name is fine. Just get something that’s fairly easy to spell and remember. Maybe you want to start a publishing company – it just doesn’t matter. Pick something. Really.
Your blog will get no respect if you’ve got “.blogger.com” or “.wordpress.com” or “.anyotherbloghost.com” after it. They’ll know you’re an amateur – and so will the search engines. Get Your Domain Name. Maybe $11 a year. Invest in yourself.
2. Get a blog and put the domain on it. Maybe you want a WordPress blog. I’d get a Blogger blog as they host you for free. The point is to get someone else to host your site for you that doesn’t cost you money that your books aren’t earning yet. You want to spend your time writing, not caring for a blog everyday and updating plugin’s, fighting security problems, etc.
We’ll go over what you’re going to put on that blog in a little bit – just hold on. Not a big deal, actually. Just get it set up. Don’t add any content or anything. Make sure http://yourdomain.com works. One step at a time.
3. Put the auto-responder script so people can opt-in to your list via that blog. Just follow the directions -it’s pretty simple. Put that script right up top – so people see it as one of the very first things on the blog. That’s called “above the fold.” I like to put it over on the right sidebar, with the content on the left. But you can do whatever you want. Just set it so any visitor sees it right off.
4. Now create a landing page for your book using it’s existing title, cover, description, and links to the distributors that sell it. Then I’d suggest getting something like Ganxy to help you sell it directly on your blog. (That 95% royalty should excite you a bit.) But we really want to list all the various places people can buy it. Because they have their preferences. This seems counter-intuitive, but it’s not. Providing value is the key.
Ganxy can link to your hardcopy versions as well as audio books – even if you don’t have them now, this sets it up so you can update your landing page in the future to sell those then.
5. Go back to that ebook and add the link in both front and back so people can “Visit [domain].com for more material and related books.” That’s where they go directly to that landing page on your blog. Update that ebook on all your current distributors. Note: Ebooks are audience-builders, they are emissaries. They are not an end-all to everything – they are only a starting point. (Read that as many times as you need to in order to get it to sink in.)
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Technically, that is all the bare-bones you need to build an audience. You could stop here – but your audience actually won’t let you. And you do want as big an audience as you can manage.
6. Post your first three chapters of your book – one chapter per post – on your blog. Make sure each of them have a link at the bottom where you send people to the book landing page to get their own copy – and tell them to opt-in to your list if they haven’t already.
And you can continue doing this through the entire book if you want – but for now, just get those first three chapters up.
Oh – and go visit Pixabay or any other public domain image host. Find some appealing, interesting, appropriate images for each post. Put these at the top of your post. Keep that in as a habit. People love pictures.
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All of this costs you nothing, particularly, except your time.
Get all of the above done first before you do anything else. Get these done.
I’m emphatic here as this is exactly what struggling authors don’t do. And it hardly mentioned by the “authorities” on how to sell your book online.
Do nothing else until you get all the above done. Period.
– – – –
OK, with that done, we can start getting some real traffic to your blog:
7. Podcast each chapter you’ve posted.
You’ll need to find my posts on podcasting and follow those steps. You’ll need to buy a decent USB podcasting microphone (under $100 – Blue Snowball or Blue Yeti are popular, but Plantronics headsets are acceptable as well.) And you’ll need to download Audacity (free) and learn how to use it. It’s short learning curve, actually. (Hint: click on the red “record” button and start talking.)
The reason for this is that podcasting immediately jumps your blog traffic. Weird, but true. People especially want to hear the author read their own book.
What this also does is to give you an audio book later which you can also self-publish. Or at least audio chapters you can post on for people to download as part of your book bundles.
A key point: at the end of each podcast – make sure you tell people to opt-in to your list. Every. single. time.
8. After this, keep adding to your blog. Yes, there’s a lot of study you can do on SEO and all that. And you can study copywriting to really make your blog posts stand out. But your book chapters should do fine. If you do nothing but the steps outlined here, you’ll start seeing traffic and getting people opting-in to your list.
Blog and podcast that whole first book. Then drop the price to .99 so they can get it easily.
Ask for feedback from your audience from time to time – what do they want, what would they like to see more of, what problem (non-fiction writers) do they most need to solve? The ones which write you regularly – get their honest reviews of your writing style.
9. Once you have an audience and a direction to go, then you’ll find what your next book should actually be. (For public domain indie publishers, this will tell you what your next book series should be about.)
10. These steps – regular blogging and regular podcasting – will continue to grow your audience. Just keep giving them a call-to-action to join your list. Each release you make is announced to your audience first. It’s only when you have an audience that you can really take advantage of your pre-release specials and pre-orders, etc. Not to mention Amazon reviews.
11. Notice that I didn’t mention social media. If you’re not doing this, you don’t have to start.
Otherwise, the two best social networks to be on are LinkedIn and Google+ – because they are content-based, not cute-kitty and ailing-relatives-based. Join and participate in appropriate groups on those two platforms.
Set up IFTTT to take care of posting updates and links everywhere else. (LinkedIn will post to Twitter for you.)
Yes, that may sound a bit harsh. LinkedIn is much bigger than Twitter. And you can do full-length posts there (not just a hundred characters or so.) Google+ will help your blog standings. Communities on these are very educational. Just give great value and never spam or even once say “Buy My Book!” They’ll find your blog and find your book – once you’ve helped enough other people openhandedly. Always, always – give value first.
– – – –
Those 11 steps are simply all there is to selling books online. The rest is built on this as a foundation. It’s only taken me about two years to boil everything down to this one key factor:
Audience.
The only way you get an audience is to build a list for their emails and let them join. Then you can talk to them and find out what you should actually be doing to best help them.
In return, they’ll buy your books and recommend them to the people they talk to regularly.
Engaged fans are the proven route to success.
Let them join you on your own journey – and their success will be yours.
– – – –
Make sure you’re opted-in above to not miss a single white-fisted, hair-raising, cliff-hanging adventure in self-publishind. This podcast brought to you by LiveSensical.com
Paypal has become pretty conventional these days. In India, you have to have a PAN card as well, so that they can collect their taxes. That’s the way it goes there.
Book creation:
LibreOffice is accepted and converted everywhere. It’s now simplest to upload your native .odt file to Lulu and they’ll create the ebook for you. LibreOffice also generates a upload-ready PDF, but you can get Lulu to do this as part of your hardcopy version. Then simply download the epub and PDF versions (as well as selling that PDF version directly on Lulu) – so you can upload these other places.
GIMP is used to make your covers, if you don’t get these made elsewhere.
Calibre is used to store the meta-data (descriptions and tags) as well as keep all your versions of the book in one central location. It will also convert your epub to mobi so Kindle users can upload it. (Most people are now using their smartphones or tablets these days, so will use the epub or PDF file.)
Book publishing and Sales:
Lulu will publish your needed versions in both ebook and hardcopy versions. Flipkart is for India and the surrounding area.
Blogger enables you to get sales directly, when you put a Ganxy script on your site. This also allows you to capture emails, which makes even MailChimp unnecessary to start with. You can email your customers directly. As well, it’s possible to make a widget that only does email, and put this anywhere.
You get blogger with a domain-name of it’s own in order to get more respect. Blogger doesn’t care how much money you make from it and takes care of all the backend support work. Yes, you’re limited like anywhere else, but you can concentrate soley on creating more books, not on security updates, plug-in conflicts, etc.
Ganxy allows you to import and export email lists (just follow their terms of service closely.) So you don’t have to have an email client to start with. Ganxy also sells directly to your other distributors without having a person have to leave your blog.
As you get experienced with this, you can then do the needed homework on Gumroad – which has some great tutorials and short courses you can take. Gumroad has extra features such as memberships and subscriptions so you can get more recurring income by selling courses, etc.
Sellfy works with Facebook on a tab – so you can sell all your books in a bookstore setup.
You’ll need to upload your books to each of these (Ganxy, Gumroad, Sellfy) in order to enable direct sales.
Book Promotion:
Podcasting is hands down the fastest way for you to get traffic to your blog. Use archive.org for hosting, and generate the RSS feed with Feedburner, then port that feed to iTunes and Stitcher (plus a few others.)
Social updates are done via Ganxy, and your Blogger blog will post to Google+ for you, but use IFTTT to push your content everywhere else. Almost too numerous to mention here. You will need to post to LinkedIn on your own, through.
Take that audio file and create a video from it, then post to YouTube. (And set up recipes on IFTTT so that they promote your video for you.)
– – – –
It’s really that simple. A couple of years have boiled this down to what would fit on one side of a 3×5 recipe card. Funny, huh?
I’ve got my buddy in India working through these. I did a lot of these for him, as he started out without having a computer and going to a local Internet cafe in order to get online access.
Now he’s got a used laptop and is creating podcasts on his own.
As a side-point, Ganxy (and Gumroad, Sellfy) allow you to sell audio on their site as well – even create bundles with many files having a single check-out. So your audio files can be used as promotion (via Soundcloud or YouTube/Vimeo) and also as bonuses.
It seems the simplest is also the easiest and cheapest.
This doesn’t get you around editing your book, or creating enticing covers, or the work in watching your sales and running promotional campaigns. But if a guy in India can do it, then anyone else in the world with Internet access can as well.
– – – – Make sure you’re subscribed above in order not to miss out on any hair-raising, white-knuckled, cliff-hanging adventures in self-publishing. See you next time…
The Rainmaker Solution – a BFF which starts as an expensive date.
Have you ever been in this situation? Having a significant other who is costing you a mint in maintenance – only to find out they are actually so priceless, that you could never let them go?
The biggest problem is that I already know how to publish a book for little or nothing. And here I am with a very powerful tool which is costing me money every month and is just sitting there.
I’m frugal by upbringing. If I’m paying for something it should be earning its keep.
The easiest thing to do would be to cut my losses and go back to what I already know.
But the old saying, “begin with the end in mind” tells me if I’m ever going to turn over this business, it has to be a great success, not just a very profitable hobby. Putting what I already have onto a system would leverage it into something that will take my income into a “comfortably well-off” range.
The main problem is that Rainmaker comes off as just too damned complicated. Everything has multiple parts to it. It’s incredibly powerful (like I said already) and can do just about everything except brush your teeth for you after it woke you up on time and has your coffee ready.
I thought it was because I’m too used to Blogger, and not used enough to WordPress.
In my current model: I simply create a blog post, upload an image, tweak the text, add in the Ganxy script for that product, tweak the meta-data to fit – and then publish.
But I can’t do memberships. I can’t do discounts (much less offer 50% off of everything I sell.) If I want to do discounts, I should put in a Sellfy link – which is essentially uploading a complete new set of ebook files and descriptions, etc.
And while I dither, all the link-love I’m accumulating for livesensical.com is just piddling away – while I pay another monthly fee for a site which isn’t ready. All that I’ve been building up for months would be for nothing at this point.
Some things you have to see through, no matter what.
It’s the learning curve which is killing me. Because I needed all this done yesterday.
Too many products as a problem.
Right now on GooglePlay, I have about 215 books. On Lulu, I have over 400 various versions of books – in different formats. On Amazon, I have about 70 or so. Itunes, Kobo, and Nook are somewhere in between.
Out of these, somewhere around 70 books sell regularly, so these are the ones I need to get up and running on my site – selling these directly in order to get higher royalties and also to build an audience. All of these have been extracted from sales data, and are on a spreadsheet.
All the old pages have been transferred (uploaded from backups) and very few have to be created – all the data for these is already on Calibre, so that’s really just copy/paste.
And that’s the rub – should I cut/paste to Ganxy to get these books posted on Rainmaker fastest – or figure out how to get it built using Rainmaker itself? Going with what is familiar would be faster – but it would cost me more.
In the end, my frugal side won out. I need to make Rainmaker pay for itself – so I invested some more time figuring out how to get things done.
Enter: Setup Wizards.
Now, if you are happy with Ganxy, this isn’t a section that may thrill you. On the other hand, it’s how to get your stuff on a site which will enable you to scale your existing content into 7 or 8-digit income – by all reports.
Because what we need to be doing is building an audience with the existing content we already have. At least, that’s my problem – and has been for years. Getting sales through ebook distributors only disguised the problem by throwing money at me.
Rainmaker has simply opened up paid hosting for a tool they are themselves using. And they are useing to make 8-figures currently.
Set up wizards – these are for single products and also libraries. We’ll do the single products to catch up with the existing (selling) pages we already have.
And it’s quite simple, actually. It integrates with AWeber (my autoresponder service, but will also do MailChimp and others) and also is tied directly into the memberships. So the two targets here – of building an audience and having a free membership to host my content – are both integrated every time I post a new product.
When I’ve done it once, the settings are the same. At this point, I’ll only need to copy/paste from Calibre to get everything posted. (Yes, if I ever leave Rainmaker, I’ll have to do this all over. So I’m committed even more to getting this to pay for itself.)
Starting a free download library
This has always impressed me with Copyblogger – all those great ebooks available for nothing. (No, I haven’t had time to read them all as yet.)
How I’m going to use this is simple: give away the PDF’s and sell the other versions. Seems counter-intuitive. But it’s also a way to see where the demand is. I’ll also be able to email those people directly to give them a special offer on epub/mobi/hardcopy versions and the bundles I can make with podcasts. These same viewers might be interested in courses to help them study the book – and special books which accompany the course.
The point is – this will help me sell more books. And Amazon can’t access these prices with their search bots, so it won’t affect any price I have on their site. This gives me exclusive value to offer members – a great way to build audience and where I’ve been headed for some time.
This is also the key to leveraging material and escaping the glass ceiling which the distributors enforce.
But can’t you just do all this for free?
Well yes – and no. Ganxy and Sellfy – no. Gumroad comes closest to handling memberships.
Technically, you can make a membership with nothing but an autoresponder and Paypal. You don’t need anything in between. Just get them to pay, and AWeber (the one I’m most familiar with) will send them their first download. Then password protect part of your Blogger site (or the whole thing – a great description of how to do this is at BlogsByHeather.com )
The drawback is that once a year or sooner, you’ll need to change the password for the site, since everyone gets the same one. But it’s free, so…
Note: Free means you spend your time. Paid means you pay someone to take care of the backend so that you have more time to be creative. It’s called leverage.
The deal is: start frugal and get your publishing to pay it’s own way. Reinvest your profits back into the business. Once your self-publishing business is paying it’s own way, as well all your living expenses – Congratulations! You’re now financially independent. Probably somewhere in the middle, you’ll either need to cut back on living expenses (like debt) and invest in some services to free up your time to be more creative.
Along the line, your passive income does start paying everything and you can start socking away reserves as well.
This is the goal. At that point, you can play the game of getting as rich as you want.
Rainmaker is our new BFF.
Well, as long as they keep improving it and it keeps having more bells and whistles than I can use.
I’m into the “getting rich” mode now – which essentially means leveraging my time to improve my income.
It can be done. And that’s why I’m telling you that when someone living in the farm belt can do it (or even someone in India) then you can, too.
With today’s breakthrough, I’m back to hopeful again. Even though this summer has been mostly overcast and rainy, it seems that there’s some bright sunshine breaking through all around.
I hope that yours is going as well.
See you next time.
– – – – And thanks for listening to another installment of “Selling Your Books Online.” Make sure you’re subscribed by email or RSS. You won’t want to miss a single white-knuckled, hair-raising, cliff-hanging installment in this adventure in self-publishing. If you like this podcast, please leave us a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you’ve discovered it. And do share this with your friends! Tweets, Likes, and Plusses are always appreciated…
Spying is probably the oldest profession (well, excepting maybe one other). The most widely reprinted book on warfare (Sun Tzu’s Art of War) has a whole chapter on spies and spying.
Spying is really just gathering intelligence. That’s why embassies are constantly found out and “embarrassed” when it’s “discovered” they’ve been doing this – over and over and over. For governments, it’s just part of doing business.
For corporations, it’s big business, and a big part of their budget. For marketers, it’s called “market research” and “demographics”.
If you are a self-published author (and don’t have a huge marketing budget) you can still have spies working for you.
Like embassies, you can have emissaries – in every book you publish. The problem for so long has been that books were considered the end product. Once you sold them, you were done. Or so conventional wisdom said.
Your books are actually emissaries because they spread the word about you. They can also gather intelligence for you.
Any brick-and-mortar shop owner knows that their local repeat traffic comes from word-of-mouth – and this is gotten by providing incredible service to everyone who comes into their store, regardless of whether they buy anything or not. Local shop owners learn all sorts of things from their customers.
That fact is lost on the traditional publishers. They have been so long in the business of having books as a final product that they miss the fact which our modern “native commerce” model exposed.
Your book is no longer a finite printed work. It’s in many formats, delivered through multiple platforms. It can be updated at any time (although print versions are harder).
You book is no longer an end point of your production – factually, it’s just the beginning.
Books now are your emissaries. They tell everyone about what you think, how you act, what you think of them, how you can help them – even how much you respect them (or don’t.)
Intelligence your distributors don’t want you to know
Books-as-emissaries are also spies. The best ones have embedded links which bring potential buyers back to your site. And those embedded links can tell you more about that customer than they want to tell you. Well, mostly, anyway.
Right now, there are no really good tools to find out what your readers want – except what they actually buy. And that is limited, unless they are buying directly from you.
When you publish your books via distributors, they pay you royalties – but they don’t tell you all the intelligence they are gathering from getting people to buy through them. All of them have various algorithms which give you “also bought” and “related books” to get you to spend more money with them. As you spend, they keep records of everything you bought – just business.
Your books are probably on at least a half-dozen distributors now, and each of these have different audiences. Google seems to sell more nerdy books, not surprisingly. Amazon sales are filtered through their algorithms, so they are basically bargain hunters and fans. iTunes has artistic types, but also business people and early adopters. Nook could be described as hard-core anti-Amazon. Kobo is international in scope, so purchases here range across a wide field of cultural differences.
From the little data the distributors reveal, the author up to this point could only say – hey, I got more/less book sales this month! Because that’s all the data you’re given (other than maybe what continent they came from, which is hardly better data. “10 from the U.S., 2 from Italy, and 1 from France – cheers.”)
If your business was a local book shop, one of your spies would whisper when that person came into your shop: ((Psst – this guy is basically a nerd. He came from Google.)) or: ((Psst – this is a gal looking for a deal, she came from Amazon.))
And you, being a good spy-master, can arrange your shop to offer that new potential customer just what they are looking for. You take them over to that particular case of books that has what they probably want… And get the sale, and get a loyal client from there on out – since they think you can read their mind.
How Do You Get Such Great Intelligence?
It’s that link you have front and back in your ebook, your PDF, your print book, your audiobook, your videos, your podcasts. (You do have links back to your site, don’t you? Good, I thought so – we have such brilliant people who listen to this podcast and read this blog…)
The secret is to have a specific link for that buyer everywhere you distribute your book.
The link they use to find your site also says where they came from. No, this isn’t magic or even black hat. This has been known since people started selling stuff online. (The earliest I was able to find was about 1995.)
These links are called “Redirects”.
Affiliate marketers have been using this as least that long, while mail-order marketers such as Claude Hopkins used “coupons” in his Scientific Advertising since the 1920’s.
That link in your ebook can tell you where their copy came from, whether it was an ebook, a print book, an audiobook, or video. That link will answer: did they come from Amazon, Googke Play/Books, iTunes, Nook, Kobo?
The cheap way to do this is to create these links on your server – so when a person clicked on http://[yourdomain.com]/[your-redirect] they would show up on a page they were probably interested in. And that is why affiliate marketers used them – to take them to a specific page just for that type of people who were looking for a specific product.
As an author, you do this to find out what type of buyer is coming to your site from what version of book.
And – being the brilliant person you are – you then give them a page which is closer to what they are looking for.
In Rainmaker, this is made simple. You create the redirect, and the landing page, and then link one to the other.
But you say – hey, I’ve got over a dozen books. There are nearly that many distributors. And just where am I supposed to get the time to spend in creating all these links and pages?!?
Relax. The Rainmaker folks have you taken care of. They keep track of the clicks while you can make simple variations of links, and landing pages can be simply copied and tweaked as a new version. Of course you could be satisfied with just knowing which distributors are best at sending you what type of traffic – even if you send them all to the same page. Later on, you can invest in specific pages for viewers coming in from specific areas.
With Intelligence, You Can Offer Specific Viewers What They Already Want
What if you followed a link in a book you got from Amazon, only to find a page which said, “Thanks for getting [Book Title] from Amazon. Here’s some related books and material readers of [genre/niche] have found valuable.” And then you show them other books you have on in that area – not just the ones you have on Google. The buy links go to your site, though – and the viewer is able to get not only .mobi or .azw versions, but also PDF’s and links to the audio and video versions.
Meanwhile, you are pocketing 100% royalties from every sale. Or you can also send them to a Print-On-Demand outlet like Lulu, or an indie bookstore where they have your hardcopy book in stock. More book sales, more royalty income, happier customers.
Yes, you can also offer them a free membership which gives them an automatic 25% non-expiring discount coupon on everything they buy from you. And an additional 50% discount if they tweet or like that copy their interested in to their friends.
Now you have a devoted client – who’s wondering how you read their mind.
All you did – was put a specific re-direct link in your book that was only in your Amazon versions.
A buyer who types in your print book link would be met with a page that gives them print versions, but also helps them buy ebook versions for their smartphone or tablet. Or that audiobook version so they can listen to the book on commutes when reading a print book would be difficult.
Improving Sales, Improving Royalties
Do you see how this could improve your sales markedly? (Thought I saw a few light bulbs go on over there…)
Since you’re selling on your own site, you’re improving your royalties – and now
I’ve talked about this before. And I’ve put bit.ly links in my books to take care of this function. The problem with bit.ly links is that they are only one web address per link. You can’t have several links going to a single page.
Being able to set up your own re-directs is how you get intelligence. Send all your buyers to a single page to see if its worth creating a specific landing page for them. When you do start getting a flood of viewers coming in from a certain distributor’s book, then create a variation of that page – maybe with a special discount for buyers of that book from (certain distributor goes here).
On Amazon, you can use redirects on their individual author pages you’re supposed to set up on every continent. You can also do this with every bio page you set up anywhere. They can redirect to a specific page for that nationality or region.
You don’t have to change the ebook and revise all the time after you’ve done this once. Redirects can be changed to point anywhere you want, any time you want to improve your sales from a decent flow of viewers. You can even run A/B tests through Rainmaker, so you tweak the page to convert best.
Quite simple. Quite powerful.
And while this was another “secret hidden in plain sight”, it’s a good one. If you’ve subscribed to Rainmaker, you already have these tools available.
Otherwise, just access your own domain server and cobble your own scene together. With your server-redirects, you can even do this on a Blogger blog. Just takes more time.
I say that, as I say always – that you start from scratch or less, and make your site pay for itself as it goes. Costs you more time, but not money you don’t have. If you’re already getting great income from your book sales and want to take it to the next level, I’d suggest Rainmaker.
But then, I’m right in the middle of my transition over to this – so you can expect me to be a bit enthusiastic.
However, as far as I know – no one is telling authors to do this.
So I’ve just given you secrets even the top corporate spies won’t disclose.
– – – –
Show notes:
…picking up where we left off in the podcast.
How to Implement Redirects
1. Take your bestsellers, probably in order of actual sales – not what you wish were happening.
2. Pick your landing page, even if they all go to the same one for now. What we are looking for is which books from which distributors actually show up.
(and Sellfy, Ganxy, Leanpub, Overdrive, e-Sentral, BitTorrent, Rainmaker itself, and anywhere else you are actively uploading your book for distribution or sales.)
Note: these redirect links all go to the same landing page, and only give counts of traffic by distributors.
4. Split out Lulu (or your hardcopy POD distributor) by book type – again, only if you’ve gone there:
Sign up today for a free membership and instant access to an expanding library of books and materials ready for immediate download – all to help you improve your quality of living.
now uses that link both front and back of every book (just mouse-over to see the link).
6. Rinse, repeat from 1-5 for all distributors where this book is getting sold. 7. Rinse, repeat from 1-6 all books which are actually selling, by order of personal sales rank.
Simplest is to do this as you update the marketing for any book.
a. Grab the .odt (or .doc) file and update for Lulu with appropriate link. b. Have Lulu create the epub. c. Edit the hard links as appropriate (Calibre has an internal epub editor) and save as [title]-[distributor]-version.epub – ie. “SunTzuArtOfWar-amzn.epub” d. Upload that epub where it’s needed. e. Generate the PDF from the original .odt/.doc file (embed fonts) for each version and rename similarly, according to anywhere you are selling the book. Lulu hardcopy versions would also get individual versions. (It is possible to edit PDF links, just not as easily.) – ie. “SunTzuArtOfWar-lulu-tpb.pdf”
You can and should definitely do this for every PDF preview you create, regardless of sales – as this is part of book promotion. TIP: you can also include a coupon in that PDF for a discounted purchase.
Note: if Lulu is distributing your ebook, you’re stuck with one redirected link for the single epub they post everywhere. That’s a trade-off – like the royalties you lose in that process. As you can, get accounts with these other distributors and start uploading your ebooks directly, turning them “off” in Lulu’s distribution.
Work from the ones which are your bestsellers, so your increase in royalties would pay for the time you have to invest to make the switch. If you’re losing 50 cents per book, but only sell 3 in 6 months, well… You probably have other issues with that book and would be better putting it on your “ready to be re-marketed list” (meaning start from scratch with market research.)
You’ll also probably have some books which never sell on certain distributors – so you tailor your links appropriately. Saves you time, which is worth more than money.
Discussion:
A point to be clear on – when you make a redirect link once, you never have to update that ebook again (for the link, anyway.) You can change the page it directs to anyway you want, any time you want.
Theoretically, Google Analytics could help with this – but it’s way beyond my pay grade. Adding editable redirect links to the ebook as you submit it to the distributor would be a simple, elegant solution.
I’ve done a fairly thorough check to see if Amazon has any particular policies on links within ebooks. The safest route is that the ebook links to your own site. Some have links that go elsewhere and haven’t been penalized (with the exception of one spammer who had hundreds of links in a “book”)
And boy, does this give me a lot of work to do – but again, it will pay for itself by working in order of current bestsellers down. All this is a way to build audience, which is the exact point.
Bonus Lightbulb Concept:
I mentioned Rainmaker’s ability to create digital coupons above. You can also set links up so that they show in the Kindle Preview – such that a person could send people to their site without that person even needing to buy that book. I’ve checked a preview of one of my earlier books and this is indeed the case. Look up any of my books with a link in the front, click on it – and you’ll wind up on one of my sites. You don’t even have to buy the book.
This means you could use the Look Inside feature to get people directly to your site. A redirect link would tell you which preview they had clicked on to get there.
Imagine a boxed text which said something like: “Up to 50% discounts on this and related books in all formats – Click Here Now.” Or maybe something like: “Limited bonus for book readers – Click Here Now.” As long as any price on that link wasn’t lower than Amazon (with the discount) then you’d be fine. Of course, if that book-discount was only available behind a free membership paywall, then Amazon’s bots wouldn’t be able to find it…
Digital coupons come into play, much as in Scientific Advertising, to tell you more about the client, and as well, what text gets them to buy. While A/B tests aren’t really possible with ebooks, they are with landing pages. Those landing pages could also enable people to tell their friends about that offer, to make it go viral – giving them a different redirect link, which itself was shortened with bit.ly or similar.
Isn’t bit.ly an overkill? Considering the analytics they have, it’s a nice backup. You can customize it as well, for any mouseover. None of the bit.ly links I’ve used have ever caused a flag – as they simply go to one of my sites, in any case. Bit.ly has better analytics than the next closest contender in this, Goo.gl. But if you don’t want that extra complexity, your redirect link itself can be plenty short.
Examples:
original redirect link: http://livesensical.com/go/aow-lulu-djhb/
If word got out that people could get a free membership with multiple downloads – just by clicking on Amazon preview links – perhaps that would drive business to your site. Of course, such people might only be lookie-loo’s – but a little work would then show you whether this was working, since signups from a special landing page would tell you if you were only getting freebie-seekers who opted out after downloading everything they could. (The joke is on them, though – since all your PDF’s also have links in them which are redirects. If they post them elsewhere, they’ll still be able to bring you buyers even years later.)
This prompts another post (on my list of to-do’s) which tells of a new strategy for beating Amazon by employing their own tactics against them – commodity pricing and instant delivery. So do stay tuned – make sure you’re subscribed by email or RSS feed.
Just an ad lib today. No real transcript this time. Just me talking to you.
We’ve been around the pike and I’d like to hear what you need help with or have questions about.
Next will be some very intensive work in Marketing ebooks and books in general, so I wanted to check with you before we moved forward.
Visit livesensical.com and sign up, or simply opt-in on this site and we can be in touch. Once you get an email from signing up, then answer it with any question you have. I’ll be in touch when you do.
Of course, that also means all the podcasts to this blog.
Thanks. Much.
No email, just – “your account is locked” when I tried to login. Checking my back posts found all their links removed. I have today’s post here and another on a different blog – because it was posted accidentally using a different login (one that Indian author I’ve been telling you about set up and gave me access to.)
All the various things I’d posted are now vanished. Most of it I still have on my hard drives – somewhere. Some of it should never have been posted. Many of these were tests.
No, I don’t know why.
Good thing I’m moving to Rainmaker. (More on that below.)
But this is what I’ve mentioned (on one of those podcasts) that you don’t want to digital sharecrop any longer than you have to. Because all of your stuff could vanish on you – quite suddenly. For me, it was within an hour of posting (or less – it took me that long to revisit for a new post.)
But as to why Archive.org locked account and removed all files – there’s little on line. One point (which I already suspected) is “commercial intent.” I did absent-mindedly put two bit.ly affiliate links into my last post (they were in the blog already.) That’s all it took. Years of content gone.
Of course, I turned around and created a new archive.org login – which I’ve read isn’t always possible. I’m not going to tempt fate by putting up the same offending files – even though I could probably get by with no descriptions (ignoring SEO, not wise.) With what I now know (ouch) I’ll probably have that account for years more.
The scene with these digital landowners is to keep scammy marketers and spammers off their turf – and yet are prostituting the content which is freely donated to their sites. Content marketing is turning yet another corner – and the phrase “Native Commerce” has come to envelop those who provide content, but also unashamedly ask people to buy their valuable products or services built from that content.
The trick is – you can’t do both. All the digital landowners can pull your sharecropping license anytime they want. This is usually when you try to earn income off their hosting. Non-profit or for-profit, their business model is in having people donate or pay them for access. Meanwhile, they can run ads to defray their operating expenses. If you are a threat to that income stream, then off you go.
Your best solution is to simply work from the very few honestly open platforms (or, like Blogger, recompense their sponsor, Google, by providing user information) – and build up your income to the point of bootstrapping your business into being able to invest in paid-for services.
Meanwhile, what do we do for our podcast now that Internet Archives kicked us out?
Looking For a Cheap Replacement
The biggest problem turns out to be two.
