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.
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