Lessons Learned from Steve Scott - publish 65 books in a single year and earn 6-figure passive income for life.

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.)

View my Flipboard Magazine.

But this blog and podcast are officially done.

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.)

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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.

Download link: "How to Publish 76 books in a single year - keep your sanity, and build a 6-figure passive income for life."

A Case Study in Self-Publishing - Step 0: Finding Your Bliss

A Case Study in Self-Publishing - Progress doesn't come easy...

We'll start with the Step 0 of self-publishing: ensure you are working on your bliss - something you are fascinated with and could talk to an avid listener forever.

For me, this has several possibilities. What I chose to show you was fleshing out a long-held fascination of mine. We'll see also that the other distractive fascination points can keep you from fulfilling any targeted bliss - unless you stay almost manically focused (Hill's "Burning Desire.")

What I've always been good at has been artwork. In a round-about way, I've been working closer and closer to doing only this for a living. At some points, I've been close - but it's usually been the necessity of a job which has kept me distracted, even when I worked to join the two as a job (but the short story is - artists seem to make lousy workers. Just too inspired all the time...)

I publish books for a living these days, and have become financially independent with my book sales alone. So I'm getting closer to simply doing artwork for a living. The books I publish are public domain, as well as some private-licensed-rights (PLR) books, mostly as tests.

Publishing other's books was an acid test

This model of public domain publishing has allowed me to quickly test the various "conventional wisdom" being repeated ad nauseaum. You've heard a lot of these - that an author should spend about 50% of his time marketing, and most of this on social media (for instance.) Since my books bring me income enough to pay all my bills and then some, all with no marketing and no social media particularly - this was one test which disproved that datum.

A datum that it did prove, is that you have to have a deep backbench of books, preferably in a series and a niche. I've wound up publishing more than 200 books by now. A very small percentage of these were books I personally authored. So I know a bit about how to get stuff published.

That I fired my last boss around a year ago or so, means I know how to make a full-time living from writing, editing, and publishing.

The move toward my own bliss

The current plan is to move toward writing and illustrating children's stories. The niche is a perennial buyer's market. Very profitable for anyone prolific at it.

The trick is not just getting these published, it's also learning how to write and illustrate for that genre.

That's what this case study is all about.

I'd collected some books on illustration and artwork years ago and stashed them on a hard drive. Recently, I came across some PLR about this and dug everything out, since I could make a series of books which would deal with just the tools and skills you would need to polish up in order to make picture books for kids.

Finding what was already downloaded, then studying to find more PD books which filled the gaps (and wouldn't take extensive editing to produce) - I was set with a nice set of books.

At that point, I found myself still lacking something.

Next was to set up a site with landing pages for each book. But it showed that I hadn't done the necessary market research to know what keywords to use. Any site needs to be set up well, around a keyword phrase which will act as a base. The search engines need to anchor your authority on something.

Market Research can be fun, like a detective story.

While this seems to be going backwards, it really isn't. I'd already found on several lines what a profitable genre would be. I then found that there were fairly well-known PD books I could simply edit into shape. And I had some PLR which would make some great giveaways to get list opt-in's to build this audience.

The next step really was to fine-tune it all before I started putting a website together - or as part of building it. (You see, I already had a site which had been aging gracefully, it only needed to be tweaked a bit, since it was already about painting - houses, not canvases.)

Enter my old standby tool: Market Samurai.I've been using (and neglecting) this tool for years. It's a one-time purchase and probably the only simple tool left around without having to buy into a subscription service. They keep it updated and it will run on any platform as it's based on Adobe Air (although Linux seems a pain.)

While there is a bit of training to learn how to effectively use it, they have a training center called a "Dojo" where you can study up on what you need to know.

For this case study, Market Samurai told me that a good, profitable keyword phrase would be "picture book" (I know, right?) Too obvious. This was a phrase which fit in with what I was doing, but also could be expanded into many other long-tail phrases (how to write..., how to draw...., how to self-publish...) "Chidren's books" was saturated with way too much competition, for example.

Anyway, you can get a free 30-day evaluation version and try it out. (Yes, those are aff-links.)

Building the website and landing pages

You don't have to do a lot to begin with. You want a nice theme (use existing and tweak, it's faster and cheaper than buying one.) Put in a sidebar which has room for your opt-in and social proof widgets.

A note about Blogger: why do I use it? Because it keeps things simple, because it's part of Google. I've used Wordpress and like it. But the best way to run it is with someone else keeping track of the plug-ins. Nothing worse than being kicked off your hosting because WP tied up their server.

Blogger doesn't have plug-ins. It does have some widgets. And you can add scripts via the widgets. What you see is all you can get. But it's kept updated pretty well. And there's a decent community around it. The point is that you can get going right away with no investment besides a domain name that you control.

It does (mostly) everything I wanted to do with Wordpress. (As a note, I will be eventually moving over to the Rainmaker (WP) platform at a considerable monthly cost/investment. Because I'm expanding beyond what is simply attainable with multiple blogger blogs. Stay tuned, and I'll clue you in why - although it will be a later article in this series.)

The way I use blogger is to redirect (via CNAME) to one of my own domains as a subdomain (http://subdomain.domain.com). This way, I can use keyword phrases in the address and get more search engine link love.

Google does the hosting for free and all I have to do is to maintain my domain name with almost zero traffic on that server.

Back to our landing pages...

As I said above, you need landing pages for every book. These are simple - cover image, description (from the book) and links to all the distributors. If you want to take it from there (and we all do) embed the book trailer in the top (above the fold) and also embed a preview as a PDF they can download (essentially the landing page converted to a PDF and hosted on Slideshare.net or similar.

Having your book trailer (YouTube) and that PDF (Slideshare) will give you link love from these two great sites. When they open up your landing page for that book, it will then give some link love back to those sites, which makes your book easier to be discovered there as well as your own landing page.

OK, you only have to have that image (people love pictures), text about your book (use the book description you already laid out) and links to all your distributors (which also sends them link love so they offer your book in their "related" recommendations.)

Long ago, I assembled all the links to the major distributors (excepting Amazon Kindle, which is non-standard) based on ISBN - these are held in a spreadsheet so I can generate the links and then copy/paste into the landing page. You'll also need the icons, which can be gotten from each individual distributor. Once you've created this for a single book, you'll see that you don't really need a spreadsheet, just copy/paste the whole section into the next landing page and then edit the ISBN's to include your new book's. (But a spreadsheet keeps this all in one place, so you can generate a particular link at will without having to look it up - helps when you have dozens of books...)

Where we are at now

We have a blog (essentially for free)
We've done our basic market research for keywords to use.
We have landing pages for the books - even though the books haven't been published to distributors yet.
We're doing what we love most - or one of them, anyway.

This is just a basic start. You have a place to link into your book, to send new fans and buyers. We'll see that you need to get this link into your ebook as well as the print edition.

You'll be using that market research from here on out, which is a good reason to have a copy of Market Samurai so you can update and extend your market research as needed.

Where we are going next

Lots more work to do, believe me:

Verify every book is ready for porting to the various distributors, update as needed.
Publishing these in an efficient workflow, to get all possible versions for sale.
Keeping distractions at bay, staying focused on expanding your income base.

Our next major step is to simply get everything published. This is by no means hard, and also not the end of the story by any means, just the beginning of the journey (should you decide to accept this, Mr. Phelps.)

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Tuesday, October 6, 2015