If you’re going to host podcasts somewhere, they have to have huge bandwidth capability (when you become really popular) and they should fit into iTunes technical feed demands.
I did look up possible replacements, but it’s mostly seems that you can’t host without paying, basically. One possible replacement – Google Drive.
Well, having 50% of all mobile devices out there can’t be all bad…
And it was simple enough to re-upload all my files to Google Drive again.
The next two problem areas showed up immediately: Can I get an embedded MP3 player like Archive.org had – and how do I get the file name to enter as the enclosure link?
Getting a nice little embedded player.
This could be trickier. This code will work on a blogger blog. (note: the code itself tended to start running when you go back to Compose mode)
That’s all HTML 5 code, so it works in all modern browsers. (There are Flash versions, but these are disappearing gradually.)
One workaround is to use their embedded viewer. (Found by going to Google Drive, right-clicking on the file itself and selecting “preview”, which will overlay in your browser window and start playing – unless you turn the darned thing off. Then go to the upper right corner and click “pop-out”. This will then give you a static window in a new tab. Clicking “more actions” on the top menu bar enables an embed code to show:
Note the width and height sizes there. change these to a width of 400 and a height of 100 and you’ll get a nice little player like this:
(If you mouse-over, you’ll see a little pop-out option in the corner – nice to get your file playing elsewhere via social sharing…)
How to get a Google Drive MP3 file name is tricky.
But once you get it set up, you have unlimited amounts of audio files to share.
You have to get the folder file name. (Thanks to StackOverFlow for this discussion and image.)
Note: The folder has to be shared as “Public on the web” (“Anyone can find and view”), not just “Anyone can view”, or it won’t work.
This then worked well with the embed code above:
Testing it in the Enclosure Link showed that Blogger accepted it. Yay! We’re now podcasting with Blogger.
Is it worth it?
If you’re doing this from scratch, I’d say so. It’s a way to get started.
Of course, you could just avoid my mistakes and continue using Archive.org without offending them somehow (I did, for years.)
Again, the idea is that you run a frugal, sustainable home publishing business. One that pays its own way, not continually borrowing from your day job income. Eventually, you’ll get your sales up to the point that it’s covering all your broadband, domain, and hosting costs.
A bit above that is when you can get into a Pro hosting scene such as Rainmaker, which has unlimited storage and bandwidth, plus enables your podcasting with better analytics than anywhere else (or so I’m told.)
This will be part 2 of this – where I actually port all these files over to Rainmaker, and then embed their player on all these older posts here.
Despite other plans, I’ll need to do this today in order to get everything running properly again.
But then the old phrase is right: “Man plans, and God laughs.”
– – – –
Make sure you’re opted-in above or on livesensical.com so you don’t miss a single white-knuckled, hair-raising, cliff-hanging adventure in self-publishing. And feel free to email me back with any questions you have. I answer all of them – either directly or with a blog post/podcast. See you next time…
As mentioned last post, Internet Archives had suddenly dumped all my stuff and locked me out. They didn’t like my bit.ly affiliate links, apparently.
So I was left with all these podcasts to re-upload somewhere.
I was looking to Rainmaker to solve this. And it will, once it goes live. This will essentially move that Blogger blog over to Rainmaker with all the text and everything. (Then I’ll reset the iTunes feed and do a final post there – not yet, though…)
Meanwhile, I was stuck with the problem that people subscribing through iTunes were stuck – if I only hosted through Google Drive (to replace Enclosure Links from Internet Archive.)
What pulled me along was that Rainmaker is basically built on WordPress. That means that the MP3 files are in there somewhere and can be directly linked. Rainmakers main benefit is that they’ve made it so nice to develop in with their interface – but that hides some of the “under the hood” action we geeks are used to.
The Search for File Hosting Begins
At first, I recreated a post, by copying the text and uploading the files from Blogger. Since I was working from late May posts (the first actual podcasts) – I quickly saw that this would be a very long series of actions if I had to do this for every file I wanted to host.
As well, since the site won’t be live for a few days yet – I needed to see if I could simply host the files there right now and get around all the waiting. (Plus I didn’t want to have to do these Enclosure Links twice.)
Right off, I figured there had to be a way to mass-upload all these audio files, just like Google Drive.
Sure enough, there was – just get into Edit Media -> Add New, and you can select and drag these files right over:
Now, what was that place they put them all? If I had the folder path for one, only the file name would be different.
Selecting one file, I hit “Edit Media” and found that the URL was there already. Go to the right column and look under Save:
Selecting that file gave me the direct link and folder structure to all of them. Simple.
Now I only had to use my original file name, matching these up with what was originally linked – then fixing the folder path, and I was really cooking.
So it’s simply replacing that folder path for each one, since I uploaded the same files and the names wouldn’t change.
While I have that post open for editing, I also had to replace the Archive.org player – which broke when they nuked my files.
So I used the simple HTML5 player from last time – as I haven’t found where there’s an embed code for Rainmaker’s built-in player (yet.)
Again, just copy that Rainmaker link and paste. Simple. Voila! Fast updating with simple editing.
– – – –
Just finished updating all the episodes – took over 3 hours for about 20 or so episodes. Most of this was waiting for Blogger to come up. That was probably my own satellite broadband rather than Google.
Now I’m up to date and you won’t get interrupted with earlier or future episodes.
The only problems I ran into was where Archive.org and Rainmaker had different opinions about how to handle spaces in file names (“%20” or “-“). I would then look it up on Rainmaker and copy that exact file link. Only happened about 3 or 4 times.
So – now we’re done.
What did we learn from this?
Never sharecrop if you can afford not to. What you’re saving is money, but you could be saving time.
This is what the Rainmaker.fm podcasts are drilling into my head these days. I listen when I’m doing mundane things – and have even figured out how to listen when I go check my cattle twice a day – about an hour each time to make the rounds of my herds and pastures.
You leverage money in order to save yourself time. But at the beginning, all you have to invest is time. So:
Work smart, not hard.
Get efficient as your middle name.
Begin with the end in mind.
and –
Be flexible.
– – – –
Be sure to opt-in above or over at livesensical.com, so we can continue this and other conversations. And so you don’t miss a single episode of these white-knuckled, hair-raising, cliff-hanging real-life adventures in self-publishing.
You see, “conventional wisdom” has it that you need to publish on a schedule in order to serve your audience best.
I’ve come to disagree with this idea.
That’s not the way I listen to podcasts, and I bet you don’t either. I can fall behind on keeping up with various podcasts. My iTunes will actually quit downloading them after awhile, which is fine with me. That means they are putting out too much stuff too often.
I listen and work in batches, best. When I find several books I want to publish in a certain format, then I’ll get them all through to the point I can publish them. Marketing after publishing has been my sore point. Apparently, I wasn’t through finding stuff to publish.
Right now, I’ve pretty much found all the stuff I need to – for now.
I want to get all these things I’ve published already selling better.
Like I’ve been telling you for some months now. In fact, we started podcasting (me talking, you listening) right in the middle of some marketing work.
However, when I “had” to get a podcast out, I started resenting that work – because it was interrupting some line of work I was doing otherwise.
Right now, I’ve been trying to get this new livesensical.com site up on Rainmaker for months. One thing after another interrupted it. Some interruptions were good and needful, others were annoyances.
Over the past couple of days, I got four blog posts out, on two different blogs. Some of this was research based on what I’d discovered in revising the Living Sensical manifesto. When archive.org then shut down all my podcasts, this prompted research and so – I blogged about the raw reactions which prompted solving their problem.
You saw these two blog posts recently – but I don’t know if I’ll ever podcast them. Because I already took a day away from getting that book wrapped up.
The research work was was inspired was welcome. The research work caused by inane algorithms instantly dumping all my content was not welcome and was frustrating.
Which do you think I’d rather be working on?
Podcasting as a schedule is not always inspiring. I feel it’s drudgery to have to do things which are not creative, not inspired, not calming.
I fired my last boss a year ago last May.
Not that I’d been doing much work for his company for several months earlier. I’d been making enough through booksales to more than cover my expenses – so I didn’t need to “work” at anything after that. He’d lined up others to do the menial copy work he needed – and discounted the breakthroughs I’d brought him in SEO techniques.
If the work you are doing isn’t rewarding, if you aren’t looking forward to it – then it’s just another job. The phrase comes to mind, “I work just as hard as I don’t get fired, they pay me just enough so I don’t quit.”
SEO had turned to content, which his clients either didn’t understand or couldn’t afford. The “content” he needed from me was to quickly set up a minimum number of pages on a website for his proprietary backend. Real content now means using a website to build your audience. “SEO” as we had been doing it up to that point was mostly a bag of tricks with a hole in it – the tricks had run out.
As I said, I work on whatever the hell I want to these days.
Fortunately for you, this is an entertaining journey.
The conventional wisdom I’m exposing as false is that you have to stick to a schedule to podcast.
Any author will tell you that the book is done when it’s done. Some authors can crank out 2-4 books a year. Others will crank out a single book.
The great books will generate millions.
The vast number of authors never quit their day job as they can’t afford to.
My tests have shown that there are sufficient numbers of public domain and PLR books out there ready for re-publishing, that anyone can make a decent living from this alone. Not rich – yet – but plenty of time to get there.
And this is using a fraction of what real marketing consists of.
I do like my freedom of schedule however. And being able to post whenever (and whatever) I feel like – useful stuff that no one else is covering.
Keeping a schedule means having a job – to me, anyway. So “having” to podcast is just putting on the wage-slave shackles again.
Book marketing isn’t what it used to be.
Some of my more recent posts have pointed this out.
The Book-As-An-Idea-Container is closer to what we should be doing. And freely repurposing content into any and all formats to encourage discovery.
So “book publishing” is a smallish part of everything we can and should be doing.
Here’s an example:
LinkedIn is bigger than Twitter and allows long-form content posts.
8 images per 1000 word LinkedIn post was found to be optimal.
LinkedIn won’t accept audio, but will accept video.
Meanwhile, Google considers 2,000 words to be best for their uses.
Some LinkedIn authors put a 1K post on LinkedIn, then link to their much longer original post over on their blog.
If you take that article (or the long post) and podcast it, you’ll get more traffic to your blog.
Take that podcast and 8 images and create a video for LinkedIn – but also for YouTube and everywhere else.
Each of these posts, podcasts, and videos contain a call to action to opt-in to your site as a member.
Take 5 such posts and make them into an ebook on Amazon, and everywhere else – again, with that CTA.
On your site and BitTorrent, offer a bundle which has the ebook, podcasts, and videos.
Members get a discount on the bundle, or an exclusive version.
Oh – and you post a hardcopy version as well, which members can buy at a discount also.
IFTTT is meanwhile sending out status updates consistently on all your new posts, articles, videos, podcasts through Twitter, G+, Facebook, etc.
Sure, this type of marketing is a lot of work. Booksales get all this promotion, but so does your membership. And members get treated best of all – they can access your material anyway they want it.
Now, you can monetize a lot more than just ebooks.
5 articles, 5 podcasts, 5 videos – 1 ebook, 1 “Spoken Word Album“, 1 hardcopy – all on Amazon and everywhere you can port them to. You can even make a DVD of the video’s if you want.
Your members are encouraged to leave reviews on Amazon to put it up on top with their algorithms.
That is marketing. And I didn’t mention Synnd in the above, which is more social signals through network syndication.
We’re evolving this podcast and blog.
I’m actually going to have yet another podcast over at livesensical.com, which is really “book” reviews. These will be done by series, and then marketedNew name, new look coming. as above – resulting in multiple formats, which in turn push the original books at the same time (most of which are already on Amazon.)
This blog will continue to simply describe the process, and give you a chance to participate.
The other will be aligned to telling people about the “secrets hidden in plain sight” – which I’ve republished – and how they relate to improving your life.
But I’m not going to burden you with having to listen to these. As I go through that process, I’m sure to find more material and breakthroughs about media production. That’s what this blog is for.
(I may even start up a third podcast, which will simply be repurposing an existing audiobook to promote that book – since there are 50 essays in that book, it will run for most of a year – all on automatic.)
The work on these promotions may mean that I don’t blog here as regularly. Or post in spurts (like this week) when I have something to say.
More than likely, I’ll work in batches and then review what I learned from that as I refine my techniques. You’ll then hear about that discussion as I do.
There’s a new name, new look coming.
This blog will ultimately move over to livesensical.com as I’ve got better tools to create with over there. You’ll only notice an improved format, if I do it right. All the oldest posts are already over there – just the new ones need to be updated. This blog will still stay here, though. Because Google likes old blogs.
Yes, I have a whole blog post crying out in my head to get posted – but I’m still working out the details. (The sneak peak is that you’re publishing work should revolve around a theme, not just a genre.)
Right now, it’s late and I’m to bed. Tomorrow, I’ll spruce this up a bit and probably even podcast it.
This is the (final) recipe for marketing a book online.
And because of the breakthroughs below, you may not hear from me for awhile.
But don’t worry, I’ll give you links at the end so you can follow this book promotion as it shows up.
I don’t call these breakthroughs lightly. Of course, I’ve been “breaking through” for the last few years, the first being where I simply starting creating enough passive income to work at this full time. The others have been known about for awhile, and the last one fell into place with LinkedIn becoming a publishing platform.
Now it’s time to put them all to the test.
We’re going to review these rapidly, so feel free to print off the transcript for this podcast. It’s simple to spool these off, but the work in getting them done takes a bit more time and effort. (Like days and weeks.)
The key points with all this are just a few:
Make it pay for itself as an investment as it goes, not just a money drain from your day job income. Eventually, this will replace your day job.
Build your audience and find out from them what they most want from you. That’s the books you’ll write and publish.
Focus on making this a success (Napoleon Hill’s Burning Desire) – find and follow your bliss to make this happen fastest.
Note: Don’t skimp on these steps below. These are in pretty much final order, but you can mix them around except for the first three. Any failure I’ve seen in authors can be traced to these even more than anything else.
The First Three Ingredients
0. Get an email list.MailChimp, Simplycast, AWeber, Infusionsoft, anything. Yes, those are autoresponder services, not sending out emails personally.
00. Get a domain name. Can be anything. If you don’t already have your own name, grab it – that will be fine, especially for original works. Otherwise, set up something that sounds like a respectable publishing house. (Or follow Google and Yahoo’s lead — pronounceable gobbledegook seems OK these days.) Resources: NameCheap, GoDaddy
000. Get an actual website. You can start on Blogger with the domain name on top of it if you want. Best bet here is to get something like HostGator and pay for some minimal hosting, then put your domain up as a CNAME subdomain, so you could use all sorts of other features of that hosting.
To repeat myself – all successful authors have these up and running. Period. If you’re not doing these, you have a hobby.
Note: I’m not covering writing your book here. See my “Just Publish!” for the steps of these. You’ll need a well-edited book (even if you do it yourself) and a fascinating cover (if you aren’t graphic-trained, hire this out – don’t DIY to cut corners. 10 or 50 bucks is a good investment. Get some copywriting books so you know how to write a good, engaging description. (See my Masters of Marketing Series – Collier, Schwab, Schwartz, or their collection.)
One last point: the best model for this is a free membership, so you get people’s address and build your list. You don’t want freebie-seekers, you want people who will invest in your and your books – so they can improve their lives and continue on their own journey. Memberships are a study of their own, I’ve covered earlier on this blog. Free is via Gumroad, or self-hosted with a WordPress plug-in, paid with Rainmaker, top-end is Infusionsoft.
How to Mix Your Promotion Set-ups Batter
A. Set up your landing page with title, cover, description. You need this to link inside your digital copies, as well as laying this out in your hardcopy version so people can type it in. Your books are emissaries which bring you more audience. Put this link in your book, both front and back, so it’s the first and last thing they see.
B. Publish your book. Lulu is recommended, as almost every type of publishing can be done there.
Ebook – upload your document and have Lulu port this out to everywhere except Amazon. – Amazon – take Lulu’s completed epub file and upload it. We do Amazon separately in order to be able to tweak their metadata. – Google – Lulu doesn’t go there. – There are more which I’ve mentioned, but these are the key distributors. You can later come back to port to more to further leverage your sales.
Trade paperback – use your original file and they’ll generate a print-ready PDF for you. (Or port this from LibreOffice if you’re using it.) Ordering your proof is another expense, but minor. This helps you spot obvious goofs before you send out to Ingram.
PDF – for Lulu and also Scribd.
C. Update your landing page with all these links – hard-coded.
Copy your links and use the distributor’s little icons so that if they click on it, they’ll go to that distributor. This is an SEO trick. Using a script won’t do it, the links have to be hardcoded. Google this if you don’t know how – or get a simple HTML book on it.
Embed a script like Ganxy so that you can sell your book locally. Sellfy and Gumroad are also good. (Later, you can upgrade to something like Rainmaker, which has this all built in.) Ganxy is good, as you can get email opt-in’s. Ganxy also allows you to create bundles for extra value – we’ll cover more of this later.
D. Set up or verify your IFTTT recipes. If This Then That – a way to syndicate your content so that it sends updates to every social network you want to. It will also auto-post for you to WordPress.com, Tumblr, and some others – which doesn’t hurt for backlinks and traffic. This is a short study if you haven’t done this before, but will run indefinitely – and you can tweak it later. Note: when you set up Buffer through IFTTT, it can take your updates and content to even more social outposts, even on it’s free plan.
How to Bake Your Promotion Execution Layer Cake
A. (Paid) Synnd. This I haven’t talked about much, but you can read up on it at that link. Essentially, this promots any link via bookmarking and social media campaigns through a distributed world-wide network:
Your book’s Landing Page
Your Amazon buy link. Because they are the most leveraged for sales.
(Optional) Other distributor buy links – not essential.
B. Post your cover art to Flickr and Instagram (IFTTT will take it from there) with links back to your book’s landing page. (No, don’t short cut it by sending to Amazon – you want their email address so you can help them better.)
C. Promote your book on OpenLibrary, Library Thing, and Goodreads – these all link back to the book’s landing page. Make sure you update/create your author page on these. Update your Amazon author page while you’re at it (and consider updating all the national Amazon author pages as well, especially after your book becomes an international bestseller. This can give you more traffic back to your site, but at least tells the search engines more about you.)
D. Split every chapter in your book out as content:
Create long-form articles on your site-blog, then convert these to run on LinkedIn. Google likes about 2K words, LinkedIn about 1K. Your earlier study on copywriting comes into play here, as it’s essentially the same format – you fascinate the reader, draw them in, and get them to act (go to your site and sign up.) See Gericke Potgieter’s book on this. Your LinkedIn article call to action (CTA) will tell them to visit the blog for the full article and more information. Your blog post obviously links to the book’s landing page and tells them to go there – and sign up for the free membership.
Podcast your chapters. Review my earlier posts on this. Very simple, and it will bring regular traffic to your site via iTunes and Stitcher. Embed the player on your blog toward the top.
Create a video using the 8 images from the LinkedIn post and your audio. Post this directly to YouTube and embed in your site (or use Synnd to do this for you, and run campaigns to promote it there as well.) Embed the video on your blog post at the top to keep visitors from bouncing.
Create a PDF in presentation format from these images – post this to Slideshare. Embed your video inside the presentation. Your CTA in that presentation tells viewers to visit your site for more information – that link to the specific page that presentation is about (that chapter of the book.)
Email your list once weekly with your progress and give them links to the new content. Ask for feedback and any corrections they note – give away gifts for people who find errors. Of course, you then update the ebook versions on all distributors. (Trade paperback updates should wait until the error-reporting slows down. Then come out with version 2.0 and add some additional content…)
More publishing to enable more discovery
A. Bundles – Somewhere in the middle of this, you get a lot of extra content floating around that people will be interested in. Particularly if you give it away with your book.
Post all these peripheral digital materials up on Ganxy and create new landing pages for each set of this book’s bundles. Create several different kinds of bundles – with the book and various videos, audio files, PDFs, cover art, and anything else you may have from creating the book. Give away samples, and sell both a high-priced bundle and a higher-priced bundle on each landing page.
Post bundles on BitTorrent Bundles and sell these as well as giving them away for emails. Use their model to guide your own bundle creations.
Update your book’s landing page with these links.
B. Audiobook – you may have noticed that you’ve just created an audio book of your content. It’s in all those podcasts. There’s a trick to monetizing these.
Audible has sewn up the major distributors for audiobooks – or so they think. They have arbitrary standards, and set your price for you. Dumb and dumber. Your workaround is to set up an account on CDBaby and create a “Spoken Word Album” for your book, using the same title and cover art as your Amazon version. This will then start showing up on Amazon alongside your ebook and trade paperback. As well, your CD gets sold internationally in music stores, as well as digital downloads via CDBaby.
Of course, you then update your book’s landing page with this hard-link so you can sell them directly as well.
C. Consider Affiliate sales. With Bundles, you can enter the wonderful world of affiliate marketing. There are several sites for this which have no upfront costs. By now you’ve had quite a bit of experience in writing engaging copy, so tailoring one for affiliate marketers shouldn’t be very hard. Rainmaker also has a built-in Affiliate program you can start if you want. The trick is in how much time this will take to run – but you should weigh how much this is leaving money on the table. I haven’t gone there yet, but still consider it worth checking out.
D. Consider a proper book launch. You have just done a launch, but without a list. By the end of this, you should have build a considerable list and can now study up on how launches are done and so jump-start your next book (or version 2.0) on Amazon to leverage all the resources you have. Look around the web and find Jeff Walker’s stuff. He does a release every year and tells his whole system (bare bones) in the sales videos. (I imagine he’ll probably announce this to his email list if you want to sign up and wait…)
How to Apply This to Existing Backbench – Cupcakes From Cake Mix
You may already have numerous books sitting out there and perhaps you’ve never had a list before, or even a website or blog. The approach could be full on, but probably that would only be effective for a new book (especially not for PLR or public domain books.)
Let’s take an example: I’ve got about 25 PD classic fiction bestsellers I published as a test about everywhere but Amazon. Their common denominator was their continuing success.
What they are missing is some decent, current marketing to tell these newer generations what they are missing. The bright idea here is to do a sort of Cliff Notes version of these – plot, characters, background, locale, interesting stories about how the book was written, what the author was doing at the time, how well the book sold and why… All those sorts of things. These would run about 2,000 to 5,000 words or so – just lay it all out and don’t worry about length (just so long as you keep it interesting.) Then you compile these longish articles into a book on it’s own, like: “25 Bestselling Classics of All Time – Series I: The Romances” Now you have a new book and can run this through as above.
First, you take your list and website above and do a mailing to see if anyone is interested in this area. If it’s all crickets (and is a passion for you) then you go ahead and do it anyway. This is different from people mailing you back and saying you’re full of it. (Not that one or two trolls or cranks would dissuade you.) You’re just telling everyone what you’re going to start doing. Gives them a heads-up.
The point here is that these books sell OK, even without marketing. So why not help them out?
You just work over one book at a time.
First up, make sure you update (or even create, if it’s missing) that book’s landing page. Get all the distributor links on there. Put a Ganxy script on it. Make it look nice.
Update the text of your book to include that link in both front and back.
Next, you create an Amazon version of that particular book which they would accept on Kindle. Put in some content in the back of each of these – like your overlong essay and mark it “annotated” – and submit it with that quote above as it’s subtitle. Now it’s part of a series. And series have a better chance of selling.
Oh – and check to see if you can make the cover even better while you’re at it.
Go ahead and publish your new trade paperback version with the same title and cover.
Synnd that landing page. IFTTT is already set up as above, so it will automatically tweet and post status updates everywhere on your behalf.
OK, take that essay – that’s your long-form content – and post it on your blog. Now you make a LinkedIn article about this, with the 8 images that Gericke recommends in his book. This links back to your blog post.
Next, podcast that essay. Take the images and create a video. Embed them both. Create a PDF presentation and post it to Slideshare – embed it on the blog post as well.
Now create a bundle with all that, just for this book. Post it on Ganxy and BitTorrent Bundles.
Finally, update your Landing Page with all these direct links.
Take the next book in that series and run it through as above. If you’re doing the Romances, then your next book is a Romance.
Once you’ve run all the books in that series through, then create a book out of those long-form essays and post it on Kindle. Create a hardcopy version of it with the same title and cover. Create a “spoken word album” with the same title and cover. Create a bundle with your audio files for all the books and the ebooks and post it on Ganxy and BitTorrent.
You probably have about 4-5 series in those bestsellers (I worked this up once.)
This gets all these regular sellers a bit of a boost.
While you’re doing all this, you’re sending out emails to your list.
With all this promotion you’ve just set up some ways to make more sales from getting new paperbacks and Kindles onto Amazon. Also, you’ve got 4-5 new titles on Amazon and everywhere else from your essays.
Now you’ve created all sorts of new emissaries to send people to your membership and your list.
That’s how you do your backbench.
What about working in batches for PD publishing?
Same sequence applies, actually. But you’ll need to work all of the books in that batch individually.
Make sure they each have their own landing page.
Then do a long-form review in order to get the “annotated” Kindle version approved.
Then make sure you have a matching hardcopy version to go up there on Amazon.
Work up binders of subsets within that batch. Include the audio of the reviews.
Compile and publish ebook and paperback of that subset’s reviews – make sure it gets a landing page, too.
That will then give you another bundle to publish.
Once you have that new ebook and bundle published, then go back to update all the individual reviews and the individual book pages to also link to this new book’s landing page.
If you think back to where we started with this podcast, I was in the middle of the marketing for a book series on Writing and Illustrating Children’s books. This was 12 classic PD books and 2 PLR reports. Within these were sub-series on drawing, (oil) painting, and writing. A few of the drawing books would apply to oil painting as well. Although I’d probably look around for some PD/PLR water-color painting books, as these would lend themselves better to illustrations.
And several of these could become free and paid online courses.
Another reason I quit that one was as it brought up another four sets of books – each having about 25 titles each – which would help someone study classics in order to improve their abilities to write and illustrate children’s books. That’s about 125-150 more books to publish from scratch.
As I got closer to this, I saw that this journey was going to take me directly away from a lot of what I was doing currently – and I’d not be coming back.
The decision was made to put that all on hold (yet again) so I could wrap other stuff up.
A Q-and-A Discussion With Fellow Bakers
Why this approach?
Mainly as Content Marketing and Search Engine Marketing are two peas in a single pod. Google wants more content and will give you link love for putting your variations on several platforms. With some care, you rank better for certain keywords if you craft your meta-data carefully.
Because I hate ads in general and believe in the Golden Rule as a Natural law you shouldn’t try to skimp on. Modern advertising is built on interrupting your attention and mostly talks down to the audience.
Content marketing is different, and is more and more welcome (even in it’s “native advertising” mode.)
The only ads I’d do would be Stumbleupon, which actually bring traffic to your webpage. (These are also cheaper than all the other types of ads, BTW.)
Why all this social media by syndication?
By testing (which I haven’t compiled and written up yet) each platform and social media has its own audience. Their tastes are wildly different. As well, most of these social media now have their own search engines, to find and serve up content.
As you build your content backbench by consistently publishing, these different social platforms will actually bring you more and more traffic, even on days you don’t post.
You’ll note that the only platform I suggest personally involving yourself with is LinkedIn – because with their publishing feature, they’ve moved into content, which is any author’s chief talent. Everything else is by IFTTT, so you don’t burn your time trying to collect followers when you need to be concentrating on leads and conversions. I’ll take a well-heeled CEO looking at my landing page any time over some random lookie-loo in search of freebies.
Does all this work pay off better?
Of course. Look – most authors are settling for an ebook on just Amazon. My tests show you can make more on other distributors until/if that ebook starts to take off (this is figuring with no list and no other promotion.) Even when that book takes off, you’ll still get several hundred per month from the other distributors combined. (Meanwhile, when someone searches for the book by name, you get multiple listings on Google for each distributor.)
Doing podcasts actually creates your audio book – which can be posted to Audible to get pulled up by Amazon for your book’s title. Using that same set of audio files for a CD Baby “spoken word album” should also show up on Amazon and also will get distributed to multiple music stores internationally.
Videos bring their own traffic. But this can give you a DVD to sell on Amazon via CDBaby or directly via Kunaki.
Meanwhile, all this extra content allows you to offer bundles, which can be sold on BitTorrent (a yet different audience) and also directly.
The Short Answer is yes. The other response is: you’ll never know what money you’ve been leaving on the table until you try this out.
Why do so little on backbench?
Mainly because my view of this is about PD and/or PLR books, which mostdistributors Amazon and Kobo discriminate badly about. The key point is to create little sub-series, each with their own new book. Again, you waste no efforts but instead leverage everything. New text, combined, becomes a new ebook on Amazon and print book via Lulu. Classic fiction mostly already has audio for it, and this usually in the public domain. Of course, a good non-fiction book which has never been transferred to audio is yet another leverage-able approach. Nothing is cast in stone.
If you have a lot of original works, then take them in order of best sales and do the whole podcast/audiobook route. This also then can give you a video for each chapter, which will of course get people to view the rest in the series.
And you can bundle multiple earlier versions of your own books, much like I’ve outlined for PD/PLR. Some PLR comes with audio, so this can put you way ahead of the curve. Podcast these, create video’s from them (and in some cases, extract the audio from the video in reverse.)
The point is to leverage everything, and point to your landing page with all variations of content.
Why bother selling direct when you get so many sales on Amazon?
Actually, most authors don’t sell well on Amazon – it’s known as the ebook graveyard, especially for Indies. Out of over 200 books I’ve published only about 70 do more than one sale per month, only a dozen do more than 5 a month, and only 2 sell more than a couple hundred per month. Sure, these are mostly PD and no PLR is allowed on Amazon, so it cuts down what I can really sell there.
The point with having an audience is in those bundles. Amazon can’t really do this, other than trying to sell the various versions of each title together (which the author has to agree to sell at a lower price.)
With a membership, I can give them offers which Amazon can’t (such as buying all the ebook versions [mobi, epub, PDF] all at once, and also getting videos and audio files, plus “cutting room floor” excerpts – as well as special casewrap hardback editions, and so on.
Your own audience can be leveraged to increase your income hugely. If you don’t try it – again, you’ll never know what money you’re leaving on the table.
Most importantly, you can build your audience by giving them exactly what they really want.
The Key Ingredient is Audience
Most authors (and big publishing houses) never figured this out – and it has only really come to view with the last decade of Content Marketing, replacing conventional advertising and ecommerce wisdom.
The importances and sequence appears to be this:
Audience – Value – Income – Bliss
You invite an audience to join you on your journey.
This is done by generating interesting and valuable/useful content.Of course, you have an opt-in form to get their emails, which is the most efficient way to deliver content to your audience.
While you give some very valuable data away for free, you also offer versions of this in some sort of paid content – which they can exchange with you.
As they click on and buy your content containers, you then get an idea of what they are really wanting. You then refine these and offer more of that and related materials.
Along the line, you’ll find your own and your audience’s bliss.
And as long as you balance all these above, you can continue this journey indefinitely. This passive income flow continues to support your lifestyle and will leverage as you go, to provide for all your dreams.
