Genius publishers can get financial freedom if they want to work hard.
My job is to make it easier by leaving a back-trail anyone can follow.The idea is to create a self-publishing home-business which earns you financial freedom.
I started on this a few years ago, when I saw that Lulu was getting into the ebook business in a serious way. The logic I saw was simple (and I've covered this before):
- Most books don't sell well or at all. The chances of getting a true bestseller are slim.
- Authors who have a deep backbench of works make more income, particularly if they write for a narrow genre (Stephen King, Amanda Hocking).
Private Licensed Rights (PLR) books came up when I was studying Internet Marketing. They were touted as one of the quick-and-easy ways of "making money online."
So I did some tests, which Lulu carried my water for - I put up 28 topselling fiction books and 30-some PLR books which I'd collected and already had good covers.
Both sets were published as 99-cent offers and went everywhere I could get them, ignoring Amazon as they had peculiarities. This was Lulu, iTunes, Nook, Kobo, and Google Play/Books.
I started getting sales right off from some of each category. Books I'd put up on Amazon, some based on PD, took almost a year before I started getting any serious income. Then one book took off and still makes me over twice what the rest of the books did combined. Meanwhile, I made enough from the other books to literally quit my day job as all my bills were being paid, plus some went into savings.
I'd achieved Financial Freedom, if not yet a millionaire (my current and on-going project.)
The reason I blog about this is two-fold:
Helping you get your own financial freedom makes my own freedom grow.
Self-Publishing Lessons Learned
- It's a lot of hard work. And it only expands and becomes more profitable the more you refine your approach. Left to itself, the sales will ebb and flow, gradually working down in time. So you have to keep adding more books and marketing the books you have.
- Marketing is enabling discovery. Online, this is making them easily accessed by search engines (SEO) also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM.) While you can run ads, they are expensive and are mostly ignored by online viewers. What is most effective marketing currently are a) Content Marketing (Native Advertising), b) Direct marketing to a list, or c) A combination of the two, such as building a membership from your online presence which builds your list so you can give special offers to those who pay to get behind your "velvet rope."
- Because of the work and marketing involved, the actual competition is low. If you look over the bulk of the ebooks available for sale, you'll find that they have lousy covers, and lousy descriptions. Yet these are the two points which people use for buying. Sure, they look at the preview and price, but not the reviews so much, if at all.
- You never stop learning and improving. Marketing and the Internet are both evolving at a rapid rate. But the old axiom that 97% of conventional wisdom is bunk also holds true. You need to test everything and look for the 1-3% of recurring truths which keep showing up (providing you are keeping your eyes wide open.)
Why PD books make you money
- Their audience and word of mouth has already been established - all you have to do is dust them off, repackage them, and make them enticing and available. In short, ADD VALUE.
- Because 97% of the people on this planet won't take the extra steps to make something succeed, they won't do the hard work it takes to build up these passive income streams. (Actually, they are trained and want a wage-slave JOB so they can pay for their entertainment. That's their life.)
- 97% of the wanna-be entrepreneurs out there are in search of the "get rich quick" approach and won't see the Field of Diamonds they are already standing in.
- In today's world, people want their information pre-digested and summarized. This is why you use a blog to Content Market. What you are offering is solutions to common life problems. It just happens that humankind hasn't changed much in 10,000 years and the writers who successfully told people how to solve those problems left behind their writings. You are just making them discoverable again.
- The Velvet Rope approach (as Jay Abraham refers to memberships) is how you develop a captive audience who will digest the flow of useful and valuable information you are providing. This is how you can take any of various books and create an "instant bestseller" on Amazon, earning you a tidy sum which will continue for a very long time - even if you don't do much of anything to market it later.
- Continuing marketing (which most companies don't do, but the successful ones do) of a set of books or course (the "Do You Make These Mistakes in English?" campaign was a great example) is what builds momentum and sales. You don't have to run ads - you do have to keep telling people that you have the solution to their problem(s).
The reason I continue to do what I do
Is to help you earn your freedom. Because the Golden Rule applies - in order to get, you have to give. The route to peace is through prosperity, which is through commerce. We all want a more peaceful life. We'd all be better off if we were rich. To get rich and have peace of mind, you have to help others get rich and their own peace of mind.The books I publish help you to this end-result - and my end goals.
Your well-being is my highest concern.
Because if you do better, I'll do better - we'll all do better.
A permanent, ongoing world peace is the ultimate goal.
It will happen if we all help everyone around us live prosperous and free lives.
And so, I publish.
You can, too.
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