How to Make More Than Just a Living With Profitable Passive Income Publishing.
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| (Image: WishIKnew...) |
It hasn't ended - but has accomplished that goal well over a year ago.
What's next, then?
Jim Rohn gave me that in an old MP3 being passed around. You work full time at your J.O.B. and part time at your fortune - until you make your fortune earning more than your day job so you can work full time at your fortune.The trick is not just chasing after money, but following your bliss - your truest interests and consuming passion. With that worked up, you then have that "Burning Desire" which Napoleon Hill talks about in his Think and Grow Rich.
I went the public domain publishing route and it made more than I needed to quit my day job. In fact, it has pulled in enough on a good month to exceed what I've ever made at an hourly job doing 40 hours a week.
The trick to this is that I spend a few hours on each book, and the profits simply roll in after that. Some books don't sell, some sell infrequently, some sell regularly. And a small handful will sell very well for a short or longer period.
You can then leverage these bestsellers with more editions and supporting promotion.
But public domain publishing has proved that it's not the fortune-maker I was looking for. (Mainly because Amazon doesn't want more of those-type books on their site - and that is the most obvious place for a publishing business to sell books.)
OK, so what's next, then?
Glad you asked.My bliss is not publishing. It's illustrating and writing. (Explains why my blog posts are so long...)
Publishing has been a means to an end. It's rewarding and interesting, but the leap to be taken has to be toward original fiction - in particular, children's books.
I'd done this research years ago, to know that it was a good market. And recent look for public domain books after 1923 just confirmed this:
1) Only bestselling/topselling book copyrights were ever renewed. (About 1% on average.)
2) Every single children's book from that era that I checked out had been renewed. Every single one.
3) Conclusion: lots of money to be made/ value to add with children's books.
How do you get started publishing children's books?
I worked out the training lineup and posted it here. It's a natural function. The trick to it is to publish those public domain books as you study them. This means your training will pay for itself.That's a natural extension of what you've already been doing. All you really are doing is concentrating on a single niche instead of a broad shoot.
The Steps
(do all of these for each and every book from here on out):
- Study the area and find what people are buying. There are sure to be some sub-genre's which are more profitable than others.
- As part of this, keep track of keywords. Do a fuller study with Market Samurai to see what the conversations are around these keywords, which are more advertised for (monetize-able, etc.)
- Get a blog on a new domain, or subdomain on an existing one (like the one you are reading, for an example.) Make sure IFTTT is cross-promoting your blog posts to Tumblr, Twiter, Wordpress (as applicable.) If possible, have your blog post auto-posted to a Google+ page.
- Work up an ethical bribe and build your opt-in. Do Not Skip This Step (it's cost me greatly to ignore this one.)
- As you find and create ebooks out of classic (PD) children's books, port these to the ebook distributors. Create a POD hardcopy version (paperback) for Lulu, and sell the PDF of that book there as well. Go ahead and order a proof of your paperback - it will do you good to have a copy in your hands, and you can always give this away to a relative or local library.
- Put up a landing page for each title with buy links to all available versions.
- Set up Ganxy direct-sales links as part of this. Set up Ganxy bundles as you build your book numbers.
- Pin (Pinterest) and Flip (Flipboard) your blog post.
- Announce special offers to your list, particularly if you can get them on Amazon. This includes print versions on Lulu, which can be discounted ahead of a broad release. Also let them know about your Ganxy bundles.
- Create review PDFs and post them to doc-sharing sites. Create video's and post them to video sites. Embed these on your landing page.
- Create BitTorrent bundles as part of your book promotion as well - include video and any images, PDF's, etc.
- Run Synnd campaigns on your new book release (also - do this religiously. It takes time for the bookmarking and social news to prime the pump.
- Start your next book, rinse, repeat.
Later: - As any particular book starts to sell, release the proofed hardcopy into Global Reach via Lulu. Especially if its on Amazon - which will match the two.
- Consider getting any topselling book you have converted to audiobook via ACX (Audible) for even more leverage. It's also possible to sell audio via Google Play, ITunes, and iAmplify - if you are non-exclusively on Audible.
- Upgrade the audio in that video from this and sell via iAmplify and/or as a DVD from Kunaki. Update your landing page links for these new products.
- You can create bundles of digital goods and host on JVZoo or similar so your fans can become your evangelists and get paid for it.
- Expand into a full-fledged membership (both free and paid) to reward your list participants, as well as leverage additional income from your hard-core fans.
More detail here.
Complete list of distributors:
- Lulu,
- GooglePlay,
- iTunes,
- Nook,
- Kobo,
- Amazon,
- Espresso Network.
- (Scribd and Doc-Stoc might be additional ones.) Lulu won't distribute non-original books for you, but will sell all versions of your book.
- Leanpub will take your original book and create the .mobi, epub, and PDF versions for you.
- Smashwords will distribute original books to all the above, as well as OverDrive (not Espresso that I know of) - Smashwords and Lulu save you time, but cost you income from royalties you'll never get back. (But you don't get time back, either.)
- For your video, you can port to iAmplify and give a pdf book away as part of this. While Kunaki can sell your DVD, they aren't a distributor and have no audience for this.
The future - what about original books?
Once you know you have your chops down, then edit your own book into shape and run it through as above. Since you can get any original book onto Amazon, get your list to buy and vote for your book. (Intro price at .99)That will jumpstart your sales for any original book, and whatever PD books you have managed to get ported into Amazon (if they are by the same author or part of the same series.) If your book is really good, then those sales will continue. Once your initial offering is up, then raise the prices higher on all platforms (Amazon won't let you use them as a loss-leader, but must be the lowest of everywhere else you have your book. Only on Amazon.)
You sales on other distributors will depend on your cover, description, author, series. The more books you create, the better chance of them selling.
A nice production plan would be to create at least one book a week, and run it through that sequence. If you pace yourself, and pay attention to details, you could possibly have 50 books published
What else to expect?
I'm pretty well wrapped up here on what you need to do to market your books. What I will promise is some case studies where I do this exact market strategy on some upcoming children's books - forcing myself to do this disciplined route and streamline it as I go.My new work will be on training people how to write and illustrate children's books - while I build my own deep backbench of these at the same time.
Just had the idea to convert the other two sections above just to cover these other two areas - writing and artwork. That would save me immense time on building yet another website...
Later, then.
Update: Reconsidering my efforts. This blog has capacity to cover what I want with publishing. There are actually two other blogs connected to this (although they all look pretty much the same - on purpose.) http://topsellingbooks.midwestjournalpress.com will be the landing pages for these new books. http://selfpublishingnewsreviews.midwestjournalpress.com/ will start aggregating short links to stuff I find daily about book (self)publishing.
That saves me building a new site completely - since I already have Google grooved into this one...
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