A Warning: This Cookbook is Closing…
Of course, the next thing is to tell you – as usual – that I’m dogfooding this and so probably won’t be podcasting here for awhile. Maybe not again, actually.
Just too much work to do on this new book – the manifesto for this new site. It’s got some 15 chapters or so – which then means a lot of time getting all this promotion done for this book. You can see above that this title becomes a container for all the various formats that are possible – all as a test of this careful planning.
And if I do have another breakthrough, I’ll let you know.
The invitation to join me on Live Sensical still exists.
That way, you can see this as it works up. But no, I won’t be doing a post-mortem on this particular marketing as far as I know.
Because I have a back bench of books to handle after this one manifesto is set.
And I haven’t mentioned creating courses for books, both free and paid.
I also haven’t mentioned the idea of paying to have an audiobook created, and then immediately posting each chapter as a podcast, which will then auto-post each week (or bi-weekly) for a year and promote the title in all formats – as well as the membership. Just organizing this for several books will take a few weeks on its own.
So you can see I have a lot of work coming up.
Then please forgive me if I don’t talk about book publishing and marketing for awhile – as I’ll be far too busy publishing and marketing books.
Again, I’m heading into writing, illustrating, and publishing children’s books after this – so I’m pretty sure that we’re done here.
PS. I do owe you a title on book marketing. This last test sequence will basically wrap it up.
PPS. There’s also a whole study of the personal development side to making a bestseller. This is ongoing and will eventually show up on the livesensical.com podcast – or will be a reason to dust this podcast off and revive it for a bit. Maybe. Just maybe.
So much for that hiatus. Since you’re one of the brilliant, charismatic followers of this blog and podcast, you know I just gave you a complete brain dump of a marketing sequence just last week. Half an hour of content, all in one huge checklist.
And then I said I was simply going to get busy implementing it and so you wouldn’t hear from me for awhile.
That old phrase I like comes to mind: “Man plans and God laughs.”
What I did was start double-checking my research – which then simplified the process.
That is why I’m back with you today – to help make your life simpler.
Scott Sutton showed me a better way to Amazon my books.
I mentioned in my last post that I’d found out that Kindle books weren’t normal books which would run 300 pages in text. They should be short, compiled versions of blog posts. Well, I did some study on Scott Sutton – actually paid for his collection of three books (“3 for the price of 2” was the marketing hook.) [link]
Then I digested this last night, which was true to its word – short, bullet-heavy, and full of action steps. Not a lot of fluff.
While this is how he has made as much as $50K per month – he’s leaving money on the table and isn’t organizing this for real production by re-purposing.
The other point to ignore his ideas about KDP Select. This simply doesn’t work anymore. Hasn’t since 2012. He covers this with his “.99 is the New Free” report – but doesn’t revise his earlier books to take that into account.
Overall, it’s a nice read to get started earning some real income from just books.
76 books in a year, really?!?
Well, it could actually be more than that. And it doesn’t cover all the peripheral products you’ll also be creating as you go along.
Theory
You essentially blog once a week.
Turn that into an Amazon single, plus peripheral marketing pieces.
Combine 5 of those singles into a title.
Combine 3 of those titles into a collection.
Bundle at every combining step.
Counting this up gives you:
50 singles
10 titles
3 collections
10 title bundles
3 collection bundles
And then equals:
76 properties on Amazon, your own site, and BitTorrent. (Plus the rest of the major distributors and anywhere else you want to port these.)
Note: the word “book” applies at every step, since a book is an idea-container. But to be specific, we will be talking about
singles (a 2K blog post converted into a short ebook.)
titles (a 10K collection of 5 singles)
collections (3 titles together)
bundles (ebooks plus audio, visual, and any other digital offering you have that adds value.
Basic Plan
You research for a profitable niche that you can blog about for the next year.
(Note: The starred items aren’t covered by Sutton.)
*You blog every week.
*You podcast that blog.
*You create a LinkedIn article with 8 images from that blog post (and link to it.)
*You create a presentation on Slideshare from that LinkedIn article (which links to and is embedded in the blog post.)
*You use that podcast and images to create a YouTube video (which links back to that blog post, and is embedded in it.)
You edit that blog post into a standalone single for Amazon with front and back matter – and post it. (Lots of work here with cover and description.)
*You then port that Amazon single through Lulu and Google Play to the other distributors with updated links (front and back).
*When you have five which are on the same topic and complement each other, you edit these into a title and port to Amazon.
*Then port that title through Lulu and Google Play to everywhere else.
* That title can be published as a hardcopy through Lulu to Ingram provided it’s longer than 32 pages.
*Next, create a bundle for sale on your site and through BitTorrent Bundles with the extra A/V items you have, plus anything else – like related PDF’s. Go back and update links on all singles and titles about that bundle.
*When you have 3 books that complement each other, you compile these into a collection and port to Amazon, Lulu, and Google Play.
*Then port that collection everywhere else.
*Next, create a mega-bundle with all the A/V and other extras, and post to your site and BitTorrent Bundles.
That’s a year’s worth of work, all nicely organized to create 76 products in a single year’s time.
What Sutton had was a way to get a book out every 3 weeks.
My improvement on this is to get a property out every single week, and another 8 properties as well.
Schedules
This is the rub. It doesn’t count for “everything else” that can happen in a life. But roughly, here’s how it could go:
Daily –
Writing in am, and nothing else. 2K words as a target.
Editing in the afternoon.
Email and business in the evening.
Weekly –
Mon – Fri
New blog post.
Edit into shape and post to blog.
Create the Linked In article from it and publish there. (Remember this has 8 images.)
Create the podcast from the LinkedIn post. Embed player on blog post and as as enclosure.
Create the video from the podcast and images. Post to YouTube. Embed on blog post at top.
Create PDF, post to Slideshare. Embed video in presentation there.
Edit this into an Amazon book with front and back matter, as well as cover. Consult your research for title.
As time and content available – build your titles, collections, and bundles.
Post to your list (preferably on Monday or Friday – best email open days) with what you got published the week before, as well as anything coming up. This becomes your newsletter. It links into your blog, your podcast, and your video channel – and to Amazon for exact properties and also to your author page there.
Do daily analytics on each of your properties sales – at end of day.
Sat – Sun
Do market research on upcoming content.
Do longer analytics on trends, at least monthly.
Do daily analytics to see weekend sales.
Study up on other authors and their strategies.
Layout your M-F posts.
Monthly
Analytics of sales and trends.
Update your publishing schedule.
Discussion
How this fits into public domain and PLR publishing is fairly simple. Once you have your niche area worked out, then you find your existing books already published and write a review about them, or excerpt them to be a good single for Amazon.
As you have your 5 book reviews, then these can be combined into titles, and so on.
This brings more links into the books you discussed.
PLR can’t be published on Amazon, but can be re-written as your blog posts. Sutton brings up some very good points in his collection above about how to write for Amazon buyers. Most PLR doesn’t come up to that quality or precise targeting.
Again this has to be tested. And so I’ve just laid out a year’s worth of work.
Why? It took Sutton 4 years to create a stable of 58 properties which was pulling in $30-50K per month. I think we can do it faster, by creating singles for .99, titles for 2.99, and collections for 4.99. It’s possible to have 76 properties by the end of a single year – my next goal.
This is also starting without a list in general, and implementing the various strategies Sutton has for list building as you go.
The real key is to not do as I have done. Keep your research and writing separate. Keep to a schedule as much as possible. Play catch up with the priority of posting a single every week at least.
The other key point is that Sutton left money on the table all over the place. I’ve covered multiple times how the other distributors will bring you income while you wait for Amazon to take off. As well, he uses CreateSpace, which doesn’t get you into Ingram’s catalog, so your hardcopy only sells on Amazon. He also doesn’t mention creating “spoken word albums”, although elsewhere he does say he’s publishing audio books on each one. (More than likely, he’s publishing them exclusively on Audible, which is even worse financially than publishing to KDP Select.)
Why all the videos, podcasts, and such?
Marketing – which gives you additional discovery points. People who listen to podcasts are not necessarily heavy readers. Same for video viewers. So giving them a way to find it all out without having to go outside their own preferences makes it possible for them to get the version they want.
That’s the point of the “spoken word album” and even creating DVD’s from the videos – but probably more realistic to use them as part of your bundle and give a handful away for an email on BitTorrent Bundles, or your own embedded Ganxy script. People have preferences – and if they’d rather buy the audio or video to get through the same content, fine – you’re ready with it.
This post is to lay out how to organize taking a single blog post and creating multiple discovery and sales points from each one.
The Breakthrough
A few actually:
1. Working backwards from the buyers – researching Amazon as the starting point for greater passive income.
My approach so far was to build on any (residual) brand awareness for that PD author and/or their book title. What’s popular as downloads doesn’t necessarily translate to sales. Researching Amazon then shifts the mind set and allows you to leverage Amazon for all its worth.
2. Pushing singles gives you instant properties. Combining these gives you more properties with little more work.
While Sutton opened my eyes to the idea while Amazon wants original content, Kindle readers want short and low-cost books they can read quickly on their favorite device (like a smartphone – which is what I mostly used to read his.) What Sutton didn’t do is to take this back to the basic business plan of generating a ton of singles and the building them up into books – but instead set up for books and then would shift gears to write singles.
(In looking this over, it’s obvious that if you took your most popular singles, they’d make your best title – or a lead article for that title.)
3. Adding the extra oomph of publishing everywhere possible builds on publishing to Amazon first.
The PD problems built into Amazon have kept me away from this platform in How to Publish 76 Books In a Year and earn 6-figure passive income for lifegeneral. The world-view shift of writing short works not only opened up PD publishing by giving the annotated extra Amazon wants, but also then created new books by combining those short singles.
(This was the inspiration for last week’s long post. But it’s simple to post an “annotated” version of a PD book if it’s not already up there – since you now have the annotation-article to add.)
4. Multiple eyeballs wins out over being Amazon-centric.
As I mentioned, Sutton is leaving tons of income on the table by publishing mostly inside Amazon’s kingdom. His use of CreateSpace underscores this, since they only publish to Amazon, really. If he’s using Audible, that is a reason right there why his audiobooks aren’t bringing him income.
You will most always make more money from paperback sales as royalties than you will from ebooks – even though they sell far less. Again: “both” is the best solution.
By also publishing everywhere else, this gives you additional passive income sources – as well as bringing you buyers directly to your site for the added value. And passive income is that which will sell from here on out.
By publishing “spoken word albums” through CD Baby, you’re now selling through music stores – as well as through Amazon, on a back-channel.
This solves the social network problem Sutton fudged on.
He only really uses Twitter. And in his books doesn’t really nail this down – practically giving advice that would mire down your week in just communicating on social media.
One approach I appreciate – he says his approach doesn’t market, but lets Amazon do his marketing for him. Smart. Right down my alley.
As I’ve mentioned before, the two content-friendly social networks are LinkedIn and Google+ – and it just makes sense to point a writer to places where their skills can be best put to use.
By researching Google, Amazon and then LinkedIn, you’ll wind up with the keywords and approaches which will bring you well-heeled clients. Search engine optimization on all three platforms can (and should) be built into each article so that they’ll all bring you all possible interested viewers.
Then IFTTT takes care of all the updates everywhere else.
Your primary job is building a backbench of properties which routinely sell well. Your metrics are income vs. overhead. You want to get one-and-done approaches ongoing so that you can concentrate on the next book.
That said, you may want to spend six months building properties and take a month to just tweak everything to see how that affects sales. If that gets too boring, then maybe expand your analytics review to three days, and expect to get out new properties every other week.
My own opinion would be to simply get all this done now, and then at the end of the year do a complete review where you sort out what isn’t selling well and why. Once you get them all selling well, then start your next year with a new niche.
The Perfect Graduation or Retirement Gift
What this current plan does is to give you a graduation present for your young high-school grad. Get them to follow this, and you’re giving them a business they can grow forever, one year at a time. Infinite income – and financial freedom. (Yes, you could give this to your college grad – but practically, they should be writing their books long before that – and making 6-figures before they graduate. Anyone with a writing talent (or wanting to develop their own) can do this.
Give this plan to someone with experience (who’s retiring, for instance) and you have a built-in retirement plan they can will to their heirs after they have no more use for it.
The Self-Funding Opportunity
This pays for itself as it goes, and so will leverage into even higher quality.
Even without a lick of writing talent, it’s possible to create these books by hiring it out. You just have to know what you like when you read, and do precise research on Amazon. Hire out the writing. Hire out the cover. Hire out the editing. Hire out the conversion. You can even hire someone to post the book for you. Pay off your bills from the income.
Once you get done creating the original content, you can then pay someone to port all these books over to the other minor distributors and leverage your income even higher. Oh, and of course, the bundles make great Affiliate sales products. (Pay that person a percentage of sales to take care of the Affiliates for you.)
Sure, it would take an investment. But the only books that don’t sell are those which a) have a bad cover, b) are poorly written, c) aren’t edited into good shape, d) are not researched to begin with, and/or e) have poor CTA’s in their descriptions.
The solutions to these are to study bestsellers, and study the basics of copywriting – so you know. (Eugene Schwartz’ Breakthrough Advertising [link] is the key to this.)
Combine this with your membership enrollment activities and you have a real winner.
Do a few years of this and a 7 or 8-figure income should be attainable.
When I last left you, I was involved in an over-excited discovery about how to create an online empire from a single year’s worth of concentrated effort.
Then I kept going for three more days, sorting out all the questions I had.
These were all laid out as blog posts – and then I realized they were too wonky to podcast (would make a poor listen) and also, I resolved my own plan even more tightly as I went. So I pulled them together (along with the last post) to make a single PDF. This is available below for download as a free gift for you.
Today, I found “The Story Grid” which is a method to improve my non-fiction writing. I suppose that I’ll never stop studying this area. (See my Flipboard magazine to keep up with what I find daily.)
Because I am going to be producing 50 books over the next year, one per week. (Wish me luck.) And that will include 10 collections of 5, 5 collections of 10, and an online course which anyone can sign up for – which sells all these books. Count those up and you’ll get 65 books. Doesn’t include peripherals like podcasts.
This is all a plan to promote livesensical.com – so people start learning to live and act better, and improve their lives meanwhile.
I’ll be podcasting these books as I go, so that should keep you amused. Sign up there (or above, right) and I’ll let you know when they’re ready. (You get free access to my library when you do.)
– – – –
How to Sum Up Steve Scott’s Success
My actions resulted in these:
I figured out how to get more done faster, resulting in 76 books in a single year.
I worked out how to earn more income from books by getting out of Amazon‘s walled garden.
I did a complete statistical analysis of Scott’s finances – charts and everything.
And then a few dozen pages of text which really got into how this could be done and how it would wreck your life without the many vacations Scott took (and other distractions he felt were necessary.)
The final point is working out a realistic approach and backing off the concrete schedule in favor of giving the best value to your readers and list.
The two conflicting ideals in this were my earlier tests of simply pushing PD and PLR books up to everywhere I could. The odd success of these tended to reward that behavior, instead of the ideal of building an audience and then finding what that audience really needed and wanted in books and study material.
Scott started out from Affiliate Marketing and carried more than a few of these bad habits over into his book writing and publishing. I pointed out some of the errors with this review, which he mostly covered in his blog post comments – as I finally got to them.
By the end of this basically 26 months of publishing, he stepped back and started becoming a real author with longer, quality books. Of course by now, he could afford to. Owed mainly to Matt Stone of Archangel Ink, plus his own efforts in getting foreign translations, he now had doubled his properties from the 21 Kindle books he did complete, and has stabilized out at about $31K per month.
He could raise that by another third if he would just start publishing outside of Amazon as well, and get off their merry-go-round of declining author royalties. (KDP Select, and their Unlimited slow-motion train wreck.) As well, his audiobooks are all seem locked into ACX/Audible, so he’s not able to get them published anywhere else.
My interest in this is working out how to leverage Amazon.
My resources are all the PD books I’ve already published, even if not all on Amazon.
The approach I would use is in creating special reports which align this to my specific clients, which would be business people in search of motivational and inspirational materials. These special reports all link to the Amazon version of the book (except for those published on other platforms, which link to that book’s landing page.)
Then I start to promote these books within the Amazon forest to encourage cross-sells.
Otherwise, I start up promotions via LinkedIn, Slideshare, YouTube, and my own podcast(s) to drive traffic to Amazon and so increase their recommending my books.
The bottom-line idea is to, again, use ebooks as emissaries. The main object is to get list subscribers so that I can enroll them in a membership and give them more of what they want. Part of what will be required of them is to “juice” Amazon for the new book releases so that these books then become “overnight” bestsellers.
Those books then raise the sales of all books I have there, and income is leveraged remarkably.
Now, as I start this, my list is puny – and I haven’t been maintaining it.
So the first actions are then to create (even before the first ebook is released) a useful standalone report they can use to improve their lives with. That link takes them to a landing page on my site where I track what they do – and I can A/B test.
I’ll also send out a broadcast to all my list members, letting them know what’s up and what’s coming.
Once they are in the membership, the dance continues as I give them more material and see what’s interesting for them. Also, I then keep checking what they click on and give them more of that type of thing. Free ecourses are followed by paid full courses. Eventually, I also have a paid membership where I can pay closer attention to what they want and get some really valuable feedback – so I can again find and deliver the material they want.
Overall lessons learned
When you can afford it (once you are making more than you need to live on) then invest most or all the excess into building a virtual team to help you with your workload.
Always diversify as soon as possible. Of course, this is publishing everywhere at all times, but also into different formats and all possible distribution points.
Leverage every product through re-purposing – and getting these all to either give you subscribers or income or both.
Keep learning as you go – and this is by keeping your humility higher than your pride. Be transparent.
I’m going to keep this short – as we both have a lot to get back to.
My whole study is linked below as a PDF and also included as an enclosure for the podcast.
Do leave a comment on my blog or a rating on iTunes.
I also answer all my email personally, so feel free to sign up.
Oh – that includes going to livesensical.com and joining the membership there to get access to my complimentary library of goodies waiting for you there. (I’ll be posting these new ebooks there and including special bundles of extras left on the “cutting room floor” as each book is created.)
So: get this download, sign up for my free library access, and have fun with all this.
Hope to see you all soon with this next installment.
Once he had his bestselling book (and made as much as $61K per month off of it and a few others) he went on to writing books on habits in general rather than doubling down on his cornerstone work.
In his blog posts, you see that he complains how the book isn’t well written, he needs to do a revision, he was shredded in the reviews, etc.
Practically, no. These are just excuses for lack of foresight (which we are fixing here by studying his back trail.)
The reviews are fine. He’s got much better than average. You do want some pissy reviews, as that means it’s a real book. Errors in the book are just an opportunity.
The main lesson from this is to trademark your hook right off. What actually happened is that a dozen or so other authors now have “habit stacking” in the front of their book title, as it’s become a generic term.
(Note: a search on the U.S. Trademark office shows that the current publisher of Scott’s original Habit Stacking book [Oldtown Publishing LLC] did trademark “Habit Stacking” – on Nov 24, 2014. The horse was well out of the barn by then. And I don’t see that there was some effort to have those existing books by that name gotten into line – I do see nearly a half-dozen published in 2015 with that in the title on the first page of search results from Amazon. What good is a trademark if you won’t enforce it?)
If you search on Google for that term just prior to his book being published (Sep 5, 2012) you’ll find that the only mention of it is in a blog post that mentions “Stacking Habits”. Nothing on Amazon is returned by Google prior to this book.
His hook was that term – and he didn’t trademark it right off. That would have kept the competition at bay by setting up a simple daily Google automated search to bring any of these to him – then a notice to Amazon that they were infringing on his rights would take down their book. Simple.
Once that book took off, he should have dropped any other project and immediately gotten out several small books on related areas, similar to “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series. (“Habit Stacking for Runners” “Habit Stacking for Writers” “Habit Stacking for Husbands” “Habit Stacking for Children”) See how this could have taken off? All of these were areas Scott was familiar with and could have written short books about.
(Note: the cheap way to claim a copyright is simply put a small “TM” as superscript in the title, and then also note it under your copyright notice on your title page. Lawyers also have other tips – and I’m not one. Consult a professional. This blog is about marketing strategy.)
So, these steps:
1. Trademark your hook when you publish, (research it first, though) and file when you need to. Oh – and go get that domain name so others can’t. Even if it just points to another site of yours. (Like habitstacking.com now points to Scott’s orignal book, but was only registered Feb 2, 2014. In this case, better late than never. But… habitstacking.org and lots of others are still available.)
Sidebar: While habitstacking.com points to his book, it would be just as simple to set up a landing page which would link to all the Amazon properties, and could also sell bundles and collections based on the book right there. You can’t get the sale you don’t ask for – or offer.
As well, If you look up “Duct Tape Marketing” by John Jantsch, you’ll see another approach, which is to set up other services based on this book. More services would mean more income.
3. Come out with sequels quickly. As he knew about errors in his book, he would then come out with “Habit Stacking(TM) 2.0” and leave the original up there. Alert everyone on his site (and also update the Amazon description) that they need to get the updated version – “…while the original and now classic ‘Habit Stacking’ is perfectly valid, further research has found additional studies confirming it’s effectiveness – and also another 54 simple habits you can stack additionally. So get ‘Habit Stacking 2.0’ today!” (And very definitely, do a quick update and put it into the front of the book so that link shows up on the “Look Inside.”)
Since he’s working in this industry writing more books, each one would be part of the “Habit Stacking” series and so be recommended by Amazon as well.
4. I’ve covered this elsewhere in this blog, but it bears repeating: publish your book everywhere else as well. It only takes maybe a half-hour if you already have the accounts set up. And may bring you another quarter of what you’re already making in income. Bestsellers usually do well on all platforms, from my experience.
5. Publish in all other possible formats.(Which Scott eventually did.)
6. Set up a landing page on your site to promote the book, and use something like Ganxy to enable you to sell bundles of material along with the book. Like audio chapters (which promote the Audible version) and even custom-made dust-cover hardbacks which they can buy from Lulu.
7. Another smart move would be to claim the brand on the key social media. A search of knowem.com shows only Blogger and Myspace have been taken – out of the top 25, including Facebook. (Both “stevescott” and “sjscott” are all mostly taken.) You can do this yourself in an afternoon, or have Knowem do it for you. That Facebook scene is wide open for someone else to grab it, trademark or not… (And if you do it yourself, you won’t have to pay a lawyer to do wrestle it back for you later.)
Then keep these updated as much as possible with IFTTT to automate your status updates on social platforms.
– – – –
OK? Makes sense?
I’m deep in the middle of my marketing research for my next 50 books, publishing one a week for a year. But my muse kept shouting this in my ear (among other things) and so I had to blog this and get it out to you.
Sorry no podcast on this one. I don’t have the couple of hours it would take to record and edit it into shape.
Who wants to be the next Steve Scott? You and I are still trying to routinely crack the bestseller ranks on Amazon. Steve has done this several times.
How he did it takes some sleuthing. How you could do it better takes even more sleuthing.
But that’s why this blog is here. I do this work and write it up to save you time.
You deserve to get a 6-figure income from your books like Scott did. Providing you do the work you need to.
Today’s breakthrough is how to improve the quality of your book – which is what Scott has been working on for some time. Better quality books sell more and better and longer. You want your book to sell well right off (which anyone with a list can accomplish) and then continue to sell after that.
What makes books sell more and better
As you’ve been following this blog, you’ll note that I’ve published several dozen-dozen books. And by this (and being Scot-Irish frugal) I ‘ve achieved financial freedom and fired my last boss.
These books were published as tests of the ebook publishing model. Those tests showed me what books would do on their own with the only marketing consisting a good title, good cover, good description, and decent price point. Nothing else.
Again, I was able to live off what I made just from these tests. This is how the system works just on volume publishing alone.
These books were mostly public domain (PD) and private-licensed rights (PLR) books. They ran the gamut, but typically fell down into the usual curve for sales:
Most didn’t sell.
Many sold a few books a month.
A small few sold several books a week.
A couple became regular bestsellers on all platforms.
When I was dissecting Steve Scott’s success recently, I started making a checklist of publishing that I use.
Then I ran across this quality point. While Steve somewhat regrets writing an ebook about cranking out a new ebook every 21 days, he never says what writing a quality book consists of – no matter how long it takes.
How to Write a Quality Book (and sell longer).
My book-publishing tests prove a single point – the consistent best sellers are decent enough quality that readers buy them routinely.
Those with crappy titles or covers or indifferent descriptions (or priced too high) sell poorly. Look on Amazon at the bottom of their lists and you’ll see this far too often. Or take “habit stacking” (which built Scott’s empire) and you’ll see the wannabes at the bottom which sell a fraction of a book each week – and you won’t see the ones that never sell at all.
But what keeps them selling after that point is how well they were written. Quality.
Amazon pushes up the books that routinely sell and pushes down the ones that don’t. This is why they are known as the “ebook graveyard.” Just like any bookstore – they’re in it to make profits (although somehow, Amazon continues to run at a loss each year – like the Hollywood movie industry. Taxes, probably.)
The books which sell routinely are well written. Many people say so, but more than that, my book sales say so. PD books generally do better than PLR books (depending on what distributor) – and PD Classic Fiction sells better than others. Why? Because they are evergreen bestsellers – they were well written even centuries ago and still appeal.
Scott’s success was with non-fiction. And while he covers the points on how to get good titles, covers, and descriptions (in general terms) he doesn’t say what a well-written book consists of – other than it needs to solve the problem area or answer the common questions in a quick, and precise method.
There is more to it than that.
Look up a book called “The Story Grid”, written by a 20-year veteran of editing, Shawn Coyne. He lays out what makes a fiction work into a real page-turner. And he also does this for non-fiction as well (but not in such detail.)
He says there are four “silo’s” of non-fiction out there:
These are essays/books that are written for and read by a very focused readership.These groups of readers are clearly defined, but small in number. As Seth Godin would say, these are Tribal readers dedicated to very specific passions/professions. The narrative form of the writing is far more about “presenting the findings” than it is about entertaining the reader. The assumption of the writer of academic work is that her readership is absolutely engrossed by the subject matter itself and so really just wants to get the skinny on what it is the writer discovered or what the writer’s particular argument is. These readers don’t need to be spoon-fed the previous data or history of the art. They just want to know the innovative stuff. …
: These are generally prescriptive books “for the trade audience.” What that means is that these books are written for the general Joe who wants to learn the best way to plant his garden, without having to enroll at Penn State’s Agricultural school. Or a general Jane who wants to learn how to change the oil in her old Volkswagen Beetle without going to a mechanic’s trade school. …
: This category has exploded in the past half century… It’s completely Story based. That is, …the writer/journalist collects the usual data involved in reporting a story. But instead of just presenting the traditional Who, What, Where, When and How? out of the old-school reporter’s toolbox, New Journalists focused on the Why? something happened…. What Narrative Nonfiction allows is for that subjective point of view (the writer/journalist) to argue his case. But the journalist can’t just “make things up.” He has to present the “evidence,” the details of the reporting in support of his particular point of view. But more importantly, he can’t just make declarative statements like an academic. He has to tell a Story…like a novelist or short story writer would. ….
The Big Idea Book: The Big Idea Book draws from all three of the nonfiction categories above and when one succeeds, it’s capable of satisfying readers of all three too. Academics appreciate the research cited to support the Big Idea. How-To readers take away actionable steps that they believe can better their lives. And Narrative Nonfiction readers are captivated by the storytelling. It is Academic in its rigor. There is a crystal clear argument being made in a Big Idea book that the author builds and supports in much the same manner that an academic writer/researcher would. That is, he is making a case for demystifying a particular natural phenomenon and will support his conclusions with the applicable data etc. It is prescriptive for the layman like a How-To book. The writer of the Big Idea book writes for the non-expert, not the specialist. He also contends that there are real world applications of his Big Idea that can change the lives of his readers. So the implied promise is that after you’ve read the Big Idea book, you will have the tools to apply the knowledge imparted in much the same was as you would be able to apply the principles of square foot gardening. With varying degrees of success, it uses narrative nonfiction storytelling to impart a deeper theme/controlling idea into the work than just “how to use this knowledge and get a great tomato harvest.”
Steve Scott only wrote the in the How-To style. He never broke into the far more popular narrative or the legendary Big Idea.
Scott recommended the time-worn “index card” method for book writing:
Research and compile the common questions or problems in a profitable niche.
Research and compile the answers/solutions to these.
Put the questions/problems onto index cards, along with any ideas for titles and chapter headings.
Organize these cards into some sort of logical order in a stack.
Make an outline for these.
Fill in between the lines with the data you know.
Add an introduction and front-matter, along with back-matter.
Come up with a catchy title, an attractive cover, plus a benefit-bulleted description.
Publish.
Of course, there’s a little more than that, but those are the broad strokes. This system works for this How-To type of non-fiction book.
Making even more money by writing better
But if we want to get even more income, we need to raise the bar.
What is makes narrative non-fiction sell well?
Basically, you need to tell a story – yours, the reader’s, or someone else’s. Coyne says that it has the same breakdown as fiction. Every part, from the story outline down to the smallest piece all have these in common:
1) Inciting Incident
Caual
Coincidence
2) Progressive Complication
Active Turning Point
Relevatory Turning Point
3) Crisis
The Best Bad Choice
Irreconcilable Goods
4) Climax 5) Resolution
And a bigger bunch of editor-speak I’ve never heard.
Here’s what all this means (with apologies to the classics):
Problem: Something bad happened
Worsens: And it got worse – something the hero/ine did or discovers
Choice: What do the hero/ine chooses – between two bads or two goods
Action: Here’s what the hero/ine did
Results: Here’s what they got out of it
And there’s more to this (see Coyne’s book, and go read your favorite fiction again with this in mind.)
That’s the simplicity to any story ever told. You can go further with this, like Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, or just KISS for now.
The How-to actions to take can come in on the last two points – or you tell an anecdote about how someone solved it, and then come out with your recipe of steps to take.
Using emotion in your text
This is the next one to master. Any copywriter knows that people decide emotionally and justify rationally. If you’re going to carry people along with your story, you’re going to have to involve them.
One of the all-time great copywriters was a guy named Eugene Schwartz. His single book sells for hundreds in hardback where you can find a copy. He recommends a book by Walter S. Campbell called “Writing Non-Fiction”. Here are my highlighted notes from the relevant first two chapters of that book:
Fiction must have some facts and ideas to justify the emotion it offers. Non-fiction must induce some emotion in order to maintain interest in the facts and ideas which it offers.
The non-fiction writer has another, more difficult but more profitable method, which consists in arousing emotions about things not hitherto considered exciting by his reader. Here lies the true opportunity of the writer of non-fiction.
He must present fact with passion.
If you propose to write upon a subject in a factual, coldblooded manner, without permitting your own enthusiasm for your material to saturate it and so interest your reader, you will be obliged, if you publish, to write on subjects about which the reader is already excited.
But once you have acquired a platform and a reputation, you will find that, if you believe in your ideas and in the value of your facts, you will wish for a larger audience. Indeed, if what you have to say is important, it will be your duty to reach a larger audience.
[The non-fiction writer] has for his public practically all literate mankind. He has for his subject practically everything that is known and everything that can be guessed about the universe in which his readers live. His success will depend upon his ability to choose his subject wisely and to find a reader who can be brought to take an interest in it.
Writing non-fiction is essentially the problem of rousing and maintaining the reader’s interest in something outside himself. This general subject-matter may be anything, provided the author loves it, feels at home in it, is interested enough in it to learn all he can about it, and to take the pains to make his reader enjoy it too.
The author who commands such a field of human interest and uses it consistently also has the advantage of a steady market for readers who like that sort of thing. They will remember him as the purveyor of stories about that subject-matter, and will look out for his work, knowing that they can always depend upon him to please them.
This subject may be compared to the grain of sand which gets into an oyster and forms the irritating nucleus of a pearl. It is seldom that the author chooses it; rather, it chooses him, inhabits him, and may remain with him throughout life. Every piece of work he turns out has or lacks quality according to the degree in which this intimate subject appears in it.
It appears that the intimate subject is, as it were, the soul of the author’s work, while the subject-matter is only the flesh and blood. Both should belong and work together, if the work is to be a masterpiece.
In non-fiction, the emotion is that of the writer. That is why it is so necessary that you write about something that interests and excites you. For where your task is to serve your materials hot, you will not and cannot succeed, if there is no fire in you. You must always write of what is cooking. Your reader will not accept anything served cold.
Probably, it will be best not to worry too much about your intimate subject, particularly after you have discovered what it is. Rather, let your mind dwell upon the general subject-matter, dream about that, and you may find the intimate subject taking hold of those raw materials, shaping them to its own purpose, and making them go along without trouble.
Between Coyne and Campbell’s books, we have the core of how to write narrative stories that will be popular (meaning: sell well) and then result in continuing passive income from here on out.
You also see in this the key idea that Scott followed – finding an “intimate subject” which remains with you and helps you find many outlets through several titles. There’s your “catalog” and that rising tide lifts all your boats.
That, then brings you right back around to using – and improving – on Scott’s methods to create your own catalog of bestselling books.
How to mix and match to get the title your audience wants.
Of course, you don’t have to change anything you’re doing.
But let’s just say that you’re using that index card method for writing How-To books.
First step would be to start using more emotion in your copy. Search for Power Words, particularly on CoSchedule’s site (and don’t forget to test your ebook title on their Headline Analyzer.)
After that, start keeping track of anecdotes and stories as you search for problem-solutions and question-answers. This will help you personalize your copy and incorporate these Problem|Worsens|Choice|Action|Result steps.
Once you get in habit of getting all these points in – down to even the subsections of your blog post, then it will become a regular habit in your writing and you’ll be able to move onto writing Big Idea titles.
(Approach: just as I recommend blogging your books, the Big Idea could be taking your books and editing them against the theme – Campbell’s “intimate subject” – and putting them all together in your own “Tipping Point” or “Future Shock” book.)
Where to from here?
There are still a few technical details to iron out – but the above is the key research I did to ramp up my next books to be regular sellers on Amazon. (And if they sell well there, they should sell well everywhere.)
I’m in the middle of a checklist for publishing, taking my tips from Scott and refining these to be even more effective.
When it’s ready, I’ll let you know (should be available as early as this afternoon.)
Then you can get started on your own – or revise it as you see fit.
After all, this isn’t a Gospel, it’s only what works for me – your mileage will definitely vary.
Back to the grind for me.
Your actions to take now:
Leave a comment on whatever you’re thinking right now.
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They came for a friend of mine first, and I didn’t have anything to say. Then they came for me. Then I did want to say something, but it was too late.
My self-published books now lay dead – or were they?
None of which I’m about to say can easily substantiated.
That’s probably because self-publishing on Google Play never really took off. So there are few self-publishing authors affected, and as their sales have been piddly, those authors could care less if a minor player ditched them.
Google Play Books is dying/dead because for all they may know about search engines, they know squat about hosting ecommerce. I’ve been supporting them for years because, well, they’re Google – and any book there will show up in their rankings.
That’s probably also why the pirates liked them. Pirates would be able to simply come back once they were dumped off GooglePlay, often within hours. They were pirating original works of other authors with the same cover and description. Google had a convenient bulk upload which made this turnaround extremely fast. So Google shut down their site to all new authors, as of May 15, 2015.
And apparently, they are gradually getting rid of their remaining self-publishing authors.
This is very hard to find data on. It’s happened to me and a friend of mine, but apparently not enough to cause any outcry on forums. Searches bring up more about app developers, and no one has complained about not being able to publish their books on Google anymore.
Google has also had the worst royalty set up (52% flat rate) and also auto-discount your book/ebook by 20%. Meaning that if you put up the same title with the same price on Amazon, both would shortly be 20% lower. Which means 20% less royalties on both platforms.
If you haven’t guessed, Google cancelled my account last week. Which explains the sour grapes. No real explanation or recourse, just “you violated our terms of agreement.” This week, they sent me a jovial auto-responder broadcast saying”you’ve just received another payment! Check you Google account to find out how much it is!” Of course, my account is shut down, so I’ll have to wait until that last payment shows up in my account, and guesstimate what my actual book sales were.
The 217 books I had there are now gone. That took a few more days to scour clean. Today I searched and somehow my books I just recently published through Lulu have appeared there with the Lulu description. Like Living Sensical. You can buy this as an ebook. But look at the price – instead of $2.99, it’s $2.51 – meaning that Amazon will price-match that. Thanks for the lower royalties, Google.
Google Turned My Books Into Zombies
How did my new books wind up on Google? The hint was that Lulu description (which reads like a pile of unfolded laundry, right out of the dryer and dumped in a basket.)
It looks like Google is now simply going to get their books from distributors. Like they do with Shopping. Lulu won’t distribute public domain or PLR books outside their own garden, so that makes it safer for Google. They’ll just get their books from regular publishers or aggregators and play it safe. Their experiment in self-publishing then looks to be over. Contracting with aggregators is much safer.
The Zombie part is that now you are going to have to set your price higher on Lulu in order to keep Google from taking your price down on Amazon.
Thanks Google. Thanks Lulu.
My official opinion is now for authors to pull their works from Google while they still can. This is based on how they treated me – and how they will screw your royalties if you give them half a chance. So pull them now, so you can still have an account. Only leave original works up there. You may yet survive.
Further thanks are still in order, however. I will now have to start removing all traces of Google Play from my earlier posts anywhere. And all my Google Play buy now buttons on my book landing pages.
Factually, I’ll go further and update my “How to Publish on Google Play” with a short addendum right in the beginning (so it’s visible in Amazon’s “Look Inside”) to tell people not to submit anything to Google Play, but buy my other books on self-publishing instead – from Amazon.
Lulu Plays Sharecropping Vampire
This is what I concluded, that Google is getting my latest ebooks from Lulu, who sucks their own bit of blood out in passing. The problem is more than royalty deep.
On paper, Lulu takes only 10% of what it gets for distributing your work elsewhere.
Actually, these other distributors are taking out their pound of flesh through “distribution fees.” See this chart, for a $3.99 ebook:
price
$3.99
fees
Lulu
$2.70
68%
$0.99
iTunes
$2.51
63%
$1.20
Nook
$1.80
45%
$2.00
Kobo
$1.71
43%
$2.09
Per Smashword’s survey, $3.99 is where authors could have the highest income, $2.99 is where they have the best unit-sales.
Now, with Amazon’s cold-blooded price-matching we have to adjust things. In order to not let Google suck your Amazon royalties down, you tell Lulu to set your price at $3.99 and Amazon (you publish direct there) at $2.99 – so $3.19 would be their price. Just 20 cents different. You’ll make about $2.00 in royalties after Amazon subtracts the broadband charge (still cheaper than Lulu’s .99 each.)
Note: I don’t recommend Smashwords over Lulu as 1) they also only give you 80% of what they get from their outlets – meaning you lose even more, and 2) you have to create a special edition just for them. I already change the links inside the book for Amazon and non-Amazon. I don’t need a third version.
Best Survival Strategies from Blood-sucking Sharecropping
After all this time, I’m still amazed by how much I’m leaving on the table. Let the self-publisher beware.
You have to realize that all these book distributors are just letting you sit there as a sharecropper, farming on the land they own. You have to be prepared to be ditched at any time. (You do have your own email list and your own site, don’t you?!?)
What I recommend at this point:
Publish to Amazon and iTunes directly to control your sales best. Both have various programs to give you pre-sales and promotions. (No, that doesn’t include KDP Direct or their worse-yet KDP Unlimited, which are both financial fiasco’s.)
You want to be able to update your meta-data each month to keep them fresh in both the distributors and Google’s eyes. Direct to Amazon and iTunes means you don’t lose out to all those fees above.
You do let Lulu publish for you to Kobo and Nook – since whatever sales you do get from these are nice, but not much worth your time.
Right now, you don’t have a choice with Google Play.
So your price is always at least a dollar higher on Lulu to make up for the lousy sales and royalties these areas give you. That keeps Amazon honest.
Your iTunes price should be competitive within iTunes – and as least the same as Amazon, probably.
Is Public Domain the Victim Here?
Not hardly. Since it’s actually harder work to get income from these. That friend of mine who suffered at the cruel teeth of Google Play, found that the best way to publish public domain is at .99 on Amazon, and skip everywhere else. But he is a trained writer and his descriptions and covers can make you shudder as you pull out your virtual wallet to buy that version first. You’re still competing with a commodity. The .99 price cuts everyone else out but the freebies. And those publishers simply don’t care to make nice covers and titles. That’s why you get the sales there.
My own option is to channel existing demand by creating special reports out of chapter-excerpts which then point to collections of these books, which can be priced at $4.99 or better.
No, you don’t ever, ever publish those collections on Lulu. Why bother? Google will just undercut your price, or they’ll be too high to buy. The special reports you publish on Lulu then send them to your own landing page, where they can buy from you direct.
What you can publish where is on this chart:
Distributor
Original Works
Public Domain
PLR
Amazon
yes
yes*
NO
Lulu
yes
yes**
yes**
iTunes
yes
yes
yes
Nook
yes
yes
yes
Kobo
yes
yes***
yes
own site
YES
YES
YES
Notes: * Has to be “translated”, “illustrated,” or “annotated” ** Won’t distribute anywhere else. *** Only gives you 20% and you have to publish directly here – not worth your time for the piddly sales.
Another Stalker Lurks – PayPal
Micropayments suck your royalties on everywhere except your own site – and they take a sizable piece out there.
Paypal charges 2.99% plus a .30 fee. You can opt for 5% and a .05 fee, but you can only do one or the other, not both.
If you sell your books on your own site, you get this:
Pay Pal – 3%
Price point
You Get
Actual % at 2.99+.30
Royalty
$0.99
$0.67
32%
68%
$1.99
$1.64
18%
82%
$2.99
$2.61
13%
87%
$3.99
$3.58
10%
90%
$4.99
$4.55
9%
91%
$9.00
$8.44
6%
94%
$10.00
$9.41
6%
94%
$11.00
$10.38
6%
94%
$12.00
$11.35
5%
95%
$13.00
$12.32
5%
95%
$14.00
$13.29
5%
95%
$15.00
$14.26
5%
96%
$50.00
$48.21
4%
96%
$100.00
$96.71
3%
97%
Pay Pal – 5%
Price point
You Get
Actual % at 5%+.05
Royalty
$0.99
$0.89
10%
90%
$1.99
$1.84
7%
93%
$2.99
$2.79
7%
93%
$3.99
$3.74
6%
94%
$4.99
$4.69
6%
94%
$13.00
$12.30
5%
95%
$14.00
$13.25
5%
95%
$15.00
$13.25
5%
95%
$50.00
$14.20
5%
95%
$100.00
$94.95
5%
95%
These two models swap out at about $14.
But that’s if you’re selling direct from your site. This is the reason for the 10% fee which Lulu and the rest charge. (I have no clue why they are sucking those other exorbitant fees out of you.)
This came up on trying to pay my VA a .97 payment as a test – and only .63 went through. Similarly, a $50 payment wasn’t just 3% cost.
Ganxy and Sellfy both take 10% off after you pay the Paypal fee – only Gumroad does the activity for you, and charges a flat 5%+.50 per transaction.(Much less blood-sucking involved.)
Plantation Owners Make the Best Vampires/Zombies.
When you self-publish to Amazon and the rest, you are committing digital sharecropping. They can (and will) shut you down at any moment. This is an old MLM tactic, as you don’t really own your downline.
The trick is to have your customers on your own mailing list. With any MLM opportunity, you can simply take your downline somewhere else – and this gives you instantly high payouts wherever you wind up. That pyramid scene again.
Self-publishing doesn’t scale that well, but scale it does.
The way to make your books into bestsellers on Amazon is to get early, high numbers of reviews and sales that last more than just the first few days. Then Amazon will start marketing your books for you. To do this strategy, you have to have a decent-sized list with both pre-reviewers and regular folks. You price your book low for the first few days or a week and let your list in on it. Then you raise the price right after that.
Amazon can forces you to profit from your own site is when you want to offer multi-media bundles – such as audio, plus your book collection, plus book trailers, plus infographics. Again, bundles are in the $4.99 range and up for just the book collections on Amazon (original books, anyway.)
So you can let your insider reviewers in at $.99, your regular list in at $2.99 and then everyone else at $4.99 – all over the span of a few days or a week.
The general strategy is to keep Amazon buyers going to Amazon, but opting in to your email subscription. For all other platforms, you send them to your own book landing page so they can buy your book there – or go to one of the other distributors. (Frankly, I’d actually only send them to iTunes or Amazon, everywhere else you make much less than you would selling direct. Might as well build up your own sales locally.
Now, your hardback is similar, but your royalties here will be far greater.
Like this:
And that is the difference between renting as a sharecropper and being owned by them.
Right now over 50% of my Lulu monthly income is from hardcopy books. I can only see increasing these, due to that difference in royalties. While my PD ebooks which sell well everywhere else have a hard time getting on to Kindle, my hardcopy versions do not have that problem with Amazon.
My own site (even Lulu’s bookstore) are fairly unknown, I can put links inside these hardcopy books which can get email subscribers and possible book sales just from the “Look Inside” feature. The viewer doesn’t even have to buy from Amazon to click over to my site. (The trick is to upload a PDF with hard-wired linked in it as the preview – which is under testing as I tell you this.)
Audiobooks vs. Spoken Word Albums
Amazon owns Audible, and gave them an exclusive platform for audiobook sales there. They also have an exclusive contract with iTunes, which expires in a couple of years or so. Meanwhile, another test I’m gearing up for is creating “spoken word albums” via CDBaby with the podcasts I’m creating. I hope to use the same audiobook I’d earlier created and pitch these as a discounted CD so that it’s obviously promotion for the audiobook. It should sit right up there with the Kindle version, the trade paperback, the hardcover, and the audiobook. This gives the reader even more options. to have a set of CD’s up there which they can buy through Amazon – or as digital downloads direct from CDBaby, or – wait for it – my own site.
Again, I can offer discounts to members inside my own site. Amazon can’t see these and so can’t lower their prices to match. But chiefly, I’d give the value that they can’t. Bundles with these other media materials, and the option to buy dust-jacketed, limited-edition hardbacks – all at a steep discount for members.
There’s a lot to be said for having a sensible approach to this.
Join Today.
While I’m just getting this site started, you’re welcome to join me here. Big plans are afoot, most of which has to do with enabling you to access books, podcasts, courses, and even video webinars to get the data you need to improve your life markedly. Of course, my work has to go one title at a time. I do hope to have our first collection-bundle available within three or four weeks.
Yes, I’ll set up discounts for everyone, especially if they leave a review on Amazon.
The point is to stay focused on what you are actually here for. For me, it’s serving humanity by giving them a site they can visit which will unlock the secrets of the universe. Oddly, these secrets have been hidden in plain sight. The trick is that we’ve all been trained not to look, and where to not look. Fortunately, this is all easy to fix. It only takes a personal decision. And then be responsible for that decision and all the ones that follow.
I actually had a rant ready to spring on you, but decided against it. This is the holidays after all. And it goes against my grain to simply diss someone for acting stupid and selfishly.
So, we’ll leave that for another day.
I did find a great nugget for you. Unfortunately, I don’t have a transcript.
But you’ll want to hear this anyway. Joe Pilizzi of Content Marketing Institute was on Chris Ducker’s show at Youpreneur.fm. They are discussing his new book and lay out the 6 steps all the multi-million-dollar companies have been using to achieve their success.
Because if you want to be successful, you need to find what the successful people are doing.
That’s why I spent a solid week analyzing Steve Scott’s six-figure success and several days working on Mark Dawson and the half-million he’s pulling in – both are doing nothing but books, building on the sands of Amazon. Well, not entirely – and Joe’s 6 steps tell more about how these authors made their success. They both used the same 6 steps, although they actually did go through them in less than a year before they were able to branch out into other things.
I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Have a listen, and I’ll meet you on the other side…
– – – –
Always like listening to Joe. He comes highly recommended from Bruce Clark, so I try to catch Joe’s weekly “This Old Marketing” podcast when I can. Always interesting.
Our approach is to apply content marketing to book publishing – which is the business we are in, after all.
What’s the takeaway from this?
0. Follow your bliss and get into a very narrow niche with fits with your particular expertise. Double-down, as Scott found.
1. Get your list started today. Now is the second best time to start, best would have been 6 months ago.
2. Get your own site, whether it’s blog or podcast or whatever. Have a place you can build on which isn’t someone else’s. You have to be prepared for changes like Facebook has made, or Amazon nuking all your books (I just read about it again today.)
3. Get regular content out consistently and have your list popularize it on Amazon. Yes, that can be your own books, which is what both Scott and Dawson did.
4. Keep doing this consistently. Keep showing up consistently.
5. Then monetize by diversifying. Dawson started his FB ads course. Scott started a podcast and focused more on his site.
It’s just that simple. Six steps.
And that’s how we’ll leave it with you.
Here’s wishing you a great Thanksgiving and holiday season.
Sad, but true. There’s a weird scene that happens when people put links into your analytics, hoping you’ll click on their link and buy their stuff or pick up their malware with your browser.
This simply crowds out your real data.
I had to spend a day working this over as my Rainmaker (WordPress) host wasn’t giving me accurate data I could use. (Particularly one “traffic” spike on Dec 25 which came from no where.) But Google doesn’t pay attention to your analytics for their ranking your site, so that’s a relief. And the rumor has it that Google’s working on closing this hole, but meanwhile…
The link above is a geeky page, but has the best data on it of the dozens of pages I looked at.
After you work this all out, the bottom line is this: 0) Don’t mess with your current data. Copy that Web Site Data into a new one, where you can apply the filters you’ll need to create. 1) Create second segment and test your filters in this. Very enlightening. 2) Then apply those filters to your new Web Site Data Copy. It will take some time to build this new one, as it starts from that point, so have patience (come back in a month.) Meanwhile look to that segment you set up for accurate data.
The main scene is to not freak out about the spam accounts, and never click on them. Just set up your copy of your main web data, set up your segment so you can see the real traffic now, and meanwhile build up a new data set with the filters in place.
OK?
PS. I’m reactivating this blog, so expect some new podcasts soon.
Deep in the heart of the ever-growing Amazon Kindle jungle, there’s a profitable under-served market which is not easily discovered. It sits in a clearing by itself, much like a massive stone temple rising above the forest. A temple with some gold-filled rooms.
Just my kind of area to explore. I’ve long been in favor of “find where everyone is going and go the opposite way.” So this makes a lot of sense. And any adventure is always welcome.
We saw this expedition hinted at by Steve Scott with his non-fiction habits books. But he never really explored the opportunities this area has. In re-tracing Scott’s own path, it showed me the turns he didn’t take.
That inspired me to start my own journey around two months ago. I’m currently publishing an average of one short read ebook per week. And the results are promising, as the Christmas sales influence fades.
This path struck my fancy, as it told more about how to really use short reads as a business strategy. How to cement those 6-figures that Scott started having. What I’ve discovered accelerates that progress, perhaps even creating your 7-figure income.
(BTW, in Scott’s recent videos, he points out that his income is still dwindling, down from a high of around $400K annually to an average of “just” $250K per year. While this is still great, it also shows that he’s left tons of money on the table.)
One of the more profitable avenues is content writing as part of business publishing. A lot of businesses are getting into content marketing these days, but don’t have a lot of thick texts sitting around waiting to be turned into Kindle ebooks.
What they do have is lots of shorter material which would be perfect how-to non fiction books about their particular industry. If these could also be quickly turned into small books to hand out at trade shows and by their sales people, a business could get a real marketing advantage over any competition.
And such production can be fast. The book you are reading (although more work could have been done in editing, to be sure) was created and published into four widely-distributed formats in only three days, at a cost of sweat-equity only. Imagine what could be done for your next product release…
This isn’t just for fiction writers. It’s for everyone with a message to get out.
There’s a growing group of readers which Amazon has been catering to with their Kindle Short Reads. Shaw describes them like this:
“Introducing Coffee Break Readers
“There’s a new generation of readers.
“People who will download and read lots of books. They only have so much time and they want their fill of excitement in that limited time.
“We call them the CBR’s – the coffee break readers.
They’re not just people who have never read longer books before… They’re anyone who has limited time to read for whatever reason.
“These people aren’t stuck into a certain author, it’s more like the certain type of entertainment they want: short stories which they can read in their available time.”
That idea opened my eyes quite a bit.
The price range for these CBR books is the same as Scott’s .99 and 2.99, plus the 3.99 or 4.99 boxed sets.
But the trick is that you’re having to write a lot less and profiting more from each bit you do write.
When we last left our hero, Scott seemed to be getting into longer and longer books as he went, but this is the reverse of where you want to go. You’ll see shortly that this is more of a pioneer territory with a lot less competition and few tools to use to find your way. What Scott should have been doing is to figure out how to multiply his success in related genres, and stick to the short reads and box sets.
It’s really all the “deep backbench” principle again. The more books you have up there, the more they can be recommended, the more chances you have to uncovered your room of gold.
Less Competition, More Profits
The great part is that this is still mostly virgin wilderness. Go look over Amazon short reads and you’ll see there is a lot less competition, as the books are split up by length as well as genre. People can have 15, 30, 45, 60, and 90-minute reads. Your book still shows up in the regular categories. but the CBR’s will specifically hunt up your books according to the time they have to read. So it’s easier for them to find your books.
Basically, Amazon counts every 250 words as a page. Except for special instances, they generally only accept 2500-word books these days. So Shaw’s chart shows the reading time category you’ll fall into with your short reads, depending on word count.
Let’s look at that competition you won’t have:
For instance:
Literature & Fiction –
Kindle Books: 1,352,061 Kindle Short Reads (30 min): 48,093
Business & Money –
Kindle Books: 249,574 Kindle Short Reads (30 min): 15,937
Which arena would you like to compete in?
Another point is that there’s higher turnover. People are basically consuming books like tasty snacks. This then leverages your writing far beyond anything we’ve seen before. They aren’t looking for books they can read a bit of each day (munching all week long) but rather 5-10 books they can finish each week.
For the money they’d spend buying a traditionally-published big name author’s ebook, they can buy just as much reading material for less than half – and it’s all designed to be read in those tiny snippets of time they have available.
Shaw says that the bulk of the reads in this category are actually indie authors, so this means the Big 5 publishing houses won’t compete with their big promotion budgets in this arena.
Shaw points out, as I did earlier, that you can publish a single 80,000-word book and take a month writing it. (And another month editing and proofing it.)
Or – write eight 10,000-word books and publish every two weeks. (One for writing at 2,000 per day – 10,000 words – and the next week for editing/proofing.)
In two months, the first author has one book, which will sell for 4.99 or so.
The second author has 8 books that can sell at 2.99.
The second author has roughly twice the royalties coming in, plus:
the ability to get readers as email subscribers also from each additional book (with a Lead Magnet at both beginning and end)
the ability to be searched for 56 keywords and in 16 categories, instead of just 7 keywords and 2 categories.
the greater number of his books and his more frequent releases prompt Amazon to recommend these other titles.
and you’re making income while you are writing.
then creating a box set of these (or even a couple) just adds to the above.
In this hypothetical match-up, you have the same amount of words for each author, a tiny bit more overhead in producing covers and descriptions for short reads each ebook, plus building that box set. But then the box set allows a longer-read customer to consume the full novel.
As a sidebar, the box set looks to be a better bargain than the 80,000-word single book. Would you rather buy a collection of 8 books for 4.99 or a single book for 4.99?
This starts to point out the factors in Steve Scott’s system that he was missing.
What you’ve also done is to create 9 books (8 singles, plus the box set) in the same amount of time as the other author, but on your author page, you’ve got 9 books they can check out (and buy). And that’s two months’ work. The audience then doesn’t question if you’re a one-shot wonder, but will know by the end of just two months that you’re a serious contender.
The other successes I’ve studied spent an entire year or more creating their bigger novels in order to have 5 or 6 books available (which was Scott’s average, by the way, and he was doing short books.)
Again, you can have 9 books published in just two months. Instant legitimacy, with less competition.
Setting the first ebook as perma-free is an even better option. Plus, you can give it away from your site (and also from your box set look-inside) to get their email address. You aren’t giving away your first 80,000-word book (which freaks most beginning authors out) but only 1/8th of your total work.
(One tip here is to tell them in the first line of each single book’s description that a box set is also available.)
Shaw talks quite a bit about Kindle Unlimited here, but I still hold that you’re throwing away income if you’re not offering your works for sale everywhere possible (see Addendum.) The places you should publish in my opinion are Amazon, Itunes, and Lulu (both as an aggregator and hardcopy publisher.) This gives you the minimal interfaces to deal with.
Hook, Line, Sinker and the Lead Magnet
This is a tip Shaw gives which I’ve seen nowhere else: Inside your first book, it says: “Get the next book in this series!” and has a link which goes to a landing page opt-in. When they sign up, they go to a thank you page, which lists all the rest of the books in that series, as well as your other series – and they can buy each of the books through that page, directly from Amazon. That “thank you page” also has the free samples linked.
To my mind, this would be where you also give a link to sell a bundle for each ebook. It would include the PDF, epub, and mobi files as a download from your own site.
(Shaw does give a way you can help them side-load it with their Kindle email link. This builds relationship.)
Now, note that you will be building your ARC (Advance Review Copy) subscribers with your email. This segments part of them into a special list so you can sent preview copies in exchange for a review on Amazon. This is the key way to make “bestsellers” on Amazon. I did find a slightly better take on this from Mark Dawson, who has:
a) Tell your ARC about the release date.
b) Tell the rest of your list the day after, letting them know the price is going up.
c) Tell your entire list the day the price is going up.
d) Then (my addition) post to your blog/podcast with the release data and use IFTTT to syndicate it everywhere.
e) You’d then run Facebook ads about the book, particularly if it were a boxed set, where the increased book income would pay for those ads. ($4.99 or so.)
What that does, per Dawson, is to give you immediate reviews and sales, then gets continuing sales afterwards, as Amazon will promote books which are new and continuing to sell well.
Additional Short Read Marketing Tactics
Shaw comes up with some marvelous tactics with short reads, which are just as applicable to bigger books, but not as quickly or easily done.
1) Collaborations with pen names
This tactic can be used for testing other genres, but is also essentially brand-extension. Your first pen name is known for a certain sub-genre, then you write a book in a related sub-genre adding a co-author that is actually just another pen name. It’s not hard to see the cross-selling aspects of this. You can now can have several authors with their own list segment, for each sub-genre you want to write in. Shaw explains this in more detail in his course.
Your emails then come from an embracive source (like your publishing house or an “imprint” of it) which then lists the books by each author for each sub-genre. Each author could have their own special offer going.
As you segment off your hotter audience (more opens, clickthroughs) then you can give them polls, in order to narrow down what they like most and so create a better experience for them.
2) Collaborations with other (real) authors
If you have a box set with books by several of your pen names, you can then offer other authors in those sub-genres a chance to get into that box set. Since you have several “authors” already, it’s a no-brainer. And that new author then emails his list about that box set. This is an old standby of affiliate marketing. It builds both your lists.
3) Cloning
For fiction short reads this is a viable option. Taking your book outline (Shaw has a course on this as well on Udemy) you then get some ghostwriters to produce another book with the same basic plot. You then publish this under that pen name. Similar cover, similar title, cloned. It works because people want more of what they love.
4) Reverse Launch
You can also release the box set first, and then offer them your first book in that series as a sample – and put that in your “Look Inside”. Then you can go ahead and release the other books on a schedule, getting people to opt-in to your list to get the “early bird discount” as each new single is released.
Non-Fiction and Public Domain Publishing
Amazon is seeming to do all they can to discourage any more PD from showing up there. I got reminded this last week as I had a special report (quick read) that wound up in their very slow PD queue because of its title alone. My other books were getting approved in about 12 hours, so having to spend 5 days getting a book out of that queue back into draft was really annoying.
So I will definitely avoid this route just because it slows the speed of publishing. This also points out that they are primarily working with a database of titles (and maybe authors) as opposed to any search of submitted content (which might occur later, once it gets kicked into human hands, but that’s doubtful.)
Another cross-over point is improving your writing. Writing a good non-fiction book has a great deal to do with how they write good fiction. Mainly things like having a good hook, and using emotional descriptions.
Plus, fiction is more profitable in general than non-fiction. People like to be entertained and to escape. If you can bring these same writing styles into non-fiction, then you have a popular hit.
All short-reads do is to make your books more consumable, which is the same point of learning fiction-writing techniques.
The benefit of this strategy is to enable you to get more leverage out of the same amount of content that you’re going to create anyway.
Pen names to fill space in a magazine is nothing new. Prolific authors have often resorted to these for any number of reasons. Being able to cross-connect these authors and their readers gives you new opportunities for income.
I just wanted to tell you all about these, as this is a breakthrough down this line of short reads.
And authors with existing books – depending on how they are written – can break up their books into a serial format and do this same thing. The first short-read excerpt becomes a sample, then release the other chapters along this same line. Gladwell’s Tipping Point could have been released like this, if that were a publishing option at the time. Remember, it has to read like a serial to be successful along this line.
Leveraging Your Resources
Further, I still recommend coming out with both paperback and hardback editions to get the most out of your title. And don’t forget your audio book.
Some tips came to light this last Christmas season. It turns out that Amazon will stop ordering books for certain titles if they come from Lulu or other publishers, but not their own CreateSpace (CS). You can see how this makes sense from a shipping point, but you’ll also see that you just lost sales for the couple of weeks just before Chrismas. That means all the last-minute shoppers can’t get your books if you don’t publish to CS.
CS doesn’t do hardbacks. Period. They do a lot of different cut sizes in paperback that Lulu doesn’t, however. So you can make a pocketbook paperback version on CS, and a trade paperback version on Lulu, as well as a trade hardback version (both casewrap and dust-jacketed.)
Note, Amazon will show your CS version on the front page, and your Lulu version will have to be searched for. Having your expanded reach on Lulu gets your book into the other distributors with higher royalties and no Amazon stigma attached.
The general theory is this:
You have titles which are selling as ebooks and long enough to make at least a 32-page book in print, or about 8,000 words.)
Paperback version on CS, just to Amazon.
Paperback version from Lulu with their expanded reach. – Casewrap hardback from Lulu with expanded reach.
“Deluxe” dust jacketed version at a much higher price.
Work your books backwards in order of sales so that improved title sales pays for the proofing costs of the hardcopies.
Editing itself can give you an audio book.
You have four drafts of your book. First is your rough draft. Second is cleaning up your errors and inserting links, plus general formatting. Third is reading the book out-loud and correcting anything you find. At this point, you record everything you read out loud, with attention to reading the final version into your recording. You then send off that 3rd draft to a proofer. Meanwhile, you edit your recording into shape as an audio book (or as a podcast.)
For instance. this podcast transcript is now over 4000 words in print. So it would qualify as a 30 minute quick read, but isn’t big enough to print by itself. (I could add material to the end pulled from my other books, and also put in ads to buy my other books on Amazon.)
So we will probably use this as a test of this whole publishing scene
While your recording can become your audio book, it’s also a podcast. Including that link into your ebook then gives you added value. I also include the link into the PDF version at the bottom as a footer. So when you submit the PDF to make your hardcopy version, they can always type that link into their browser and get the podcast.
Of course, that sends them to your podcast where they get your ads, and another way to get them into your membership/mailing list.
Quick Reads Other Than Amazon
Of course this strategy works everywhere else, too. Your ebook are the same. You don’t have the “Look Inside” but all the ebook distributors enable previews – just make sure the PDF you upload has links to where you want readers to go. I’m also a fan of uploading the entire PDF, as it builds trust and encourages them to get a version they can read more easily on their smart phone. (But I do format my PDFs for 6″x9″ as these are more readable on smaller screens.)
Podcasts and Keeping Updated
One final thought is to tell you to follow my Authorpreneur Flipboard magazine to keep up with all that I’m finding daily on book publishing and content creation.
I may work this up into publishing this as a weekly digest at some point, but don’t know when. Let me know by return email or comment on this episode if you think that’s something you could use.
This podcast was started as another self-publishing test, and it’s succeeded far beyond what I expected. However, I have no need to simply work at finding more stuff to talk about just to have a podcast. I do like to share breakthroughs. But at this point, I’ve covered the bulk of the basics and have no reason to do like Steve Scott and others who are now trying to profit off selling courses to their list.
This is mainly as that market is so saturated, it’s not funny. The ebook market is, frankly, glutted. The how-to books market for new authors is worse.Amazon is more the new-author graveyard than ever before. Most of this is because authors are following the followers rather than reaching for the top 5%. That’s where the real creative energy is. Market leaders are constantly creating. And that’s what makes them leaders. Everyone who tries to just copy what someone else is doing is just another also-ran.
Scott was onto something with his short reads. But he’s another follower, even though well-paid. Essentially, he’s always been an affiliate marketer. And that’s always a follow-the-follower scene. It shows in his latest course in how to write and market books.
Any breakthrough in leveraging Amazon is in finding what are still niche areas, such as short-reads. Amazon is a complete pain to work with, as they nickel-and-dime your royalty income every chance they get. But they can be leveraged and they can be used to build your own list.
You do need your own site, and you should be able to sell your own books from your own site. I should finally have my own ecommerce site up later this month. You already see my membership site is up as a bare-bones operation, but I’m adding content to this each week. And my email lists are slowly building as I go.
Here’s the minimum basics in sequence for a successful author, outside of their ability to write:
1) an autoresponder service
2) a domain of your own
3) a membership on that domain
4) your own hosted bookstore
Everything else is getting your books also offered by the main distributors so you can use those distributors to build your email subscriber lists.
If you don’t have these four points above in, then you are just asking to be booted off Amazon at some point and left with no income, nothing.
The secret to profits from Amazon is to leverage their ebook sales into hardcopy sales, which are not subject to their money-grubbing policies on royalties. The real market for fiction and non-fiction, especially PD and PLR books, is in POD versions, not ebooks.
And those few comments above sum up my entire accumulated wisdom on selling books profitably. The rest is technical how-to which can be dug up just about anywhere (although the books I’ve already published in this area have been described as a Gold Mine with all those technical nuggets you can find inside.) My earlier books were to help anyone start with just the computer and Internet connection they already have, plus a common sense approach mostly lacking in the bulk of the other books in this area.
But I have no reason to revisit my own books. This scene is constantly shifting and evolving. I’d be forever just keeping these updated.
I’m not going to promise you that my podcast will continue. If I don’t find anything really interesting, or a breakthrough, then it’s just another day in the life. Frankly, these two Shaw courses on Udemy have inspired a completely new approach for me – but there’s no reason to repeat what he’s already written, other than this review.
I’m also studying Mark Dawson’s course on Facebook advertising, but this is a back-up to having a lot of books out there already. Your sequence would be to study the two Shaw courses and then Dawson’s free videos (until his pricey FB ad course opens up once again.) If you only have a couple of nickels to invest, then get my cheaper ebooks and work on building your backlist. Once the money starts dribbling in, then invest in the above – AFTER you have your own list, domain, membership, and ecommerce set up (which can be built with just Blogger, PayPal, and MailChimp – all free to start with.)
Again, before you start publishing your books (you should always be writing, every single day) get your basics in above. Then expand your training with Shaw and Dawson. If you go back through my blog posts, I’ve given you other downloads to study through. All free.
Your main focus is to thoroughly study and test everything for yourself, then throw away everything that doesn’t work for you. Especially what I’ve told you. No prophet is sacrosanct, regardless of how many followers they have or how much money they make.
Your life is your own. Live it to the fullest you can. Enjoy every moment. Listen only to those who have escaped that bucket of crabs where everyone else lives.
While I’m way behind and underneath my production goals these days, I still work to see how I can help you with whatever you need. Your input helps and inspires me. Email me directly or leave a comment.
And, thanks for being there.
– – – –
Would you like related books in this series?
Free ebooks (as well as links to paid versions) available in the no-charge membership.
You need to track which of your books is giving you link-love. Particularly, which ones are generating leads, which from from the Look Inside.
Yes, the primary reason for ebooks is Lead Generation (email subscriptions). They suck at generating income, which “conventional wisdom” is still cheering on. (That definition is commonly-accepted, but unexamined beliefs.) Sure, the top 1% make 6-figures – for awhile. And as long as they keep cranking out popular books. But everyone else makes between $250 and $500 per year. That same old 95-5 or 95-3 or 99-1 percentile split – depending on the data you’re looking at.
So you put a Lead Magnet in the front and back of your book so that anyone can find it and come straight to your website and sign up. But you have one Lead Magnet and a few dozen books. Use the UTM parameters (i.e. “http://yourdomain.com/…/?ref=bestseller01” ) to let you know which one is sending you the most leads. So you can somehow figure out how to duplicate that – or figure that you need to run some Facebook Ads to get more traffic to that ebook.
It can work in print books as well, but you have to make sure that your bitly link is memorable, like: bit.ly/bestseller001 or bit.ly/bookclubaaa (hyphens aren’t the greatest, and numbers are probably better than letters.) Remember, they have to physically type it in. I imagine that a scan code would come in handy at this point.
[Of course, that led us down another rabbit-hole. Hope you got another beverage while I was gone. Now that we’re back…]
You used to be able to get QR codes from bitly, but they quit over a year ago. Google is another recommended one, since they track the links – but don’t have a way to download the image. You’d have to copy it, paste it into GIMP (or similar) and then save it, so you could upload it to your print book version. You can copy/paste it directly into LibreOffice, but it goes in at 72dpi and both Lulu and CreateSpace want 300 dpi images or they auto-alert on you.
So, I had to go looking. Found this: https://designmaz.net/best-free-online-qr-code-generator/ which gives you a few free QR code generators. I picked out https://forqrcode.com/ and am happy with it. You can download several versions of it, even upload your own logo as a watermark. Don’t know how they make income to support it, but it’s there.
Let’s recap: 1. You need a redirect link with a UTM on it so that you can track your leads back to the book that sent it. 2. For print books you need a QR code generator that will give you a QR code that is printable.
Now, there is a added tip you can do to get your QR code onto the back cover (so if it winds up in an actual bookstore, someone could scan it there. I’d suggest putting it on the front cover, but it will always cause your designer fits as it’s just an ugly box there – besides, you create your cover at around 1200×1800 so it is big enough for Amazon and iTunes, but will scale down for Lulu. The scaling then trashes the QR code. Also, you do one front cover for both ebook and print in my lineup. So your QR code goes on the back. Case settled. Look, it’s inside first and last page already…)
You use Lulu to generate your cover for CreateSpace, as their cover generator is atrociously complicated. All you have to do is to use GIMP to cut off the ISBN that Lulu gave you and leave a big white space there.
Now, to get the QR code on the back of your book, you have to make a white background and put it into the lower left-hand corner high and inside enough to not be cut off by trimming. (You’ll see how it looks in the preview.) ISBN’s are always lower right. You pick white to make it simple, and easy to read. Yes, you could do other colors, but black on white is the easiest to read – and it shows off your self-publishing roots. 😉
Now, note that this is all untested. Lulu and CS will tell me if I screwed up their cover system, and then I’ll tell you. Otherwise, make sure your back cover text fits above the barcodes.
So, yes, I’m recommending you create your Lulu paperback first and then download and modify that cover for the CS version. Your CS version goes out through Amazon’s systems, but only to Amazon itself. Your Lulu paperback (which is almost always more expensive than CS) gets the extended reach so it goes everywhere else. This is simply because you want to get the Amazon sales, the Prime delivery and all that. CS still is having reports of quality issues, so you don’t want to bet the farm on them. Also, if B&N wouldn’t accept Tim Ferriss’ CS-printed book, then I’m not going to take chances with the independent booksellers who are even more prejudiced against anything Amazon.
(And that attitude has helped me leave a lot of money on the table over the past few years, a scene I’m just starting to rectify.)
[Update to this post: QR codes are a pain inside a book. 1-bit images need to be 600 dpi to work. You’ll first find this in your Lulu rejects, having to wait as long as 24 hours for CS to get to your submission, another reason for Lulu to be first in your workflow. However, they could be useful on the outside – anyone at anytime in the future could find that book and scan it. See sample below. Still testing, though.]
– – – – Is there a future for this Podcast? As for podcast episodes, it looks like they are really over for this particular show. I am uncovering very few new tips and tricks to tell you about how to publish your books. Just not finding many. And this blog isn’t about getting tips to newbies – there are plenty out ther. I’m not simply going to be regurgitating stuff in order to just have a podcast. Because, as you’ve been seeing, I’m into the business of publishing. And that is keeping me very, very busy. (After I published that first couple of hundred books, it’s gotten pretty routine, you can imagine.) The tips above are about all I’ve found for the last month or so. This one on bitly came up tonight, and I needed a break, so…
The planning is to turn this blog over into one which is about “Classics You Should Know” – which will be simply reading off the short descriptions of the books I release. 4000 characters is about 500 words, which in turn is 2-3 minutes. 5 books a week, 5 podcasts M-F. 260 books in a year.
Just my kind of challenge. The math on it is pretty wild, too. 6- figures and all that.
OK, another tip: Ebooks, especially, especially, especially on Amazon, are completely over-saturated. At least the broad categories. You have to find small profitable niches (and why I published that last short read about short reads) to generate any income at all. Steve Scott is into the habits niche, for example.
The continuing money is and continues to be in paperbacks. And that is, from my last work up, a great part of Scott’s income. But I’ve always told everyone to have everything everywhere. (And like Scott, I’m working out how to get into translations, but not leave as much money on the table as Scott did.)
Amazon has gotten so bad for PD books, I’m even considering giving Kindle versions away for free on my site. At the very least, I’ll bundle the .mobi, .epub, and PDF files together for one low price. The person will just have to learn how to side-load their own books, which isn’t all that difficult (and I’ll have downloadable instructions and also include these in the files for each purchase.) You can do this with Ganxy or Sellfy, but you pay a nice chunk when you sell on your own – which is why they take 10%, because Paypal very nearly does when you get below $10 or so. (Math it yourself – take off 30 cents and then take another 2.99% – it adds up.)
Other updates: Now, the idea of porting your content into all sorts of formats mainly stopped with ebooks, print books, cover images, PDF’s (Slideshare) and LinkedIn articles – oh, and podcasts. IFTTT makes sure the content goes out to Twitter and Facebook. It’s even possible to get IFTTT to port to Buffer and so reach G+ (but it’s iffy.) IFTTT also gives it over to five other platforms, which even includes Medium now. The only thing missing is video, and that’s because it’s huge time-burner with no record of getting any sales or email subscriptions (except, again, for the top 1%.) That should update you on how it’s going. It’s streamlined quite a bit, even if it doesn’t sound like it. When I do an ebook in a single day and link in the existing podcast, that goes out the next day with me doing nothing but post it once. All those places get their version on automatic. My idea of efficient leverage.
Systems.
Use them.
By the end of March or so, I’ll have 5 podcasts up regularly going based on audio of the 5 main books I’m marketing this way. Once these audios complete, they simply are started all over again. So they are evergreen. Yes, we’ll scrutinize each episode and maybe remaster the audio as needed to update the ads and tweak it here or there. Essentially, though, it just became a marketing system with very little maintenance overhead needed.
So that system works well. I’m seeing some response in the books I offer on Amazon, mainly due to the amount of backlinks which are showing up, as well as all the new short reads I’m creating which all link back to the main book.
My main approach now is to get all possible existing books up on CS with the Lead Magnet in them, as well as QR codes front, back, and outside. That alone should rocket my income. Added to that, I’m planning to put up another hundred or so books.
So you can see that I don’t have a lot of time for chit-chat.
Look, keep subscribing to this feed and you’ll get a lot of great examples of how to do it. And join the Classics You Should Know book club while your at it. You’ll get a free membership to LiveSensical.com when you do (if you don’t already.)
Well, I’ll let you go for now. Just thought you could use this tip on bitly codes (and the new stuff we just learned on QR codes for paperbacks.) Plus the updates.
See you around.
PS. Email me or leave any questions in the comments. Google usually tells me when there is something to handle in that area. I try to answer them all and my email to. In the otherwise idle minutes I have laying around…
PPS. What I am doing is to start a “Classics You Should Know” book club. Click that link and sign up today. No spam, just great books delivered weekly.
Bottom line: it’s all a numbers game that’s been rigged against newcomers.
Let’s go over some patently obvious facts:
1. Public Domain books are a commodity.They are sold like cattle at auction. People buy as low as they can. Meanwhile, publishers are into this scene of each diluting the market with their own version. Search for a classic and you’ll usually find about 400 versions of it for sale. 2. They are available for free – why bother. Visit Feedbooks.com or Manybooks.net or Gutenberg.org (where they get their versions from.) You can get any popular PD book there for free. Meanwhile, Amazon did that same thing when they set up originally – importing tens of thousands ebooks for free to get people to use their Kindle. All free to download. 3. PD ebooks books give you lousy royalties. Amazon won’t give you more than 35% for any PD book. Kobo only gives you 20%. Itunes does better, but has around 9% of the ebook market share (Compared to Amazon’s 65% or so.) Meaning: 4. You have to sell on Amazon to make any real money – and that’s nearly impossible. Plus, they actively discourage you every time you post another PD book there – and make you say it’s “annotated” or “illustrated” or “translated” in order to ‘differentiate’ it from the free versions. And what does that do? You have zero reviews to start with, so their algorithms put your book at the bottom of the heap. (Amazon alone uses reviews seriously, very seriously.) Oh yeah, Amazon also threatens your account with their robot emails every time you submit a PD ebook. Nice.
Now all the recent hype has been about ebooks, ebooks, ebooks. All this has done is to get all the self-publishing wannabes to invest heavily in ebooks. So the competition is huge, PD or not.
The Big 5 and also-rans also are on this schtick. They’ve come out with their own cheap versions of public domain books and work to dominate the low-end market for these.
Even worse, there are some companies who apparently have a business model of coming out with new versions of the top 250 or so classics, apparently under different imprints, which then get featured for a month or so as “new” versions, and then get replaced by the next imprint doing the same thing. (Apparently “big” publishers have a way to mass-import their catalog which the self-publishers don’t have access to.)
Unless you love competition just for the sport, you aren’t going to find a lot of support in this scene.
Meanwhile, you can’t make any real money just throwing new ebook versions up there.
Say you wanted to duplicate the model of the publishers – you can’t, but lets say you have a few months where you can do nothing but edit, re-cover, re-describe, and publish PD books to Amazon (and don’t mind winding up banned because you screwed up one too many times.)
There are the usual curves about sales which hold true anywhere and everywhere.
The 80/20 rule says that 20 percent of your books will generate 80% of your income.
More narrowly 4% (about 20% of 20%) gives you a 96/4 split on which of your books will sell well (and generate about 60% of your income.)
And, as usual, less than 1% (20/20/20%) will be responsible for nearly 50% (80/80/80%) of your sales.
Say you came out with the 200 most popular titles.
Statistically, 160 of these will barely sell, if at all.
8 will sell decently.
2 will sell regularly.
(and 30 basically won’t sell.)
So lets say you could crack into the market for a top PD book like The Great Gatsby.
Go ahead, open this page up in a new browser tab or window. What do you see?
The top seller (9.99) has a sales rank of 2,114 – meaning about 80 books a day (probably why Amazon likes to keep them on top, since they get about $320 daily after they take their “delivery” fees out.)
The top .99 ebook has a 6280 sales rank, or about 20 books per day. (Meaning about $7 royalties every day, as there are no fees at 35%)
The next .99 ebook has a 5646 sales rank, or about the same sales.
The last .99 ebook has a 39730 sales rank, or about 10 books a day – or $3.50 royalties daily.
The $3.82 Kindle has a 101411 sales rank, so it sells less than one per day.
The “bookhacker summary” version (a short summary) has a price of $2.99 and a sales rank of 416437, or about even less than the one just above.
Finally, the last $2.99 book has a 288653 sales rank, which puts it into the miniscule sales category.
So, if you could come out with a competitively priced book to the market leader, you’d wind up on the bottom of the heap and have to climb up somehow. (Unlikely.)
If you went for the bottom end, at best you could take out the next runner-up and make $7 a day.
Let’s use that as a base, not accurate perhaps, but it’s somewhere to start.
Back to Pareto‘s 80/20 rule – A year’s income from this book would be about $2520 per year.
2 books are 50% of your income. $5,040 annually, then your total sales would be around $10K annually.
But, maybe that doesn’t hold. Lets use that breakdown for Great Gatsby above:
Your 1% (2) of 200 books would give you $5,040 per year. (@$7 per day)
Your 4% (8 books) would generate about $20,160 per year (@$3.50 per day)
Your 160 books might generate $18,144 per year. (@maybe .35 per day)
The last 30 books just suck your time.
So out of 200 books, you might possibly make $40,804 per year. And that’s optimistic. (If you don’t select your books carefully, you’ll probably be closer to that $10K figure.)
What’s your current salary for your home? Do you have debts? Insurance? Car payments? Don’t forget that the self-employed pays both sides of Social Security.
Could $40K cover all your costs? Or would your spouse/partner have to keep their day job to support your publishing efforts?
Let’s also be real about how long it would take you to find and publish 200 books. Say, you could carefully select, and edit, and get new covers, and write descriptions, and publish 2 ebooks a week. That’s about 100 a year.
So it’s going to take you 2 years to get up to the point of making maybe $40K.
What’s your personal track record of sticking with a project that long? Remember, this is probably going to take all your spare time for the next two years. Sure, it’s possible that after the first 6 months – if you already knew what you were doing (and reverse-engineered the above with some creative thinking) you might be able to start making $10K off your first 50 ebooks. Woot, woot.
But is that a living? Sounds like a profitable hobby. Pin money. Vacation savings.
The best advice about giving up your day job is to move over to your home business when that business makes twice the income of your day job.
So look this over. If you want to support your whole family, take both of your incomes and double that. The average income in NYC is just over $50K. So you’re looking at making $200K from your home publishing business before you can both quit your jobs (and consider moving to a much lower cost-of-living state.)
$200K means about or over 1,000 books that you’ve self-published. And that’s 10 years worth of work.
Are you ready to commit all your spare time for the next 10 years to having a 6-figure income that would support your family?
For most of us, no. And for most of us, figure that your family isn’t going to support your habit for that long. And divorces can be expensive…
On the bright side (if there is one) you could support yourself after only 5 years of self-publishing PD ebooks. Lonely, but profitable (after alimony and child support, that is.)
Consider all this before you start publishing in PD and discover that you “can’t make any real money” at this.
PD is built on commodities, which means low price and volume sales. That’s what the big publishers do in this arena, and that’s what you need to be prepared to do.
Good Luck.
PS. How did I get to financial freedom in this area? 1. Paid off all my debts over 5 years. Now I pay cash for everything, or know it’s in my budget. 2. I live on a working farm, where my living expenses are basically free (paid for in sweat-equity, for sure. which takes my time every day.) 3. Cost of living in these boonies is very low. Internet is high, though, so that’s a factor. 4. Entertainment is low-cost: $5 DVD’s at Wal-Mart, lots of great PD books to read (free), and the few shows I can stand on over-the-air TV. 5. Long walks in the woods (when I’m not finding more books to publish) rounds out the mix. 6. Do I make my money off PD ebooks alone? No, I’ve written and published my own books for years, and some of these PD are in paperback. Remember, just a couple of bestsellers on Amazon will more than cover my costs – and I have over 200 books already up there, having made most of the stupid mistakes I outline above. But no, just having 200 books doesn’t mean you get an “automatic” 40K per year – far from it.
And that’s the point of this. Going blind into PD publishing (like I did) means you usually get diddly-squat back. Going with your eyes wide open and willing to study the real successes (who don’t PD publish, they publish their own original works, BTW) can show you a route that would work.
So, mostly I’m telling you to keep your day job and enjoy a possibly profitable hobby. Otherwise, start writing original non-fiction short-read works like Steve Scott in a market that will support it. Or invest in FB ads to spike your sales like Mark Dawson. Both of those two started making 6-figures in less than two years after seriously starting into self-publishing.
And that’s why I wrote this for you. PD publishing can be a living, if you know how to make it. For me, frugality and simplicity make it all possible. But if you have a high-overhead life, keep your day job and start figuring out what you’re going to do when you have to retire – it’s coming sooner than you think…
Conventional Wisdom (which is usually 95% wrong) says you should be happy with your ebooks and how they are selling.
The problem with that logic is that the biggest sellers aren’t doing that.
The biggest sellers make more income from hardcopy sales than ebooks. Traditional publishers know this, even though they count on just a handful of authors to cover all their costs.
The self-publisher can create their own publishing empire if they do two things:
1) Create a deep backbench of books.
2) Get their book in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
The first is obvious. All the top-selling authors routinely bring out new titles and make sure their earlier titles continue to be available.
The second means book discovery, sure. It also means having your titles in all possible formats – ebook, paperback, hardback, audio, even video. Because no two readers read the same way. No two readers prefer the same format. Most prefer combinations of these formats. Amazon knows this, and they bought Audible (audiobooks) and CreateSpace (paperbacks) to take advantage of that exact fact.
My own research pointed this out over 6 months ago. I’ve published hundreds of books as tests (and gotten my financial freedom by doing this.) Of these roughly a quarter routinely sell as ebooks. I’ve got a much smaller set of these which have also been published as paperbacks (and even fewer as hardbacks.) When I crunched the numbers recently for 6 months worth of sales, it confirmed what I suspected:
12% of my books were producing 25% of my income.
92 of my ebooks were producing the income of 34 paperbacks.
Meaning for all the work I put into ebooks, that if I would take the ebooks which were selling and turn them into paperbacks, I could possibly triple my income.
Why are paperbacks more profitable than ebooks?
You have to understand the elephant-in-the-room explanation first.
The vast bulk of the press on self-publishing is devoted to becoming a successful ebook author. Let’s face it, there are some good reasons for this:
They are easier to produce.
They are fast to get published after the writing is done.
70% royalties are easy to understand.
Paperback publishing has been hard for a number of reasons:
It’s expensive to print books.
Traditional publishers want only proven authors whose books will recoup the investment of big (or small) print runs.
Every step of the distribution chain has to be paid, leaving little to pay authors.
Hardback publishing is even more expensive and so, has less rewards.
Traditional publishing used to have the model of building demand with the expensive hardbacks, then leveraging the profits by producing the lower-cost paperbacks and ebooks.
Self-publishing, as I covered above, uses the reverse model for the same reasons. People who really like the ebook will want the paperback, and if they read it often enough, will want the more durable hardback. (Of course, you better be writing classics for this to take place…)
My studies showed loopholes and potholes.
I took a couple of days to digest Penguin’s 1700 classic books to get a set of books as a base. I wound up with about 80, quitting when I started running into their really long tail which never sell even one per day.
I used CreateSpace’s royalty estimator to see if they could be self-published and be profitable. See: https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/#content6 (The trick is to set the price a .01 and it will tell you the estimated costs to produce the book.)
Then I published 8 books on CS to see what would happen.
The first hidden factor I ran into what that there was a gap between what CS said it would cost and what they actually charge.
Any book 108 pages or less is said to cost $2.15. It actually will wind up costing $3.59 Working with these, it wound up being exactly 1.67 difference between estimated and actual.
The second hidden factor was to find that the price minus the actual cost, plus your royalty left a big amount of change on the table. In fact, Amazon only gives you 40% of that possible royalty.
Just the way things are.
Do these steps with a spreadsheet to do your number crunching:
Take your page count.
Find the estimated CS cost.
Multiply times 1.67
Pick your royalty and divide by .4
Add that royalty to your actual costs and you’ll see the price you’ll need to charge.
Run through a few scenarios and you may have some different ideas about what you can make off paperbacks. A nice introduction to this reality, perhaps.
What you’ll find is that your costs will tend to raise dramatically according page count. What I found in these books is that they actually cease to become profitable for self-publishing much above 250 pages if you have to depend on the prices traditional publishing sets for those page-counts.
This is because longer traditional press runs make bigger books more profitable, and there POD can’t compete. Smaller books have a bigger expense on binding per book, for instance. This is probably why any CS POD books at 108 pages or below cost “the same” in order to keep the business running profitably.
What about Lulu POD?
The biggest problem Lulu has is that they aren’t owned by Amazon. CS is internally integrated and so can produce more cheaply. Amazon can also change their prices more easily. Books that are over-priced or under-priced can be adjusted for the best income for Amazon.
When Lulu prints a book, they have to mark it up by 50 – 55 percent in order to cover their distribution partners – who insist on being able to discount any book by 40%. Or that’s what I’ve been able to find out.
When the price/cost of a book goes up $1, Lulu has to raise it by $1.50 or so in order to stay in the distribution game.
(Lulu also has some fudge-factors in their pricing. I took 10 books I’d published as hardcopy there and ran them through a spreadsheet. Most of their added costs were explained as above, although there are some small factors – about 1.4% – that varied according to page count.)
Lulu overall is higher quality than CS, but that doesn’t matter. On Amazon, a CS-published book (same author/title) will seem to get preference over a book published outside. Lulu is always higher priced, and has to be searched for in the “other formats and versions” link.
During the last couple of weeks before Christmas, non-CS titles will become temporarily “out of stock” even though there are plenty on hand. The obvious explanation is that there are lags on getting it from the external publishers warehouses to Amazons, so their guaranteed delivery wouldn’t be possible. CS is completely integrated with distributed printing (that apparently matches the Amazon warehouse locations) so this isn’t a problem. Mostly, that depends on how many units are sold for any given title. Those which sell less than one a week might do fine with a single book on Amazon’s warehouse shelves.
The trick is when you try to get a CS book into other independent bookstores. There are a significant percentage which won’t take a CS (read: Amazon) published book.
You’ll get sales via Ingram of Lulu books where you won’t be able to get your CS version sold. Tim Ferriss ran into this when his CS-printed book wasn’t accepted by Barnes and Noble – so he marketed it via BitTorrent. Had he known the above, he could have had an easier time of it.
Recommended distribution is then to publish on both at the same time. Use CS for only Amazon-internal editions. Use Lulu for all your “expanded reach” distribution. Of course, there are exceptions. And we all could use more studies than just what I found. These are rough workouts. There are far greater publishing wonks out there than I.
This article simply gives you some tools to work more profitably with.
No real competition…
A key point to know is that there really isn’t competition. Amazon knows this with their “also-bought” recommendations. People who buy one book will probably buy more like it. You just must be more creative in your marketing than other authors in your genre.
Be more creative in
Covers
Descriptions
Audience Experience
Never try to compete on price. Your titles aren’t commodities. They never have been, never will be.
There is a very funny strategy you can try. I recommend publishing on Lulu in every format you can.
That said, you also publish to Amazon with CS.
So: set your Lulu book price at what the market will support. Then: increase your CS royalty so that price is close to your Lulu book. You’ll get higher royalties out of your CS version and benefit by the “competition” between them.
There is an apparent sweet spot in page count.
Because Lulu has to increase by $1.55 every time the costs go up a dollar, above a certain page-count that price becomes hard to support.
I mentioned earlier how the longer print runs affect pricing. This seems to start kicking in at about a 250 page-count. CS books tend to return much less royalties for the same title-author combination. Lulu seems to cut out at under 200 pages. Lulu and CS compare best together at under 100 pages.
If you take the standard of 250 words on a page, a 200-page book is about 50K words, a 100-page book about 25K words. A 100-page book is also in Kindle Short Reads category.
This means that your investment with National Novel Writing Month would pay off if you completed one title, sent it to editing and then started in on your next novelette. Write five days a week, publish two. You’d end up with 10-12 books which would sit on the top end of Kindle “short reads” and also have profitable CS/Lulu paperbacks.
What is a typical workflow to achieve Multiple Eyeballs?
For publishing itself, you want the fewest possible interfaces. Every time you have to shift gears, it’s a drain on your resources. So you want to work in batches as you can. Note the terms below:
“title” is your particular word-collection, usually referred to as a “book”.
“version” is the format, such as ebook, paperback, hardback.
These are the simplest ways to keep everything straight, since all of these are “books.”
Again, store all your data in Calibre and keep this safeguarded. Back everything up.
We assume you have the front cover ready.
Also, a 4000-character description (about 3800, actually) formatted with Amazon-acceptable HTML. You’ll edit this down for Lulu meta data. Store this in Calibre. (It can even become your backcover text for the paperback.)
1. Start with Lulu. Figuring that you’re publishing original material, get each title through Lulu on it’s own, in every version. I generate the epub version through Calibre itself, and then tweak it to fit on Lulu. But you can also upload your Word doc/LibreOffice .odt file and let them convert it for you. (Hint: try to keep all images out of it.)
2. Have Lulu distribute your ebook to Kobo and Nook, not Amazon or iTunes (we’ll be back for them later.) If you have Lulu create your epub, download it and store in Calibre.
Start now to collect the ISBN’s as you publish each version. Calibre gives you hints how to store these.
3. Generate the PDF in LibreOffice as it’s simple, accurate, and accepted by Lulu and everywhere else. (I understand Word still doesn’t do this natively.)
4. Then submit that PDF to Lulu for both trade paperback and trade hardback versions. Make sure your PDF is formatted for 6″x9″ – use their templates until you can evolve your own. (LibreOffice has a nice feature where you can import styles from a document you’ve used before.)
5. Get the proof into your Lulu shopping cart for the paperback as required. Wait until you have all your title-versions published before you finish your order to save on shipping. (Find their specials by clicking on the Logo on the home page.) Don’t order the hardback proof yet.
6. Download the pdf Lulu creates for your cover and edit out their isbn in GIMP (or similar.) This is your cover for CS, unless you want to change it. (Note: you can generate several versions at the cover stage, or go back and create a new one. Simply upload new cover art and let them generate a new PDF you can download right at that point. Perfect time to send out PDF covers to your fans to see which one they like the most…)
7. Get all your titles through Lulu first. You’ll use the Calibre and Lulu interfaces for all titles and all their versions.
8. Then publish your trade paperback versions on CS. They have a truly lousy cover creator. Simply upload that cover-pdf you set up above – the one from the Lulu trade paperback – and let them install their ISBN on it. (No, they won’t accept a Lulu isbn. But you can buy your own and use it.)
CS takes about 12 hours or so to approve each version. Note that they give you both the full ISBN and also the shorter IBSN-10. That last one is used for Amazon to create their links. (http://amazon.com/dp/[isbn10goeshere])
9. Proof your CS version, once it’s approved. You’ll be able todo this online unless you have an error in the file.
10. Then submit your titles to Kindle.
11. Then submit your titles to iTunes.
Again, we are using one interface at a time as much as possible. Calibre is the key interface. And I’d suggest dual monitors if you can. Much easier.
12. When the paperback proofs come in, approve them and order the hardback proofs. As above, you have to decide whether a hardback is even needed on the market. For each of your top-selling books, it’s probably a good idea. Otherwise, you’re probably better off selling them from your own Lulu storefront, where you can set the discount (up to 60%). These are great for offering special editions to your list for “just a dollar above cost.”
– – – –
Yes, it’s that simple to increase your book publishing income.You no longer have to settle for smaller income from just ebooks.
Thanks for all your patience during these last few years.
[Update: Well, that didn’t work. The RSS feed is back as it always has been. All I learned from that is such a move is a great way to drive off subscribers. The feed I sent them to didn’t contain all the episodes at all. So, for now, everything’s back to where it was. We’ll see…]
You’ve seen this blog change and evolve as it explored all the factors in getting a book published. Practically, this is probably the most nuts-and-bolts blog about self-publishing out there. Because this is my journey as I lived this stuff. If I had a question, I’d look it up and then share what I found with you. Of course, as the distributors and aggregators changed, so did I. And you heard about it.
This blog has been published into at least a couple of books as well.
Having a podcast was the most recent change, and that brought even more listeners.
This is because I’ve been hosting that feed there ever since Archives.org went all petulant and automatically shut down my account because I put some affiliate links in the description. My bad. Their loss.
Anyway, LiveSensical.com is supported by the Rainmaker Platform, which is a nice SaaS solution that I’m paying for anyway. I’ve been duplicating the most recent content from here over there anyway.
Today, I moved the podcast feed over there. It’s seamless to anyone who is only subscribing through their podcaster. They won’t even see this post.
But podcasting is best done when you have something to talk about. If there’s no passion in it, then it’s just another J.O.B. So I cut back trying to find something to talk about every week and simply post when I have something to say. This is along the lines of how this blog started, anyway.
I’m quite busy publishing otherwise, and will at sometime describe the whole post-mortem when I get to some point where I can go all retrospective and take a backward glance.
This blog and all the old posts are going to remain here for people to get the data. I’ll probably even copy blog posts over to here just to keep the archives updated. Podcasts won’t be part of it.
As usual, you can get on my mailing list and talk with me via email, anytime you want.
And do go over to LiveSensical.com and see how things are shaping up. I’ll keep you posted here as I can, but the action is over there.
Would you believe me if I said I had proof of Amazon KDP being a bully?How about that they are trolls as well?
Well, it happened to me like this: I had a book up which got a DMCA complaint that wouldn’t resolve. You see, you can use DMCA to complain about someone else’s content and never have to give that person a copy of your complaint – so they have to take their content down, or in Amazon’s case, they block it and you can’t do anything about it.
The long and short is that someone at Kindle got a hair up and went to suspend my account over it. I answered right away and pointed out that it was because they left the book in question on their site and it could still be found by the DMCA trolls.
But I got the dirty end of that stick.
The next day, someone else at Kindle reversed it, butI was still guilty as accused. So, as usual, they put their boilerplate threats at the bottom of the email.
Why does Kindle put threats at the bottom of every email?
The answer –they are bullies. KDP has around 60% of the market and they don’t have to take your book if they don’t want to. And if you try to publish public domain works, they can be downright hateful about it.
Sidebar:What made Kindle into troll-bullies? Their own “success.”Yes, there’s the corporate cult in place, which comes down from the top. It’s that take-no-prisoners, scorched-earth policy they have. Besides that, it makes them a great target. I’ve published that one complained-about book everywhere else. But who got the one and only DMCA complaint? Amazon-Kindle. Because it’s an easy target and Google searches will pull up that title there first rather than anywhere else. So the DMCA internet trolls simply have to fire off an automated request to Kindle, and the book is shut down. If it doesn’t disappear entirely, they complain again until that title is removed. (That is the actual strategy: to eliminate the “competition” for a specific book title, which isn’t trademarked.)It’s the mutual troll society.Amazon-Kindle doesn’t have to care. They’ve got 1.6 million books out there, and yours is just one tiny drop in their ocean.
The bottom line is that I’ve finally had enough with these guys. It set me to thinking about what I was actually getting out of my dealings with them. Frankly, I haveonebook that sells decently, and a lot of other books (about 70, maybe) that don’t. Some have never sold. Which brings up the fact that…
Amazon Kindle is correctly the “Graveyard of Indie Authors”
And the more people publish to Kindle, the bigger that graveyard grows.
Now if you had a book that sold one a day, and you were getting a royalty of maybe $2 per book, what kind of income will that give you?
Yup – $720 a year, more or less.
So you can figure what I’m getting with my book whose sales rank says it’s turning over maybe 5-10 per day. Nice pin money, but won’t support any family by itself. And that is my Kindlestarplayer.
Then when I have to put up with Kindle’s nastygrams in order to do these submissions, it doesn’t really seem worth it.
Here’s the surprise: I make more money on paperbacks and hardbacks.
Meanwhile, neither CreateSpace nor Lulu give me any grief at all about my books, as long as they are technically able to be printed. They trust me from the start. (They don’t accuse me right off the bat of doing something illegal, like the Kindle trolls.)
iTunes, Nook, and Kobo similarly don’t care what I publish there. And they also just accept the stuff I give them. On each publisher, my books sell differently. But only Kindle has that weird review hang-up. (OK, it does affect CS sales, I imagine.)
The point here is that I can help you best with all these books I’m finding if I’m not hassled and stressed every single time I submit a book or revise it.
The Kindle Trolls just made up my mind for me with their last round of bullying.I’m really through with having to fight for the “privilege” of getting books up there.
So if I do find a great PD book, it’s going everywhere except Kindle. It will wind up on Amazon as a paperback and maybe a hardback as well. I’m just not going to fight over measly profits from their Kindle version. (I’m sure there’s no love lost on either side.) What I will do is to offer that ebook to you directly with it’s Kindle-ready version, and pocket something like 97% of the royalties. Members only, of course.
Where I come out with an original work, Lulu is going to distribute it to Kindle for me. So I lose some royalties out of it, at least I’m not losing sleep.
I think that if authors wised up, they’d see how they are getting screwed and would quit their Kindle addiction. There are 1.5 million, 9 hundred thousand Kindle ebooks out there that sell less than one copy per day.
It then makes sense that the average income of most indie authors by survey is about $500 per year. Because most of these have published a single book which never sells, especially on Amazon-Kindle. And people can’t find your ebook because it isn’t recommended because it never sold to begin with. That’s the way Amazon works.
Amazon Kindle is the ebook author graveyard. Cue the funeral dirge, please.
What Turns a “BestSeller” into “Makes a Living?”
You’ll find that all these “bestselling” authors have built up an audience of rabid fans who buy everything they come out with. Takes some time, and some good writing, but it can be done.
Like Amanda Hocking, they don’t just write a bunch of good books. They also borrow other’s audiences until they can get enough of them to join theirs.
This is the lightbulb moment most authors are missing.
And frankly, it’s a point of visiting podcasts as a guest. In Content Marketing, it’s called guest blogging. Hocking got the book bloggers to take up her cause. Steve Scott and Mark Dawson visited the book podcasters. Same approach in all cases. Enough of these visits, with your own opt-in’s and list in place, and you have your own audience.
At that point, you can do the Kindle Review Dance. You know the steps:
a) Give your audience advance review copies, b) get some of them to put reviews out on the first days, c) get some to buy it right off. d) Then tell the rest of them so they can get it during the first opening week, and e) then raise the price and get some more to keep buying it. f) So then Amazon starts pushing it and drives the sales even higher.
That’s all it takes to make a “bestseller” on Kindle. Yes, the reviews are all contrived. (Normally, about 1% leave reviews there or anywhere. But this strategy is legal and accepted.)
But what does it take to make a living there?
Well, the honest truth is that you can’t get there from here.
No author I’ve studied makes their income strictly and only from Kindle. No one. Not any. Lots of “conventional wisdom” guru’s say to just get your books on Kindle exclusively and – voila – instant 6 figures.
Nope. Doesn’t happen. Except for the 1% – usually those with lists of rabid, buying fans. Like celebrities. (Cue the zombie march.)
It takes a couple of years to build up your audience to even start approaching 6 figures from book sales. It’s a real grind, but necessary. Learn by doing, not by hoping for lucky breaks.
Let’s crunch some numbers.Smashwords’ Coker has done surveys say ebooks sell the most at $2.99, but produce the most income at $3.99. We don’t know how many 6 figure authors are using those numbers. Mark Dawson won’t run Facebook ads for anything under $4.99. He’s pulling down $500K per year, spending over $100K on FB ads – and making twice that back.
Let’s figure you want to make $100K in a year. In New York and other high-tax districts, $50K won’t even get you out of the poverty zone.
You need $2K per week. Let’s take Dawson’s book price – that’s about $3.50 royalty per book. Just over 570 units sold per week. Or around 82 units per day. Your sales rank needs to be between 1500 to 3000 – meaning that you have that many books which sell better than yours in all of Kindle-land. The air is thin up there, for sure.
That’s just one book to do all the heavy lifting.Most of these guys have an average of 10 before they get any decent income. That makes more sense, as then your average sales only need to be around 8 per day, meaning your sales rank for these are between 10K to 50K.
Now you can see why 84% of all Kindle authors make diddly-squat.
But crunch the numbers for yourself. Come to your own conclusions.
What the guys making real income from booksales are doing.
Their money is made withmultipleversions onall possibleplatforms.By my last notes, Scott was sticking to KDP Unlimited with his ebooks and had given up around $100k per year. But around a third of the rest of his money was coming in from other versions. Print books, audio books, foreign rights. It was only when Scott moved into these additional versions that jumped him into the $300K range.
That’s the model.Get all your books available everywhere possible in all versions possible.
If you’re publishing original books and have a decent audience built up, you can very probably keep making 6 figures indefinitely – as long as you keep producing books they can consume.
If you’re trying this with Public Domain books, figure that you’re going to have to publish a few hundred to do this. The problem is that PD has been commoditized on Kindle so that the bulk of them are either free or very low price of 99 cents.
However, in print, it’s a different story – with the proper approach, one can make those few hundred crank out 6 figures. And those sales are more regular, if “weak” compared to the topsellers.
Having a couple hundred PD books out there, giving you about $2 royalties, you only need them averaging about a sale every other day.
The trade off is about the same. It can take years to build up a backbench using either method.
What most starting publishers don’t know is that to submit PD books to Kindle gets you a nastygram almost every time you do.(Of course they quickly find out.)
Hardcopy versions on CreateSpace and Lulu don’t get that bizarre treatment.These two are only concerned with your technical accuracy so the book reproduces well. They aren’t concerned with what the content is, but expect you to hold up your own end.
Quite a different scene entirely. You aren’t threatened with account closure every single submission.
Meanwhile, as I’ve covered before, print books can bring you in twice or more income for the same text.
For my business model, the current work is converting all my ebooks that sell at all over to print versions. And meanwhile, look for additional PD books which are poorly marketed by their publishers and sell well in paperback despite of it. Adding these to my existing backbench then should take my income up to those six-figures, and perhaps beyond.
While PD publishing requires no audience (it actually works based on the legacy audience of those long-dead authors) I’ll be also investing in audience-building to accelerate that process. That audience will tell me what books they want, giving us both a virtuous feedback loop for the marketing cycle.
All of this is based on those two points from our last episode:
1. Deep backbench – lots of titles selling well. 2. Multiple eyeballs – all possible versions on all possible platforms.
Add to this:
3. Velvet Rope Members
That’s where you get your own audience on board, and give them a membership so you can talk freely with them and give them what they want.
There’s only a few more key points to this system, but I’ve talked at you long enough for today.
This episode should give you the paradigm-shift you need to consider your own marketing plans. The days of the Kindle trolls and bullies can reach their end. But only if enough of us get people to examine the conventional wisdom Kool-Aid they’ve been swallowing.
Bullies get to keep bullying until they are stood up to.
Then they reform, or run.
Takeaway Steps
Of course, this is my trademark end to this episode – steps you can take today to fix things.
For original works:
0. Get an email provider, plus your own domain and web site. I use AWeber and Rainmaker, respectively. 1. Use an aggregator for your ebooks, either Lulu or Smashwords. Make sure they have a Lead Magnet that works to build your audience through the LookInside/Preview. 2. Publish paperbacks through CS and Lulu and get their extended reach options (cost you nothing but proofs.) Ensure they also have Lead Magnets for their own Look Inside/Preview. 3. Publish hardbacks through Lulu to their extended reach. 4. Record your own books into audio and post them to Audible and CDBaby. Also use them as podcasts to attract your audience. 5. Make the podcast interview rounds for your books. And tell people how to opt-in to your membership. 6. Build relationships with your list through give-aways and pre-release offers. (Several good workouts exist on this, such as Dawson’s.) 7. Write more books. Publish. Repeat.
For PD/PLR works:
0. Mainly, these steps are the same, they just take longer. Probably twice as long or more. (Just how fast did you want to get financially independent.) 1. Aggregators won’t ship PD or PLR anywhere, so you have to submit all your books manually. 2. My personal advice is to skip Amazon – it’s way too crowded to be worth anything. Instead, use them to show you where the best prospects are. They publish sales rank data, which gives you clues (see my last episode for this.) 3. Publish all books to as many places as you can, especially hardcopy versions. 4. You might be able to use PD audiobooks (if you choose the right originals) for your podcasts. Otherwise, use the example of mine where I take the 4000 character description and podcast these. 5. The rest is no different. Build your audience and give them what they want. 6. Then find more books, publish them, rinse, repeat.
That’s it for now.
See you next time.
PS. I’m working up the real marketing campaign that any self-publisher can use, so stay tuned.
We’re still working on the bubble-wrap they came in, so we’ll get some more links up there as soon as possible.
I did get some ways you could buy directly, which is a step forward. I don’t know if you realize that selling directly instead of on Amazon allows an author to make higher royalties for the same price or less. (Cuts out the middleman.) There’s lot of ways to do this, but the link we’re using seems the best for what we need.
And if I don’t have a version of that ebook on Amazon, then I can price it whatever I want (regardless of the Amazon-Kindle price-check bots.)
The trick is that I can also include all sorts of other versions along with that Kindle .mobi file – so you get that and the epub (which everyone else uses) and the PDF – all for the same price Amazon charges. (It does take some sideloading, but Amazon’s getting better at making this possible all the time.) Meanwhile, your smartphone will load them just fine.
I’ve also added the direct link to Lulu – and most of the books there are running at 50% discount, usually. As I add books, I’ll keep checking these out to make sure you get every good offer I can. (That 50% is below what Amazon can offer on their best day.)
Meanwhile, there are some coupons and other discounts from iTunes and a few other places as soon as I scout them up. But you’ll be the first to know…
Anyway, check out the podcasts. With any luck, I’ll be able to keep these coming to you 5 days a week, since they’re all pretty short. And we’ll wind up just continuing to grow the book club out as we go.
Feel free to share with your friends and whatnot. If you haven’t signed up for the book club, it would be a good time to do so. I put no-charge PDF downloads on the thank-you page, just like our library, so take advantage of them. They’ll be changing every week, so it’s a page you’ll want to bookmark.
Yes, I’ll put a variety up there every week – some fiction, some self-help, some practical non-fiction, all you can use. At least 5 new titles every week. Of course, that’s a tall order to keep up. But you’re worth it, aren’t you?
– – – –
You’ve probably seen the Magic of Believing podcast come to life last week. We also saw the Think and Grow Rich podcast go live this week. I’ve got to finish up the rest of the episodes, but the one that’s there is a good start. All of these bring you the audio book and a PDF chapter of the book to study, just like the other book-casts. Of course, there are extras as we go. These are always posted on the Live Sensical podcast, so feel free to subscribe to that one as well.
There’s a couple more book-casts lined up and in the works, as well.
The whole point is to give you lots of help to improve your life anyway you want it.
And if you want to get some copies to refer to anytime you want, well the links are there for that. 😉
Your welcome.
– – – –
OK, that brings you up to speed for the week. Sorry I don’t have time to record a live message for you. You can understand that I’ve been a little more than busy just getting all this done.
The Four Whys and Four Hows of Successful Self-Publishing
After now over a decade of self-publishing, I thought to give you some hints about what you’re up against.It isn’t all that pretty, but it can be made to work.
The first point is to quit taking anything seriously which is going around about this area. The pundits are wrong on both how much you can earn and how easy it is to do it.
“Wrong” is anything you haven’t tested for yourself.
(The trick is that most people don’t know how to study things. So they can’t figure things out. Don’t worry, it’s a problem with our schools and our culture.)
The Four Reasons to Self Publish
While there may be more than this, these seem to be the four key reasons anyone would ever want to publish their own or anyone else’s books.
1. There’s a voice in your head that won’t quit. It shouts at you and nags you and just won’t shut up. Publishing gives that voice it’s own life so it will leave you alone. (Now the cousins it has are another subject for another time…)
2. To pump up your own self-esteem. Nothing like a nice book in your hand with your name on it. Does the soul wonders.
3. An investment in your career. This is the “5-pound business card” people talk of. Drop it on someone’s desk and they think you know what you’re talking about. Such books are lead generators. They bring you people who want to hear speeches or be consulted with. And they pay you money for talking, not writing.
4. To earn money enough to make a living. This is the over-pumped part. While there are a few people who pull down six figures, it’s only a handful of people who do. There’s more people who sell writers and publishers courses and books and webinars on how to write and self-publish. After all, more money was made in the gold fields by selling pans and picks and jeans and tents to miners than probably was ever extracted from the ground or streams. There are ways to make income in publishing. They are fairly well known. But you have to study a lot of back-trails to figure out what they all do in common. Can be done.
Some of what you are listening to or reading here approaches that last one. The books I’ve already written tell a lot of the nuts and bolts about it (and yes the buy links are in the show notes, thanks for asking.)
What’s related to this is how to get it all done. That leads us from the why to the how
Four models for book publishing
I was reading an article recently where thought they had it figured out. You see they said there were two camps of publishers. They had it half-right.
The Two Black Hole Publishing Systems for Authors
1. Amazon and their ebook pushers are one camp. For Amazon, its encouraging authors to race to the bottom with their prices and become a commodity along with their books. By their own stats, there are only 100K of their books which sell at least 1 per day. Since this data is hard to come by (Amazon won’t release it) a report covering the average cost of a book in 2013 said they tended to be between $1-2, this gives you a 35% royalty of about .52 per book, or around $190 per year. That same report says that what people like to pay is closer to $10 – and that is where the highest income is.
Smashwords’ Mark Coker has been doing his annual surveys in the reverse, found that the most books sold and the highest income was earned from the $3.99 books. Meaning an author would earn just over $1,000 per year off such a book. To make 6-figures, you’d need a hundred of those books. Hope you were born prolific and talented.
But Amazon won’t pay decent commissions above 9.99. Even then, they are still pulling down 30% from each sale, which is a thousand bucks off that 9.99 book. (As a comparison, $9 is the sweet spot for self-published POD print books. But that will give you only a $2.00 royalty from CreateSpace, slightly more if you sell direct from Lulu.)
Amazon apparently wants the indie authors to compete with each other and give them the best deal by selling a lot for very little. People can then buy more ebooks from more authors. (This is also the probable reason Amazon gave away so many public domain books for free, to gut that market and popularize it’s Kindle reader.)
This is just a race to the bottom by making both authors and their books compete on pricing as commodities.
Think about that the next time someone is trying to convince you to do your book publishing exclusively on Amazon Kindle.
2. The traditional publishing model uses ebooks as incentives to buy their fairly expensive print versions. They tried to prove this last year when they raised ebook prices and tried to spread the rumor that ebook sales were dwindling.
Their model has been deeply flawed for years, ever since POD publishing caught on – which was before ebooks by several years. When people began to step around all the vanity publishers and that monolithic agent-publisher system, they started to get some control over their own destiny. Traditional publishers are tied to long print runs which decrease the cost of each book – and that means finding and keeping authors who can sell a lot of copies. So these monoliths are very picky about what authors they sign up.
Needless to say, they are in trouble and won’t be getting out any time soon. Slow death by self-strangulation.
The Two Break-through Models You Should Know
3. The Hybrid System. The authors I’ve chased up (Steve Scott, J. K. Rowlings, Amanda Hocking, and others) didn’t do just ebooks or just print books. They also included audio books and foreign publishing rights. They pushed their books into every version they could anywhere that would possibly buy them.
In all cases, they had at least 5 books out there before things started to take off. Most started breaking six figures when they had 10 in production. By then, they had already started cross-publishing their ebooks or print books into other versions.
But the main point is to cross-container your content – not just thinking about it as a “book” but thinking in terms of re-purposing your content as many ways as you can figure out. The Harry Potter movies takes essentially the same content as the bestsellers and made millions. Different format, but same basic plots, characters, story-line.
4. The Services Publishing Model. We’ve already covered some of this as people are using a book to establish authority and then bank on this investment to bring them speaking and consulting gigs. This is the most profitable scenario per book that there is. It makes trying to make a living by publishing multiple bestsellers look really pale in comparison.
What isn’t covered much is how authors are using email lists, memberships, and build their audience to accomplish this. It’s a radically different model than the others, because you build it backwards from the audience, rather than assuming the audience is there. The GRQ people tell you to crank out ebooks based on what you can see from the demographics already there on Kindle. This is what Steve Scott did with his habits scene. But he comes from an Affiliate Marketing background, which tends to push “the next greatest thing.”
Actually, these models are all just an evolution. Starting out with either ebooks or print books, you’ll merge into a hybrid scene and build your list. That list will then tell you what they want more of as your audience.
They will tell you what services they want. Of course you get inspired along the way, and they help you with that.
Content is King, Content Marketing is the Empire.
We’re back to that point that content has no fixed container these days. If you record an ebook, you get an audio book, and maybe a series of podcasts. Put that with some slides and you have a video. Print out that transcript and you have a paperback or hardback. Give a talk about it and you have a lecture series, or a webinar. Put the slides, audio, and video together in sequence and you have a course.
There is no one model for content. Non-fiction writers have this easier, perhaps, than fiction writers. Either way, it’s how creative you want to get and how imaginative. There are no limits either way. Like any memoir, it all depends on how factually you want to approach the subject.
The best thought leaders in this area right now seem to be Pulizzi and Rose of Content Marketing Institute. Follow them to get a quick education. Even though they mostly work in the enterprise arena, Pulizzi’s book Content Inc. has all the quick study you need to do as a writer and self-publisher to create your own publishing empire. Because you are sitting on Acres of Diamonds in your own content. It’s just how effective you want to be in getting it all out there.
Build It and They Will Come – and Pay to Get In
All of these models also point to having your own platform to send people to. If you build on someone else’s platform, you’re just building as a sharecropper. You can get kicked off at any time. Even Jeff Bezo’s said that Amazon will ultimately get disrupted. Facebook has proved that you can’t rely on anyone else’s platform to continue to run by the same rules. Meanwhile, the FB users have become older and more “lurkish,” participating less and being great fodder for FB ads – which are quite effective.
Platforms on top of platforms are even more unstable. I had an account with Sellfy and put a few books up there – all public domain books – that created a nice little bookstore on a Facebook tab. Yesterday, I went to check out how it was doing and found it was gone. Turns out some wimp at Sellfy is afraid of public domain books, and canceled my account. No more bookstore.
Any author, every self-publisher has to have their own platform where people can find and buy their stuff. It’s a simple as you build a page for each book and put the buy links on it. Meanwhile, you find something like Ganxy, or Payhip, or Zaxaa to sell your digital products directly.
Next book, next buying page. Rinse, repeat.
You do this so that people can interact with you and give you something in return for all you’ve given them. It can be money, but it can also be feedback, or sharing your content with their friends.
The point is that you own it and you can keep it going as long as you want. You can change it, and you can shut it down. But you aren’t waiting for the whims of the tech titans to change it for you, and then you have to scramble to figure it all out again, and replace that income stream.
The ideal scene for this seems to be a membership, where you can keep the Amazon-Kindle bots out and sell your books for whatever you want. Members always get the best deals. They buy from you and you’re both happy about it.
It’s just that simple.
Let’s recap exactly what your publishing model should consist of:
1. Deep backbench. Lots of titles on a given subject or area, tuned into a specific niche where people like to spend their money.
2. Multiple eyeballs. Every title is published in as many formats to as many platforms as possible.
3. Velvet rope. Build an audience, keep a list growing, bring them to your membership and give them even greater value than they’d find anywhere else.
4. Caring sharing. Syndicate your content everywhere you can, so you can auto-magically keep the world informed about everything you create as it rolls off the line. You use something like If This Then That to syndicate everything as far as possible through all the various social networks. Keep everyone up on your actions by broadcast.
5. Mountaintop Antennas. Eventually, you turn viewers into members, members into fans, fans into raving fans, and raving fans into evangelists. As you do, you’ll create an affiliate system to keep those evangelists rewarded. I haven’t gone there personally yet, but most of the tools I use have that capability. (Look up Zaxaa if you want to see how this could be done.)
Those five simple points seem to cover everything a self-publishing author needs to know. Of course, if you have different research, do let me know. This stuff changes all the time, and the more people who look at a problem, the better the solutions can become.
– – – –
Well, that about wraps it for this week.
Again, I’m just so happy to be able to have you listening and supporting this podcast and site.
If you’re not already signed up, then do so. This all continues to get better and better as I improve and add and tweak everything.
This week, we added “Classics You Should Know” podcast with episodes for each book, all complete with buying links. Of course that member-only book page still has a lot of downloads waiting for you – so sign up today if you haven’t.
Do leave a comment on the show notes if you have something to say. Or, if you’re getting this by email, just hit reply. I answer all my emails.
Is the Content Inc. Model a Good Fit for Author-Publishers?
Short answer is “yes.”
Long answer is “depends.”
Depends if you get what he’s saying, understand it, and put it to work.
The bottom line is that author-publishers are content merchants. They deal in content, no matter what form it’s in. Like screenwriters and song writers, authors put out content as a steady diet and a profession.
This also includes those who write a single book and then do consulting and speaking gigs for the rest of their lives. Their content just changes form, it doesn’t change the action of producing it. This isn’t new: Genevieve Behrend wrote three bestsellers about the Law of Attraction in the 1920’s and made a nice living from speeches and consulting.
Now, to figure this out, I went and bought the book Content Inc. to get the model by Joe Pulizzi. (Maybe you should, too.) In the talks he gives, he usually lists just 6 points when he talks about this model, but there are actually 7. Pulizzi didn’t omit it in his book, he just put it at the very front. Let’s call it Step 0.
Even then, this steps are not just sequential, they overlap. (See image.)
0. Set your goal and stick to getting it achieved.
“Begin with the end in mind.” Decide what you want to accomplish and then burn your bridges so you have to.
Next:
1. Find the Sweet Spot.
This is where your personal knowledge and your bliss/passion intersect. What you like to do best and what you know how to do have to agree, and then you can start living large at what you can and want to do best.
Writers love to write, producers live to produce. Creative thought alone has it’s own rewards – but it doesn’t necessarily pay the bills. So, follow your bliss – but only if you have prepared by learning what you need to know in order to pull it off.
2. Find your Content Tilt.
This essentially is to “…find a problem area that no one else is solving and exploit that area with content.“
For writers, it’s a specific approach to a very specific sub-genre which they know best – and then execute it with style and originality. Like the Harry Potter books. Like the James Bond series. Like the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Each genre already existed long before these authors were even born. But the authors brought in their own specific style of playing that game.
Songwriters do this scene as well. Elton John sings songs about the same subject as John Lennon and Paul McCartney did, as well have thousands of others through our modern age. But they don’t just do what everyone else did, they did it uniquely. This is their own personal tilt.
3. Building the Base, and 4. Harvesting Audience
Successful authors do this. They have a fan base that they relate to and even get story ideas and critiques from. They serve this base by writing stories that their fans actually want to read. Modernly, this means having an email list they can subscribe to, and then keep building the relationships with them.
Here’s where you need to study Pulizzi’s book closely. Because “books” are no longer the only format you can write toward. Content can be poured into multiple formats. Right off the bat, there are at least four types of “books” which all sell differently: ebooks, audiobooks, paperbacks, hardbacks. Each has their own audience-preferences, and sell differently.
So you have to work smart with this. Yes, the 6-figure authors usually have at least one series of 10 books going for them. Most have several series. And the books aren’t all just digital versions, they are also audio and print versions. And they are in foreign translations. And there could be movie deals… See where this is going? Lots of content everywhere at once. One book series, and lots of versions.
Pulizzi gives the caveat here for beginning author-publishers who need to build their base are these:
“1. Focus on one content type.
“2. Publish on one platform.
“3. Deliver consistently.
“4. Continue to deliver over time.”
The formula for a beginning success is to: publish in one narrow sub-genre, just on Amazon, and get your series coming out regularly. This is how to start. Once you have your base, then you start expanding into multiple versions and multiple platforms.
There’s far more to this in the book. Like most authors have their own website, for instance. You can’t count on any one distributor being able to do everything for you, no matter what their promises are.
So while theoretically, you are publishing books, actually you are using that platform to get subscribers you can talk to through your email. Every single book you publish, every single format, should have an invitation in it for your fans to join your club.
Yes, you get those books out there, but do it smart and build your subscriber base as you do. No, it doesn’t have to take a long time. But it does have to get done. Otherwise, that one-shot wonder you produced will dry up and blow away. Ask some of the Motown and other recording-label artists that did just that – where are they now?
(Hint: not headlining on the Vegas Strip.)
And when you get those subscribers, you have to keep them engaged.
Again, there are tons more ideas of how to do these two steps in Pulizzi’s book.
6. Diversification
Once you have a single platform (publishing books) worked out, then it’s time to diversify and expand your audience. While Pulizzi recommends book, blogs, and speaking, this may not be the most efficient. Writers write. Blogs would be a simple extension, but elsewhere, I’ve recommended getting into audio. Those 6-figure authors I’ve followed have found that appearing as guests on podcasts have worked wonders to promote their upcoming book and existing series.
Also, as part of proofing, you read the book aloud and correct errors as you go. Why not create a podcast of your upcoming book? Even though the final proof will do other corrections to it, if you were to read chapters each week, or every other week, of the raw version, this would be something readers could enjoy as an audio book. Meanwhile, you can get sponsors and also run your own ads for your earlier books in that series – right in the same feed.
Blogging is logical, as you already have the text and can link to the podcast in that article. Fans would love to get the text as it comes off the line and then buy the finished book as well.
Again, as a note, these steps aren’t sequential, they overlap. So you can be working on several steps while you’re just getting a single book out in several formats, on several platforms.
You’ll see examples of this by following various authors. Steve Scott and Mark Dawson were interviewed on podcasts long before they started their own. Amanda Hocking got chums with the book bloggers to start her own rise. You don’t have to do public speaking as Pulizzi did and does. That is also very useful for John Jentsch and others. In these, your follow-up books extend your brand while adding even more value.
7. Monetization
The classic author-publisher model is built from the beginning on book sales. Monetization is built in – if you can get your book discovered. Again, most authors don’t start to get real traction until their 5th book. To do this, you need to be collecting subscribers from day one. Just update all the books you already have out there.
Your list and those relationships prime all pumps. Mine your content and re-purpose it. Bundles, podcasts, any other services you want to provide. Check your knowledge base for inspiration.
The point is to expand and diversify your number of formats, types of formats, number of platforms, and types of platforms. Monetize each and every one of these as you go.
Then you are on the route to real success as an author-publisher-entrepreneur. The real point is to decide from the beginning that you are creating and running a successful business, and align your goals to that.
So?
The Content Inc. model is an outline you can use to build it all from. You just have to know anduse it.
The sky’s the limit.
Time to get started…
If you want more information on entrepreneurial book publishing, sign up for the no-charge library of writing and publishing books at
Reviving Frankenstein: Making PLR Publishing Profitable
PLR is long from dead, although the amount of really bad stuff out there can make you wish it was.
It still sells. I have a certain set of PLR ebooks which continue to sell through iTunes, Nook, and Kobo. (Amazon won’t take them, and GooglePlay is dead to Indie authors.)
As I was ramping up my paperback production, this was a perfect time to test these.
— Oh, I didn’t bring you up to date on this stuff. Oops.
OK, we’ll get back to our monster on the table in just a second…
The Hows and Whys of Print On Demand
Print on Demand (POD) was the first to start hammering nails into the coffin of traditional publishing. (The creature still lived, although wounded.)
POD is good for very short runs and in smaller page-counts. I can say this because I did the number-crunching to prove it. Regular press does better with larger books and large numbers of books printed. One of the bigger expenses in printing is the cover, especially hardbacks. And hefty books feel like they are more valuable.
The numbers I’ve run show that while the sweet spot for ebooks is $3.99 (per Smashwords’ Coker) the sweet spot for printed paperbacks is around ten bucks. I did find a study from 2013 that said that was the case. And if you look at Amazon, this seems to be true, anecdotally.
(Update: Found another study here, saying optimal paperback price is about $14.95)
Now, you have to make money at this book-publishing stuff. To do that you need a royalty. eBooks are great because there isn’t much overhead in it – so you can sell your books for four bucks and get nearly three bucks as part of it. (Sell it directly and you’ll get to keep around 90% of that price.)
There is an approach to pricing most people don’t get when they start out publishing books, which is to start low and gradually increase your prices until you find the pain point for your audience. Your 3.99 book might be actually worth 8.99 or more. You’ll never know until you try.
So for the purpose of this test, while I could go the 35-cent royalty route, like I do with the 99-cent Amazon bottom feeders, I wanted to keep this interesting for myself. So I figured that a two-buck royalty would keep my attention.
Where we are at now is this: a ten-dollar price point with two bucks coming back into our own pocket.
So, the POD product has to come in at under $8 cost.
There are two POD suppliers which fit self-publishing. Those are Lulu and CreateSpace (CS). Yes, there are a couple more, but their restrictions and extra costs mean you take a royalty cut, or have to price it higher. Lulu and CS are both free. Just my kind of budget.
Lulu was first to the market and has made CS evolve to keep up with them. Meanwhile, since Amazon owns CS, there is an inside track that cuts almost everyone else off at the knees.
Here’s why: when you publish a book, there is an automatic 50-55% markup after you price it. That’s because the other retailers have to be able to mark down the price, as well as take a “fair share” and get their own take out of each sale.
This means that Lulu as an outsider has to raise their price by a at least 50 cents everytime their cost goes up a buck. What costs you 5 bucks on Lulu will have to be sold for 7.50 everywhere else.
CS doesn’t have those constraints. They are almost always cheaper than Lulu or anyone else, except the Mass-Market paperbacks (which have very long print runs and very, very cheap construction.)
That said, I can sell a book on CS and always sell it cheaper on Lulu. which makes it key to have a membership where I can sell these books directly to my readers. So I can add value by offering several purchase options.
CS then responds by saying, “Yes, but if you are already a Prime member, then we can ship it for free.” (That hides the fact that you have an annual payment to Amazon for that service. And meanwhile, Lulu regularly has discounts on their site that can cover all your postage if you can buy at the right time.)
There is also the point that CS can keep certain books in stock if they are regularly in demand, while Lulu is always printing it only after you order it. So you are always going to have a wait with Lulu, unless you are willing to pay expedite fees.
Time versus Money.
That said, here’s how to chose:
Both.
That’s right. Because they are that different.
1) Some people are prejudiced against Amazon. Anything Amazon. Something to do with their track record of how they treat other businesses, like that would be a surprise. 2) Lulu books go far more places than CS, using Ingram. 3) CS has a no-return policy. Lulu has satisfaction guarantee, and has consistently very high quality books from their printer in North Carolina. CS is improving, but their model relies on distributed printing (which explains their recent printing problem in the UK.) 4) Key is that you can give more value with direct sales through Lulu.
How you price Lulu vs. CreateSpace
Essentially, the breakdown is in that $10 barrier.
I crunched production costs for everything from a 32 page book up to 300 pages.
The cold bottom line: to stay under a $10 price point and a $2 royalty,
Lulu has a 32 page-count limit to produce your book.
CS is about 175 pages as an upper limit to be under that $10 target.
For Lulu, a 175 page book will cost $14.50 on Amazon, but $7.25 locally.
One of your readers could buy it as a CS-printed book on Amazon for $9.94
Also, that book bought on Amazon will improve your sales rank there, which in turn could get your book recommended more frequently.
So: publish on both. Like I said, it only costs you sweat-equity once for each platform.
That said, at 50% price break, Lulu can print and sell a 300-plus page book under $9 if they sell direct to the customer. Of course postage is extra for both platforms (unless you’re paying for Prime, or hit one of Lulu’s specials.) Lulu turns out to be an average of just over $3 cheaper than CS for any print run if you buy directly from either.
How does that work?
Lulu adds close to 25% to your royalty. CS adds 60% more. A $2 royalty will jump your Lulu book by $2.25 above your cost per page. CS does two weird things: a) their cost jumps up by 67% above what you’d pay personally to have that book printed, and b) a $2 royalty will add $5 to that higher cost.
In most actual production costs, CS is less than 20 cents more expensive than Lulu. Meaning that both of them are running with the same basic expenses.
So the difference between them is that extra $3 that CS adds as their pie slice.
CS gets away with this as they don’t have to raise their prices to get into Amazon.
If you want to wade through this spreadsheet, email me and I’ll send you a copy. Then you can take your own data samples to cross-check my figures.
How does our PLR Frankenstein monster work into this?
Well, a lot of PLR ebooks have to be tweaked to even make 32 pages. Most of them aren’t. (In their hey-day, these tiny ebooks were being over-hyped and sold for as much as $97! It’s no wonder Internet Marketing is synonymous with “scam”)
What I really wanted to tell you was about how I brought these all to life again.
The original test was to take all the PLR books I had, about 70, and get them on to iTunes, Kobo, Nook, and Google Play (Amazon won’t take PLR.) GooglePlay quit on me, but gave me a lot of sales data while my books were selling there. These were all ebooks.
So out of these reports, I distilled down a list of the books which sold an average of one book per month for the last 6 months. This gave me 19 books.
The test was next to see if they’ll sell on Amazon. I published all these through Lulu and paid for the proofs. They are now all live. And I only put a couple on CS to see if there is a problem selling them there – some books do get rejected if the same book on Kindle has a problem. We’ll know by the time this podcast hits the air.
But the fun part was how simple this was to create a set up to sell these books online.
So you can see for yourself how simple it can be to get people to opt-in, and then get instant access to the entire library.
Sure, this is a simpler approach, as it has all these books up in a single page. What that does is to get this type of reader onto my site so they can then click over onto the other content I have there. I took this approach because the main reason for the site isn’t to push PLR books related to building an online business. But I have these books, and they are selling otherwise, so I might as well see if they’ll sell as hardcopy versions. Also, I am building up a series of books (and later, courses) on how an author can build their online business, so these are a step in that direction.
You can see I’m not done with what I need to do here. In fact, that to-do list is right at the top of the page.
But this is pretty much a template scene. Once you have all the data in Calibre, you simply take the ISBN’s and build your links out of them.
I discussed this some years ago. But here’s the short-hand:
Lulu gives you ISBN’s for every ebook and print version. These are 13 numbers in a group with hyphens. (And CS gives you ISBN for their version.)
For the Lulu ebook, you just change the ISBN of the paperback for the spotlight search link. (Nook and Kobo have similar ISBN search links.)
As I said, I keep all the meta-data on these books in Calibre, including all their various ISBN’s. I started this page by simply putting down all the long list of book titles. Uploading the images and setting them as thumbnails was simple, as was excerpting enough description text to be interesting. Then the links are all the same, I just had to change the ISBN’s for each book and keep track of where I was at.
Still to do will be to add the free PDF download for each book, which is just another value-add. If they like it, they can buy the ebook to keep a copy on their smartphone or tablet. This will be through Ganxy, where I’ll offer the PDF, .mobi, and .epub versions all for one price – that’s the “Buy Direct” link. If they want a copy to mark up, they can buy through Amazon or through Lulu.
Yes, if CS doesn’t choke, I’ll have the CS books there as well, but whether I’ll link to them is a question. They already have the advantage of lower price. Linking to the Lulu version gives that version a push on Amazon. So, I’ll think it over some more when I get more data…
Really, this was just to bring you up to date about how POD is working and where it’s a good choice. And also to show you how simple it can be to use PLR (or a set of books you already have on Lulu) to create a buying page for your readers.
To make 32 pages (Lulu’s minimum, CS will start at 28) you’ll need about 8000 words at 250 words per page. The minimum short read for Kindle is 2500 words. A novella is about 10,000 words.
So the upper end of our sweet spot is to stay under 175 pages, which would then mean about 44000 words, a short novel and bigger than many non-fiction books.
This also means that if you are bundling your short-reads, you can put four of them together and then also offer a print version. Just more value for your readers.
That’s an idea you can keep track of. Of course, if you want to give your readers a nice offer, then you can also offer them the Lulu discount as well.
Why did PLR Flatline?
Two reasons:
It’s generic by definition.
All the data in them needs to be checked for accuracy.
(In short, most of the writing sucked.)
The way you succeed online is by providing great, valuable content. But all that content has to have your particular view and approach to that subject. (See Pulizzi’s Content Inc and his “Content Tilt.”)
PLR is something anyone can put their name on, like store-brand peanut butter. You don’t know what’s in it, and any other store can compete on price with it. PLR has also been sold widely and can be picked up for next to nothing at various places online. It can easily be found online for nothing more than Google search.
The trick with PLR is to use it as your starting point, not a final product. You have to verify everything they cover in there and make sure you are giving people useful data they can use to improve their quality of living. There is often a lot of good data laid out in a simple format. But you’ll have to re-write it completely in order to get it onto Amazon to sell it. And if you just upload a bunch of junk onto a website, it won’t be anything that will build a business. (Meaning: keep your day job.)
Having a stack of PLR articles on your hard drive can help you with inspiration, but you’ll have to take it from there.
Anything you put online has to solve a problem for someone. It has to enable them to get a better life. Generic solutions only solve generic problems, and these are only worth the paper they are printed on. Like “free advice,” you get what you pay for.
Note: none of these PLR books have my own name on them. This is simply a test.
– – – –
Well, that brings you up to date now.
As a note, this is just around 2700 words as I write this sentence. It will probably wind up as about a 5 minute audio file. If you’re following this logic, you’ll see that I could post this article itself as a Kindle “short read” and link to the audio file. Then bundle it with my Short Reads ebook (also podcast) and maybe one other book, and I’d have special books all with “audio inside” links which would send them to my website. Again, write once, publish in as many ways and as many formats as possible.
But that would only be if I had something which would solve problems others actually have. Putting up content just to have something out there is great practice, but seldom profitable. This episode is just another exploration in how to publish simply.
Meanwhile, have as much fun as you can with this.
OK?
See you next time, then.
(Update: All good on CS – time to get the rest published.)
Imagine that you had a car that only had two speeds – reverse, and low. Wouldn’t that be frustrating? You’d probably be able to go faster backwards than you could forwards.
Yet this is the scene that most businesses have.
Because people aren’t taught the system which runs businesses. I should know. I’ve been hard at entrepreneuring for some 15 years now, and only in the last two have been able to fire my last boss and get some real freedom into my life. (However, the 16-hour days haven’t quit. )
It was finally this year, in the last couple of months, that the last piece of the puzzle fell into place.
I can tell by the amount of hype by marketers to exclusively use “social media” and “search engines” that most people out there also have no clue. And that noise has only gotten worse over the years.
I don’t have all the answers to everything. My own scene has been to keep throwing things into the fan as tests, then see what stuck to the wall behind as a result.
What I’ve found out what works out of “conventional wisdom” averages out to be 95% BS and 5% truly workable.
The tool I’ve found as most useful is to look for systems. Natural systems. Things that workdespite pandering politicians or celebrity endorsements or ads on the mainscream media channels.
Systems work throughout recorded history, through legends, through current times and enable you to envision a brighter, more prosperous future.
The Entrepreneur System
This tends to explain how all businesses get started and why they fail. But you are going to have to test this for yourself and not rely on what I tell you. Sorry. Just the way life is.
1. Understanding Success as a subject.
2. Understanding how to persuade others.
3. Being able to produce something valuable.
4. Promoting your product or service.
Let’s use what we know about indie authors and self-publishing.
The reason most authors keep their day jobs is just those points above. It’s not just writing books and putting them up on Kindle at a low price. If you don’t understand what success is and how to get it, you’ll never learn how to set and achieve goals (only 2% do.) Not knowing how to persuade others means that your description for that book will never get people to buy it. How to produce something valuable is a lot more than writing a single book and hoping. Promoting your book is also much more than sending out some tweets.
Before any author (or any entrepreneur) can really succeed, they need to know what success is. The most common and most useful way to learn this is to study books that were written by people who studied others who were successful. Chief among these were Abraham Maslow, Dale Carnegie, and Napoleon Hill. Earl Nightingale, Steven Covey, and more recently, Tony Robbins have been more modern-day examples.
You study successful people who studied success, and then distill what they considered was important. From this, you create your own success model to follow.
The second point after this is to be able to persuade others. Most of those above were known for their own ability to get people to act in their own best interests. While you can also note that through history, there have been a lot of people who influenced others to do bad things, the bulk of humanity has always been working to improve their conditions and those of people around them.
This is all “Golden Rule” stuff, which is also known as Cause and Effect. You can test this yourself. Go around and frown for a day at your job and to everyone you meet. You’ll make people grouchy around you and they’ll also leave you alone. Now, go around and honestly smile at everyone. They’ll want to start conversations, and you’ll find all sorts of happiness in your and their lives.
This is the core of Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
The next study to take up is that of the better copywriters. Also Robert Cialdini’s book “Influence.” All these copywriters agree: what works is to really just build on humankind’s natural habits. As a species, we really haven’t evolved much in our 10,000 years of recorded history. The core desires and motivations are still there. And that is probably why ancient texts like the Bible are still selling so well these modern days. Good copywriters can demand and get paid whatever they want, once they master the old texts which laid all this out in the 1920’s.
Third is to know your production model and hone it to a polished, sharp edge.
In Content Inc, Joe Pulizzi laid out the 6 simple points each of the many businesses he had studied all had in common where they succeeded. And those points (plus the one of setting goals and making them, covered earlier in that book) are the exact steps any author-publisher needs to take to build a truly working system and regular excess passive income.
It would be just as true if you were manufacturing cars, or buying and selling stock. You have to know your market and how it works, what it wants and how to get it to them. You also have to know how to deliver far more value than is expected. You have to go the second mile – and do this consistently for years and years.
You have to develop production habits that will see you through the rough times into the good ones, over and over. You have to build a body of work. There are very few one-shot wonders that had a great life after that single success. (Look up some Motown artists as examples.)
Fourth is Promotion.
This isn’t running advertisements. Currently, that has been made into a very bastardized version of the principle we are going to talk about. Once you see how simple it is, then you’ll see how to run ethical promotion.
For our use, although there are ways to run ethical advertising, especially via Facebook (currently – until they change it again) we won’t mention ads as a term because the majority of what’s out there builds dis-trust. People have trained themselves to purposely not look at ads, all in addition to their browser-installed adblockers.
The principle of effective promotion is this:
“Ask to get in front of other people’s audience and give then additional choices that they’ll appreciate.”
Related to that is to get that host to recommend you to their audience.
In chasing down the success of some of the top 6-figure authors, you’ll see they were showing up on other people’s popular podcasts in order to pitch their books. Amanda Hocking was commenting on the popular book blogger sites, who then reviewed her books to their own following. Wayne Dyer showed up on the Johnnie Carson show and got a huge boost for his first book, just like various comedians that got their start there. The Ed Sullivan show launched many careers on it’s own, as did American Idol, the Voice, and other talent competition shows.
How this differs from “normal” or “conventional” advertising is that people are willingly tuning in to find new entertainment, education, or inspiration. They’ve asked you to come into theirhomes.
On TV these days, you are trying to understand what is happening in the 15 or 20 minutes between interruptions, (some of which go on for 5 minutes in 30-second spots.) There is no continuity in these ads, except perhaps in how stupid they think we are.
It’s no wonder advertising is hated and despised. They don’t ask, they don’t give choice, they don’t give value.
The reverse happens when you’re a guest on a podcast, where you find out about the host and what type of information his audience is looking for. Then you deliver far more than was asked for. Similarly, guest blogging is writing articles for that audience which they really appreciate as you custom-tweak that article based on what they expect to see. Meanwhile, your article is then tweaked by the site editors to make sure it’s a good fit for that audience.
That is the key to promotion these days. Ask, be accepted, deliver value.
And that is why advertising has high fail rates and “content marketing” is replacing it. Meanwhile, selling ads is a convenient addiction for any platform that has to show a profit to its investors. Ask Facebook, ask Google, ask Twitter, ask Instagram. All social media is embracing ads and limiting organic reach – you can’t inform your followers unless you pay.
Why these four points work.
Because it’s a system, not another listicle to memorize. Not another fancy acronym.
These four points interact with each other to improve your result.
The more you hone your personal success system, the better your esteem and higher your self-confidence will be.
The more you refine your ability to persuade others, the more people you will attract and interest and enable to act on your offers.
This then leads to delivering a valuable product, whether it is a physical object or service, or a virtual product such as an online course, or ebook or other content. The better you refine this offer, the more exchange you’ll be receiving. This means more income.
But people never find the better mousetrap until you can routinely get in front of interested audiences to tell them. As you do, you build your own audience. Because of your own self-confidence and certainty, your own persuasion and empathy, your own high-quality delivery of valuable materials and services.
Test this all out for yourself. All of it. Don’t believe anything I say – unless and until you’ve found it to work for you personally.
In my opinion, the amount of your success and income depend on it.
If you have better ideas or examples, leave a comment below the show notes. Or drop me an email.
Thanks again for listening.
See you next time.
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How to Resolve and Expand Your Audience Out Of Trust
The core value any online commerce runs on is trust.
Yet business schools don’t teach this. They are instead given all sorts of models to use which take them away from why they are there to begin with.
A business is a ongoing exchange of valuable services and/or products – usually in return for that commodity called money. (But not always.)
The major problem that business courses and online training have is that they are so busy teaching the How’s that they forget the Why’s.
Look at that definition above. It’s all continuing exchange of value.
That all has to happen in an atmosphere of trust. The seller has to trust the buyer and vice-versa. These are age-old principles, which tend to help us understand how it’s done these days in digital-everything.
The reverse of this is a scam, where whatever is promised is only partially delivered. (See my “Get Your Self Scam Free” for more details of this.)
There is no decent physical model to explain what happens in marketing.
Perhaps the stupidest or laziest one is calling it a “funnel.” That implies once people enter at the top, they eventually move down to the bottom and out.
This model doesn’t deal with the fact that people are leaving all the time because they don’t want or can’t trust the person or group they are dealing with.
A better model is a set of concentric circles. People start on the outside edge and gravitate toward the center as you improve your relationships with them.
The ideal flow of customers – and customers implies they are following a custom, or cultural habit – goes from less trust toward greater. Your clients come very closely in to you, and what you do, to absorb everything possible. When they’ve achieved the highest pinnacle of what you can offer, then they do one of three things:
They move on to another mentor, or
They go back through the material from the start, or
They become evangelists for your material and bring new customers to you.
The Usual Suspects, the Usual Lies
Recently, I laid out how the Social Media has been pushed as the latest Shiny Object. I wasn’t so complimentary about it, as it was described as “Revenge of the Social Media Zombies.“
audience, self-publsihing, social media, trustaudience, self-publsihing, social media, trustaudience, self-publsihing, social media, trustSocial Media, and even book distributors (like Amazon) are on that outer ring. People come and go, they even buy your books and you have no clue who they are or what they did for you.
That outer ring isn’t worth much of your time to deal with, as there are no reliable ways to build trust. You cast a wide net of content out there, and invite them closer in to you.
Next in would be to get them as subscribers to one of your feeds, so they could get your particular brand of content on a regular basis. This is your blog and podcast. Blogs are less reliable as most people don’t know how to simply subscribe to a feed and get your data regularly, so podcasts are further in.
The next closer ring is an opt-in email subscription, where they can get a regular newsletter from you. Here is where you can build your relationships more closely. At any time, you can communicate directly to individuals, or vice-versa, and improve your mutual trust.
Even closer in would be a membership, where they have to log-in to get your special content. Here you are able to track their interests more closely, and find out what people are clicking on within your own site.
Memberships don’t have to be paid, and it is probably best to have a free one at the outset. They do have to sign in and take that extra step to get your material. They have to demonstrate a little more trust. And you reward that with exclusive value.
From here on in, and closer, you’ll be able to offer tailor-made products to them. With their feedback, you can carefully improve the value of the content they are looking for. And, if this content is good enough, they’ll pay you for it.
Courses start showing up here. Especially when delivered with a Learning Management System (LMS). You can then open a course up which is delivered on demand, not on a time schedule. People can progress at their own pace, and you can send them tailor-made emails to encourage and debug them.
And this is where it gets quite interesting. Because the trust becomes mutual.
As the trust increases, you can offer ever-greater value, and your clients will start to exchange with you more frequently and in greater volume (you can set and get higher payments.)
Errors, Mistakes, and Misdirections
Most of the misdirections which are being spread ignore this trust factor.
For authors, this can be very confusing. Amazon pays for sales, but doesn’t build trust. Your buyers are completely anonymous. And you probably know more about your reviewers (especially the trolls) than you do about your buyers.
Like Social Media, there is tons of “free” advice about how to get sales on Amazon. A lot of it is spread by Amazon itself, who wants you to only sell on their platform.
Let me repeat – Amazon is the outer ring of trust. Right out there with strangers giving you odd looks.
Here’s how you use Social Media – post your content with invitations to join your mailing list. “Interaction” (like resistance to the Star Trek’s Borg) is futile. Always syndicate to as many social networks as possible.
Here’s how you use Amazon and all ebook distributors – post your content with invitations to join your mailing list. Never respond to reviews. Always publish to as many distributor platforms, in as many formats as possible. Always. Because they each have different audiences.
Do you see the similarities?
You don’t spend a lot of your valuable time where you’ll have nothing to show for it.
You can’t build lasting relationships by “interacting” on either social networks or book distributors.
The one exception – perhaps – is to run something like a private Facebook group by invitation only. That is tricky, though, since that platform can shut you down at any time, just as the book distributors can cancel your account at any time (like Google Play has done to many Indie publishers.)
Ideally, you’d run a personal forum on your own site if you want to interact with people on that level. Like social media, it depends on how valuable your time is (as in “what should you be writing or editing right now?”) You can get a return of money for monetary investments, you’ll never be able to get time back for time spent. Always invest money. Always spend time wisely.
This model tells you to spend most of your time building relationships with those closest to you. By giving them private and exclusive special offers, they’ll help you with reviews on Amazon and sending out tweets, plusses, and likes on your behalf. Those can attract attention and get people closer in.
But some percentage of your time needs to be spent on the middle ground as well. Guest blogging, and being a podcast guest are the ways you can build your audience by interacting with other’s audiences.
In these, that existing audience is given the opportunity to join your inner circles. They trust the site you are appearing on, and can start building trust in you. Appearing as a guest takes more time than simply doing your own thing – but the investment pays off better.
Again, here’s the breakdown:
Outer circles:
social media, book distributors – syndicate content with offers to join your inner circles.
Middle Circles:
blogs, podcasts – deliver regular, valuable content with offers to join, as well as appearing as guest (also with offers to join.)
Inner Circles:
free memberships, email subscription, private forums, free courses– give them more valuable content and invest in relationship building with offers to purchase. These can start inviting others to join.
Closest circles:
paid memberships, paid courses, coaching– this is very intensive relationship building. These can become your evangelists.
– – – –
I hope you’ve now started examining and discarding what you’ve been told about sales funnels and all the conventional wisdom around them. I know that this was a tough slog for years for myself and others, as there is just so much untested silliness being foisted off as Gospel these days.
Do test everything I say for yourself. Don’t assume it’s useful until you’ve tested it for yourself.
All this article is about is to lay out a common sense approach to timeless natural commerce principles.
As you uncover more of these natural principles for yourself, you should speed up your own progress toward the goals you’ve set.
Because you never know when things will go to hell. Being prepared is a good option to keep open.
You’ve probably heard this pharse or some version:
“Plan your work, work your plan and always carry a spare.”
Another one you should also know is:
“Never build your house on rented land.”
These both describe the problem that authors have when selling on Amazon, iTunes, Nook, and Kobo. These four sellers cover about 96% of all ebook sales internationally. But is that fair?
You are trusting that they won’t go south on you or cancel your account overnight. And meanwhile, the trolls at Kindle threaten to do it for you with almost every email. My KDP account was suspended a month or so ago (for a few hours) for nothing I had done wrong, but because someone needed to be blamed. It was all that stupid DMCA law they passed a few years ago. It allows a person to bully others without recourse.
That brought to mind that my own backups weren’t in place.
GooglePlay already has shut out most Indie authors from publishing there. Google needed a solution to their self-created problem of allowed mass uploading. Pirates became whack-a-mole, as they could set up again within hours. So Google shut everyone out, and closed down a lot of regular folks as collateral damage. (Corporations don’t have to care, do they?)
Similarly, Amazon’s biggest problem is that they are the butt end of lawsuits. It doesn’t matter if you are right as a self-publisher. Certain titles won’t be published in the U.S. And some won’t be accepted at all. (Go ahead and try to publish something with “Think and Grow Rich” in the title.) And then there are the DMCA bullies…
Worse, someone published a click-bait piece this week saying that Amazon could shut down its book publishing branch and would do just fine without it. And what about those six-figure authors who sell exclusively there? Sorry, guys. Should have seen this coming. Rented land and all that.
Amazon owns the land many people are building their business on. They tell you how high to jump and when.
I’ve been telling people for years that they are probably losing more sales than they are making through the promotions that KDP offers. It’s doubly true now since Kindle Unlimited started up. The horror stories about how self-publishing authors have lost a third or more of their income keep showing up. In some cases, it has gone as high as 70%. Meanwhile, scammers are making more money on the Unlimited program than legitimate authors.
What if you lost the ability to publish on Amazon at all? Then what?
Another point I’ve pushed is to have a domain and site of your own, to capture the emails of readers and develop relationships with them. Additionally, you need to be able to sell your own books from that domain. Yes, of course it’s in case of disaster, but also to give an extra reward to your fans.
How to do this is another question entirely.
As I see it, you can and should build your own storefront on your own hosting. It should be simple to set up and maintain. And you can offer anything you want for prices (as long as it’s private between your and your list and the Kindle Trolls can’t send their ‘bots out to spy.) There are a few solutions in this area.
The other approach is to find a distributor who will help you set up your own storefront and push your books for you. This hasn’t existed until just this last year. Let’s take up this last one first.
In the most recent Digitial Publishing World Expo, Hummingbird Digital Media announced they were ready to take on all bookstores and self-publishing authors who wanted a way to sell their books online in addition to everywhere else. The biggest problem independent bookstores have had was in trying to sell ebooks. Kobo had one option, but it depended on selling Kobo ereaders, and the profit margins were a bit smallish.
Self-publishing authors have a similar problem, of being discovered by readers among themillions of other books on Amazon Kindle. If you build your own storefront to sell your own books, you get crickets for customers. You want marketplaces offering your book to others, and put your books right up there with the big-name authors with all the respectability that comes with it
HummingbirdDM allows you to build your own bookstore and stock it with your own books, as well as those of other famous authors. You are essentially being treated as a Big Publisher, since your books go across their network, and you get what any of the Big 5 get when one of their books sell.
On the site they provide for you, you can rearrange the shelves to feature your books when your customers come in that virtual front door. Plus, you can run ads for your books and feature a series or a certain book whenever you want. And if those customers want to browse for other authors, you get a cut of whatever they buy. Again, we’re talking having your books right up there with big name authors who are signed with the Big 5 publishing houses. You get a cut on everything people buy from your site, as well as any of your books selling somewhere else.
Brilliant, really. Treating indie self-publishing authors as real publishers.What a concept.
This new operation is a partnership between an established wholesale book distributor American West Books (http://americanwestbooks.com/ ) and an 15 year-old Indian company Papertrell (https://www.papertrell.com/ ) This enabled a new arrangement, where 2700 publishers could put their books up and get them being sold by anyone who wanted to set up their own bookstore online. HummingbirdDM has been testing and tweaking this arrangement over the last year to find out what they had to do to make it work. (You can see a list of the 2700 publishers at: http://hummingbirddm.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Publishers-list.pdf
The great part for self-publishing authors is as I said – you can operate your own virtual bookstore and feature your own books in it right at the top. Any sales you make are yours to profit from (somewhere around 12-23% depending on the publisher’s agreement.) This is because the standard agreement has the book publishers taking the first 50%, with you and HummingbirdDM splitting the rest, after creditcard fees and taxes are paid. The same thing happens in reverse – when your book is sold on HummingbirdDM bookstore, then you get that 50%. Of course, when you sell on your own bookstore, you usually get around 70%, just like Amazon (except you can charge whatever you like.)
The trick is that there aren’t a lot of other indie bookstores and indie authors on board right now. It just got announced in March at that Expo. The predictions by HummingbirdDM is to have about 2000 merchant storefronts by the first quarter of 2017. So it’s very much an early adopter scene right now.
However, it does give you a free option to get your books on an upcoming market place where you only have 200,000 books to compete with, opposed to nearly 2 million on Kindle. The more storefronts they get going, the more exposure your books will have. So it’s a good idea to get in now and also sell through this distributor.
You have to buy books via a browser. And then you download their app to your phone or tablet to view the books. It’s another ereader application. You have that book forever, but you have to read it on that app. All books have DRM built-in, which is apparently some sort of javascript file. (Too new to have anyone cracking it at this point.) You also can’t sideload other books you have bought elsewhere. This means that it’s going to be another universe-on-its-own for now. But another plus is that it will run on any device that runs IOS or Android.
Where you are going to get customers are from supporters of independent bookstores and fans of individual authors. Like an exclusive club. Getting your readers to buy in will give you the ability to alert them to changes on your site so they can go there directly – which will happen every time they open the app.
The point is convenience and having your book secure from pirating. So right now 4 out of the Big 5 are on board and are porting all their books and audiobooks to that platform. Hummingbird is even in talks with Smashwords to get their books to show up there. This is how big these boys are thinking.
Another key advantage is in list building and customer relationships – you get the emails of all the buyers from your own site. Uploading these to an email service (like AWeber, MailChimp, or others) then gives you a way to build audience – something iTunes, Amazon, Nook, and Kobo don’t give you. You still don’t have the emails of customers buying from other sites, but that’s considerably better than what you’ve been getting. You could use those emails to build and distribute a newsletter, for instance.
What’s the Press Saying?
Let’s quote from some of the press on this (links in the show notes):
“Hummingbird’s solution was to create a platform on which anyone can set up an online ebook storefront for free. Potential merchants can range from independent bookstores to nonprofit organizations and professional groups. Merchants get a branded storefront where they can sell digital books, and a branded app that allows their consumers to download ebooks and listen to audiobooks.
“When it came to getting publishers on board with Hummingbird, [Steven] Mettee [President of HDM] says, each publisher responded differently.
“‘Nothing is easy in this world. Some publishers immediately said, ‘Yes, we want to be involved,’ and others—for one reason or another—were a little tougher to convince,” explains Mettee. “Some of the small publishers needed some explanation. But, overall, we had a really good experience. Today we have more than 2,700 publishers’ titles in our catalog, and many of the publishers who were looking ways for sell direct to consumers are coming on board as merchants.’
Throughout the last year, Mettee and his team have been taking steps to make sure their platform is a seamless experience, fine-tuning it to make setting up a storefront as easy as possible.
Or as Mettee puts it, ‘as easy as setting up a Facebook page.’”
“The program includes an app for reading and listening and a web-based storefront for the discovery, purchasing and downloading of digital media. The app is operating-system agnostic, meaning it works on iPhone, iPad, Android devices such as Nook and Samsung, and the Kindle Fire. Both the app and the storefront carry the brand identity of the organization or individual.”
“So what are the primary advantages to Hummingbird? ‘Authors (and publishers) get to dilute the control the three large retailers have over them; they actually make more when they sell a book from their own storefront; they make money for each sale from their storefront even if it isn’t their own book; and they get the reader’s e-mail address’ — a convenient way to build a ‘tribe’ of fans and stay connected with them.
“Mettee recommends that authors keep publishing their books to Kindle, iBooks, and Nook — “wide distribution is important for sales,” he said — but that they also apply to be a vendor on HDM and send readers to their storefront, essentially their main hub.
“‘Since whatever you put on your storefront shows up in your app each time the consumer goes back to continue reading,’ Mettee said, ‘they are again reminded of you and exposed to any changes you’ve made on your storefront.’”
That author (Stephanie Carmichael) tried it out and had her own customised storefront up without having to do any special training.
On those banners, you can link directly out with them. I’ve done a banner at the top which is lead magnet for my membership-library. I could also send people to my self-hosted bookstore (while we’ll explore in a few minutes.)
Next are the collections. You can create a collection of just about anything. (This is handy for me, since I’ve got a couple hundred books up which can be collected in a dozen dozen ways.) Of course, you then can have the whole page with your own collections if you want. The other thing you can do is to move the categories out of the sidebar. This doesn’t eliminate them, it just makes them harder to find as categories.
The search bar starts working instantly. It relies on the meta-data supplied by the publisher for the book. This means that like iTunes and others, your own book will be referred by author and series. There are no reviews or ways for trolls to affect your sales (feel somewhat better now?)
Go visit some of these sites and play around with the search and categories. You can amuse yourself for hours. (Did you know there was Steampunk Science Fiction?)
Then you get a five page agreement to sign (lots of boilerplate in it.) Once that’s approved, then you’ll get an FTP account to upload.
You use a simple FTP program and rename the files like this: ISBN.epub, ISBN.jpg
The Excel spreadsheet is pretty straight forward. It follows the type of operation that OverDrive and e-Sensical use to upload books (and GooglePlay used to.)
So it’s pretty simple. Great to batch upload a set of books you’ve already published. Just export from Calibre and then rename according to ISBN. Then copy/paste your metadata into your Excel spreadsheet and upload.
Self-Hosted Sites – Simpler and Safer than Ever
The obvious solution for author-publishers is to have their own site, based on WordPress.
Over the last few years, WordPress has become much, much easier to maintain. Now the updates are pretty much automatic. WordPress is a free install for most web-hosts. Simple to set up.
Once you are there, the trick for a self-published author is to install WooCommerce (free) and a template that supports it. What this will do is to set up your site to run your own shopping cart and enable you to list your books. It’s pretty generic. Your books are referred to as “products” and you host your own digital files for download. There are a few bells and whistles you can turn on and off, but the setup mostly leaves you with what you need to get going. Set up your merchant account and your good to go.
One note is that you’re going to have to .zip your epub and mobi files to get them uploaded.
If you aren’t familar with WordPress, then there are plenty of helpful tutorials online.
My own site is a little different as I had earlier purchased a template from StudioPress (part of Rainmaker Platform now) and installed it, as it was WooCommerce ready.
So, go visit http://midwestjournalpress.com/bookstore/ and see how you like it. Obviously a work in progress. I’ll have to find time to get all my books up there, but you can see it’s pretty simple and direct.
It came with two options for selling because I didn’t use a straight WooCommerce theme. As I got more used to it, and started integrating Gumroad for a “pay what you want” (PWYW) option, then I saw I didn’t need to do both. The site is really designed to help people find out about my books and the various series they are in. At the bottom of each book page are buy links. One will be for Amazon, the next for Lulu, and the third for Gumroad’s PWYW option. The third sales option I have is to send them to Lulu for discounts.
The chief advantage of WooCommerce is to have an easily administered storefront of your own. Otherwise, you could set up pages on a Blogger blog and sell them there. That would make you manually edit every change. But it could be done.
For now, at least you have an example of how to get it done.
Now, note that with a simple StudioPress template, you don’t need to host your own files to sell them. Essentially, you are sending them out to Amazon, Lulu, and Gumroad. Of course, that means you aren’t stuck to any one seller. It also means that these places host your books, so your bandwidth will be smaller.
Gumroad’s “pay what you want” pricing, often results in a higher payment and overall revenue than setting (and guessing at) a fixed price. It is one way around Amazon’s “race to the bottom” scheme.
Your Cost of Doing Business and Your Return on Investment
Since you install WordPress for free, and WooCommerce plus it’s template for free, this still fits into the idea of getting started using what you already have to expand and leverage your income even higher.
By now, you’ve invested:
your own Internet connection and computer.
autoresponder service (MailChimp is free)
domain + hosting (can be gotten for under $200 per year, total)
and maybe a podcasting microphone (about $100)
The trick is to get all of this stuff making income for you.
Since you have the domain and webhost, you can simply install WordPress and start sending fans to it. There’s a little more theory of marketing involved, but the main point is that you can add your self-hosted website to your workflow while publishing and then devote some time playing catch up to get all your earlier books posted everywhere.
Your HummingbirdDM site will be easier to play catch up with, since it can be just a few upload sessions to get your books there. (Do a test run first with just a few to make sure it’s fine, then do some bigger and bigger batches until you catch them all up.)
You’ll then have added two more places your books can be found. All in addition to the main book distributors you already have.
The point is to make your life more free by increasing your passive income and leveraging your resources.
BitTorrent Bundles Becomes the Ultimate Book Distributor
I’ve spent some time discussing (and dissing) Tim Ferris for having to promote his work on BitTorrent because he published through CreateSpace instead of Lulu. But you can’t fault the results. As a note, we don’t know how much he spent on promotion to get that. Which means the jury is still out for indie author-publishers.
Meanwhile I had an update:
A couple of years ago, I created a bundle with an email gate (submit your email to get the downloads.) Then I moved on to other areas.
I went back to the bundle I created and found a few things. Now, during the time I had this, I didn’t recieve any emails or notifications from BitTorrent. In fact, the promotion link I had went down, so I assumed something bad might have happened. But it was the reverse. Over two years, I had accumulated an email list of 122 emails. I had a lead generator and wasn’t using it.
With no way to integrate this with any other system directly, you have to download your CSV file regularly (daily?) and stay on top of this to make sure you harvest the interest in that bundle.
As well, the smart move is to have Lead Magnets inside any digital file you upload so that they can then opt-in directly.
So the trick is in 1) using this as promotion for an active promotion campaign and 2) staying on top of it.
I still don’t know why the promotion link went down. It’s simply greyed out on the site, and nothing on the bundle anymore, so the first assumption is that it a) somehow is too much of a drag on their technical resources, or b) is time-limited to avoid that.
Just recently, I bought a pay-what-you-want package that covers Pay What You Want. At first glance, this guy is a typical money-promises-in-your-face Internet Marketer. (I don’t particularly care for those approaches. “I made [X] dollars in [Y] days/weeks, by/with [click-bait action]. Or – “I made $23,456.78 in only 12 days by just eating Twinkees.” See? Scammy.)
However, this book is well researched with real examples that can be verified.
There are ways to do Pay What You Want (PWYW):
Gumroad (a bit difficult to integrate on several platforms)
Payhip
BitTorrent Bundles.
LeanPub (for orginal books.)
All of these have to be integrated into your site, or you have to go outside to get access. Since a site will generally send a buyer outside to Amazon or wherever to buy, that’s not a particular problem.
How does Pay What You Want Work?
It’s best when you have pre-established relationships.
Failing that, or for new customers, it relies on the strength of your book (product) description and offer.
Another tactic is to offer tiered models or anchor your price in some way.
I would do something like –
Here is the price on Kindle: xx
Here is the paperback on Amazon: xxxx
Here is the hardback on Amazon: xxxxx
Here is link to all versions on Lulu with as much as 50% discounts: xxx
And the bundle I’m offering for PDF, epub, and mobi files you can pay what you want: ___
PS. Meanwhile, if you do buy the hardcopy version, email me the invoice and I’ll send you the download for free.
The point is to give them a choice to buy through Amazon’s shipping, which is really convenient, versus paying the author what you think it’s worth to you.
This can also act as a tip jar, saying that they can always come back and buy it again if they didn’t think they paid enough.
The point is offering choice.
Those companies I’ve read about have either saved their product from a marketing disaster, or made quite more than was expected.
It seems to work because you give the buyer more choice and more opportunity to contribute. You involve them in the purchase more.
Check this out, study it for yourself.
How BitTorrent Becomes Your Next Distributor
This takes a bit of planning, but not so much more than the others. Perhaps it will work better on a whole series than an individual book – like book collections.
You have two levels on BitTorrent Bundles – the free samples, and the pay what you want.
Obviously, a simple preview PDF and cover download, then buying the package of all the digital files would not be much of a scene. And this can be done with all the books individually in that series or collection.
For the entire collection, maybe you give away the first book in full as PDF, plus samples in PDF format of the other books in that series – cover, TOC, first chapter. Then they PWYW offer has all digital versions of all books, and their covers, and any additional items, such as book trailers.
The plan becomes:
0) Build your book with all versions with Calibre keeping track of everything.
1) Post your book to Kindle, iTunes, Nook, Kobo.
2) (optional, but recommended) Post to Hummingbird DM, e-Sentral, Espresso Book Network, plus your own site. Add any other distributors here, depending on your book-version.
3) Repeat for all books in that collection. Go through the usual pricing strategies of pre-launch, low price, higher price, next book for all of them.
4) Launch the bundle this way as well.
5) Then launch the book bundle on BitTorrent with all the extra’s.
Note: if your own site is integrated with Gumroad or Payhip, you can offer PWYW all along. Sending emails to subscribers about every book you publish there would be a good marketing scene. Also, making a podcast of the description (which can become a short book trailer and embedded) would reach people through that additional media.
In short, you start to wean yourself off Amazon, and your customers as well. Then you are using Amazon for what they are good for – paying lead generators.
– – – –
Do let me know how this works for you, or what you think about it. Leave a comment below the show notes or email me. Obviously, I haven’t covered all possible angles to this. I simply wanted to get this data out to you fastest.
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The Smart Ways to a Successful Book Launch Has Four Routes
I’ve been doing some study again, and found the truth in this phrase:
“No one school has all the teachers.” (An ancient Polynesian saying.)
A book I recently released, An Honest Kindle Booksales Blueprint, goes into some of the courses I’ve been working with (in Chapter 4). But I still hadn’t found what I needed.
However, there’s another old phrase, “close, but no cigar.” (Some old carny saying.)
What Tim clued me in on is that there are several approaches. What he hasn’t seen yet is that launches he described are really part of a bigger system:
Vision
Content
Audience
Network
All of these interact with each other. Some will be better than others for you, but as you work on any one of them, the rest improve.
Vision is what you want to accomplish, that book you want to publish (even if only an idea.) This also involves your mindset, goals, and attitude. Many of these courses approach this. Some really emphasize this as important, others gloss over it.
Content is those books you’re publishing. But it’s also your emails, your social media posts, your blog, your podcasts, everything that you generate. This is really the expanded idea of “book-as-an-idea-container.” There is no one version of a book that is the best for your audiences. Because each one prefers other versions. Audiobooks and podcasts are in vogue right now because they are the author personally talking to the listener and fills the time when a person is doing something else, such as working out in the gym or during a commute. What you say to your audience also falls under this, which includes all your emails. So this is your brand, and is really mostly covered by references on Content Marketing, but goes further.
Audience is all the people who receive your content. Simple. This is the point that authors miss, because this is your readers, it’s your listeners, it’s your social media followers, and it’s also all those podcast and radio host audiences where you haven’t shown up in front of yet. It’s also all your network’s mailing lists and their audiences. You appear in front of other people’s audiences in order to build your own.
Network is everyone you know and the people you want and need to know. This isn’t “influencers.” That’s another one of these poorly defined words that trip you up. You have a close-in network of your mastermind and people you trust. It’s also the wider-out circle of people you have ever had conversations with on social media.
Together, these build your “platform”. Finally there is a working definition of this term. Earlier, traditional publishers would send away authors who came to them without one. What they meant essentially was a promotion network that would enable response to any ads run. But the traditional publishers are really a publishing and wholesaling setup. They never have done any real promotion, except for those clear winners they had picked (and given huge advances that they needed to earn back.) And the promotion they have done is pretty weak, as it still relied on the author to make appearances and so on.
How to Use Your Platform to Launch Your Book(s)
Grahl is an expert at doing a book launch, with several of his authors hitting the top positions of various bestseller lists. He is an expert at launching single books. And so his advice is key in this area.
If you compare his advice to Nick Stephenson’s and Mark Dawson, then you’ll see another approach, that of selling an entire backlist of books by promoting the last one through its launch.
Two different approaches? Actually part of the same system.
You use this based on what your strengths are.
Grahl laid out three of these:
For those with a good network, then you use them to pitch your books to their audience.
For those with a big mailing list or audience such as podcast audience, or regular blog readers, then you would sell to your fans.
If you had neither of these, then you would work the “long game” of building your network and your audience before you launched.
That takes care of two of these elements. But note that again, Grahl is dealing only with a single book being launched.
Here’s how those elements can be assessed to determine your approach:
Audience – means mailing list. This is pushed by Dawson, Stephenson, and their network. Build a mailing list and mail to them to get your books sold. This primes the pump for Amazon so they start promoting your book. Back this up with Facebook ads, which simply contacts Facebook’s audience for your type of book. Selling the latest book in your series will get people buying the other books in that series or by that author. So if you have a mailing list or are a genius at using Facebook (and the book blogs like Bookbub) then you can use this approach. A less responsive approach is to use your blog to promote the book, and the least responsive is to use social media.
Network – this is traditionally affiliates, but can be anyone you know. The approach here is to hit podcast and radio hosts to get interviewed, as well as any other media you can contact. Again, you are contacting their audience and getting recommended by them as an authority. Affiliates will do this for pay, a split of the take. But affiliate networks aren’t instantly built. Like any network, there has to be mutual trust.
Content – this is best described in Geoff Shaw’s “Kindling” course. He also has several courses on Udemy which cover the approach of writing short reads and publishing regularly. I found this by re-publishing public domain works and PLR as ebooks where they were accepted. Lots of content will find you buyers based on the title or author. This alone, without building up audience or network, can be very lucrative, but takes years of consistent weekly effort to build. Shaw’s approach of publishing a few original books every week, under your own name or pen-names, is essentially the same approach. Amazon rewards series of books published every two weeks, and so the short read approach is an effective strategy.
Vision – is having nothing but a dream out in front of you. Copyblogger’s Brian Clark recommends this, and is essentially how he built his empire with a single blog. He promoted a course via that blog and sold it without much more than the first lesson ready. Other promoters say to get onto podcasts and radio shows with the title of “author of the soon-to-be-published book (Your Title Here).” You have a set of bullet points based on your audience research and then the interviews will tell you what they want you to write. Other authors have done this, blogging their book (The Martian, 50 Shades of Gray) first and then converting it to a published book with the audience feedback. This is Grahl’s Long Game, essentially.
Four Approaches to Becoming a Published Author
Audience-centric: promote to your list. Run ads.
Network-centric: promote to your network’s audiences.
Vision-centric: pitch an idea to other’s audience, while building both and writing your book.
Content-centric: flood Amazon and all outlets with your books in all possible formats while you build a regular audience and your network.
I mentioned before that when you use this system for a book launch, it builds all other parts when you work on any given point. Of course, this is somewhat automatic, but let’s be smart.
When you get on other’s shows, then you work with them to get you as part of their network (so you can get invited back.) And you also ask them who else you should be contacting. You also set up a special offer for that audience so they can become part of your mailing list – and so, grow your audience.
If you run ads to get people into your mailing list, this is pure audience-building. You give them something in return for signing up. Once part of your list, then you build relations with them so they start buying your book. This probably works best when you give away a set of your writings along with a first book in a series so that they will buy your other books. (Works best in combination with content.) But you can also do this with your first book, and write some additional material to go along with it.
Getting onto talk shows to promote your upcoming book is a way to find out what people want. Of course, you are grooming up the host to become part of your network and also writing some content to give to that audience to join your list.
If you are prolific, then you simply crank out a lot of works and have reader magnets in the front and back of them to get people to join your list. Once you have some series that sell well, then invest some FB ads into a collection so you’ll earn enough income to pay for your advertising from sales, as well as raising the earlier books in that series. Then start getting onto some podcast/radio shows or other media to tell about your bestselling series of books, and get them to opt-in, etc. as above.
Know Which Best Foot to Put Forward
Now you have a way to build your platform from nothing but a book launch. You can start with just the idea for a book for simply start writing and publishing. Or contact your buddies and ask to get in front of their audience. Or just start running ads on Facebook for whatever you already have published, even if only a single book that you’re giving away.
Just assess your strengths above and step off in that direction.
How to Hack Amazon Algorithms By Starting at the End.
I had yet another book to launch. As you know, I like to work backwards on these things. The phrase (attributed earliest to Socrates) is: “Begin with the end in mind.”
This book was basically all set to go. I just had an inspiration for a final title and did the cover for it. All nice.
The problem was what I’d just found out in my recent course studies.
Tim Grahl’s book launch course confirmed what I had found other places: Amazon really likes bestselling authors, not unknown authors with no platform.
Because of Grahl, I finally had a definition for “author platform.” (See that link for explanation.)
That didn’t matter so much, because I still didn’t have one. Chalk it up to loving to research as a recluse.
Well, I did have one, but not that I could leverage very much to get any big launch happening. Less than a hundred on my mailing list, no experience with FB ads, no network of podcasters to talk to their audiences.
If I simply published, it would dive off Amazon’s 30-day cliff with not even a thud. And then disappear into obscurity after their 60- and 90-day cliffs.
They do this to keep fresh content up there and scammers at bay. For authors, it means “feeding the beast.”
The secret was in what I’d learned from Geoff Shaw’s “Kindling” course. I laid this out in my “How to Write Less and Publish More.” That is successful for research as it’s easy to publish a book literally overnight.
In Shaw’s course, there is one post where its pointed out that publishing in parts or a series two weeks apart keeps the sales up for the entire series. This is really only possible if you are writing short reads, or you split up a book into parts and publish them individually.
This was my Eureka moment.
Short Read Publishing Advantages
When you publish in smaller sections, the book becomes more manageable. I like about 10K words myself, but you can get buy with 2500 if you want, or 7000 if you want to publish a paperback on CS to match.
With that short text, it’s fairly simple to do the editing yourself. Do your first draft to get it out of your skin, then a second draft to trim it down and add in the links and other tidbits. A third draft is the line edit. The fourth draft is spoken aloud, where you also get your audio book. This is all doable by yourself, without having to pay for outside help.
At 10K, I get a decent-sized short read, a thin paperback, an audiobook and audio-CD. All good.
And these show up in the regular categories as well as the short read categories. So all is good. Cheap, fast, efficient.
How to Chunk Out a Bigger Book Into Short Read Parts.
This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Because the book parts have to get people to read the whole book, preferably.
You add extra material at the end of each part to get the reader ready to get the next one. But you also have to add your “reader magnets” at the front and back of each one. And you really need an appendix with links and bibliography. So you have a lot of parts that are in a big book which are duplicated a bit in each of the parts.
What made this easier to decide where to split the book was because I had written it with the narrative approach, having four acts like a screenplay or TV episode. Since the final book was cut down to about 140 pages, it would mean approximately 35K words for each part (m/l).
The big book started out originally as 200+ pages, but when I had to make all the parts hold together, I cut out a lot of dross at the end which had been added on and wouldn’t stand alone. The reason I had a big book like that was to make it look substantial on a book shelf in a store. The problem with POD, however, is that after about 150 pages, you can’t keep the price down where people are expecting to find it, which is between $10 and $14 USD.
So that edit is going to help the final book quite a bit.
How Does This Work Amazon’s Algorithms?
I mentioned above about being able to publish every two weeks. That is now possible with four parts that I can affordably invest two weeks into editing and publishing all the parts. That should steadily build up any sales from other ads I can run on the ebooks.
Yes, that means launching the ebook parts for .99 so the book blogs will do ads for it.
There’s a catch there. This runs counter to all the now-conventional wisdom about how to launch. That 30-day cliff will actually have a steep drop if your book has any sort of unsustained peak. Amazon likes slow and steady sales growth over a longer period of time. They make more money that way, and will tend to keep it selling at that level if they can.
So your ads start after it’s been out for a couple of weeks, and are spread out over those last two weeks that it’s on the “new arrivals” section. This is after the next one is released, and so both books are increasing the sales of the other. The idea is that I have four books which will all leapfrog each other.
The other point of ads is to only use the free ads on these .99 books. The price will raise to $2.99 after they have been out a month, but that’s still not high enough to afford Facebook ads. The trick is to set up some sort of grid of book blogs to contact with that week’s release (which had been out for two weeks.) Half of the blogs trigger through one week, the other half through the second week, then they are alerted to the next book, and so on.
Two weeks after the last part is released, then I launch the entire book as one set. It has bonus material in it that the parts don’t, and vice-versa. This is launched for a couple of weeks at .99 and then jumps to $4.99 where I can afford to start running FB ads. In that case, the book blog ads are changed out a bit to hit both books while they are .99 priced.
You’ll note that I’ve said to have the paperback, and audio versions also available with the ebook, but only running ads on the ebooks. This is because no one has figured out how to run that type of promotion for these other books. (Note that this is an ongoing back-burner research project.)
Once you hit the final book at it’s final price, then FB ads are run weekly to keep those sales up and pay for themselves with increased book sales. You then can inch those sales up profitably from there on out. The full audiobook and audio CD is released as well as the full hardback to match the paperback. That way you get all the versions people want.
One other promotion you have going is to take the audiobook and set each chapter up as a podcast episode. Theoretically, I’ll have about 50 episodes running one per week, and these will then promote the book all year long. I’ll then simply reschedule these episodes to run during the following year after they run out. (Yes, you heard it here first. My other tests have already proved this successful, this being an extension to make these podcasts pay.)
Ad Stacking with Podcast and Radio Interviews
The other promotion I’ll be working up is to get onto podcasts and even radio shows in order to promote the books. The first book-part will become perma-free and will be given away with additional material (such as the first quarter of the final podcast) for their audience in exchange for their emails.
I’ll probably rotate through finding more book blogs to run on the parts, as I can drop those prices for a week or so while the ads are run – as well as the complete book. I think there are a lot of book review blogs which can be contacted, while Grahl doesn’t consider them very effective at raising sales. Tests are tests.
Meanwhile, the Real Work is Started
You’ll note that this book is an introduction to a following book, which is actually an overview of a series of courses. I’m coining (and trademarked) a phrase “Mindset Stacking™” which is a marketing ploy. Since these books are public domain, but all have problems on Amazon as ebooks, I’ll actually be creating a series of study guides for each book on each chapter, which will be able to go up as ebooks on Amazon as original works. These are recorded and become podcasts, and themselves might be split into several 5-minute videos to use on the course. Each chapter would become a module, with 5 lessons each.
This is where building a book backwards from the course comes from. These individual lessons will be just above 2500 words, and so will require 4 of them to be published as a thin paperback with at least 32 pages. Most of these will have 13 lessons, with another 3 bonus lessons to make a round set. Four sets of four will give me over 120 pages, which makes a nice paperback (and hardback, and audiobook, and audioCD.)
That’s per book, and I have four books to receive this treatment.
Meanwhile, the Mindset Stacking Guide will be extracted from the highlights of these four books to lay out a way people can shrug off the mis-programming they’ve been receiving all their lives and fine-tune their mind into an automatic success engine.
You’ll also see that the promotional scene I’ve worked up for this first MYGA book. As I build out these very short reads, they each get promoted and are released two weeks apart. In this case, the thin paperback and audio versions are released with each collection. 8 weeks of singles, then a collection, repeated four times, then the final book is released and gets continuing FB ads until the next book comes out.
If I can get ahead on these, I’ll start simultaneously releasing the other books parallel to the first. In that case, I’ll pre-launch the other ebooks, which keeps them on the New Releases line just that much longer.
Why Do This With Your Own Big Book That’s All But Ready?
You get the advantages of testing your content and ideas and style before you release the whole scene. Then you can adjust. This gives you a way to treat your bo0k like a start up and iterate as you go. “The Martian” and “50 Shades of Gray” did this by blogging the book first for free. Putting these books up on Amazon just makes it more exciting and allows you to build your buying audience from the start.
What you may find is that your audience loves your book more than you think they will. Or you missed the mark slightly. Or it’s only going to be a vanity work if you keep it in that category.
The point is that you can test with a book you’ve nearly got ready, and then the income you get (if it’s successful) can finance finishing the rest of your masterpiece. (I’ve heard the sequel to “50 Shades of Gray” is being written and published this way – two chapters at a time.)
Frankly, if you can keep up the pace of publishing (which is only about 8-10K every two weeks, edited. The cover is the same with variations) then you can build quite a scene while you “feed the beast” without killing yourself off. Yes, the smallest is 2500 words on Kindle, which is probably a chapter. You can use screenwriters format and run about 120 pages, which would be close to 30K words. Split that into four acts (2nd act into two parts) and release your book in four parts as a serial. 7500 words each, a thin paperback on Createspace and a short audio book you can record and edit.
The first part of this book I’m publishing is 12K words. It took me a little over 2 hours to record it and about 10 hours to edit that audio. Again, this is editing the audio from the fourth proof. (But I’ll tell you more about this in the next installment…)
The total book is just around 30K words, and 132 pages. If you run the math above, I may only have three parts to publish, or will have to add in order to get one of these up to minimum paperback length. (Again, I need to go into this in more detail with the next installment…)
The conventional wisdom ideas along this line have been to write 80-100K books and publish every two to three months. Amazon doesn’t reward these, though, since your audience wants your back titles now, not a few months from now when they’ve forgotten you in favor of other authors. Amazon and your readers to reward short pieces coming out every couple of weeks. New readers discovering you can binge all they want to catch up. And you’re getting consistent feedback on your work meanwhile.
I think I’ve covered this before. You could do like several authors and crank out tons of books and publish them a month apart. Or write the whole book like I did and publish the parts of it regularly. Obviously, they are both “long haul” approaches, but the shorter of the two is measured in months, not years. And you see how your doing as your doing.
That’s where I’m headed, as you can see above. It’s more involved for me than you need to get, but I like to work and keep things exciting as I go.
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(Download this audio – Click Here.) You may not believe this, but the Classics you have read may be just as alive as you… (Considering authors as midwives to the life contained in a…
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