Why You Don't Have to Be a Bestselling Author to Get Financially Free

(Photo: Alfred Cunningham)

To Make a Living as a Writer, You Only Have to Publish Books Well.

Why keep beating your head against a perfectly good brick wall?

Look over some facts:

• Some bad books sell well.
• Some great books sell poorly.
• Less than 1 percent of all books ever attain bestseller status.
• Most authors make less than $500 per year from their book.

The logical conclusion:

If you want to make a living writing, you have to increase your book sales - by becoming a better publisher.

Seriously.

Here's the old mantra again (repeat after me):

Writing feeds the soul, Publishing pays the bills.

This I found by my own struggles.

My own story began after I left a suffocating corporate cult in late 2000 and returned to the family farm in Missouri. While operating the farm part time, and researching/writing part time, and holding down a part time day job (or going to school for some degrees) - my life was pretty full.

From then until 2013, I published all my books and several public domain works (as related references).  And even now, my own books don't sell well.

But I changed my perspective in 2013 when I started researching why my books don't sell. My tests in publishing made me financially independent, and I ditched any day job because my book sales started paying all my bills.

In about 18 months, I went from having a day job to not needing one.

It just took me over a dozen years to figure out how, then only a few months to make it happen. Yes, that's a happy coincidence. But happen it did.

This blog (among many) chronicles that adventure. So you can look it up, if you dare.

You don't have to be a bestselling writer, you only have to be a good-selling publisher

I'll repeat that as many times as necessary to help you understand it.

What did I change in 2013 that made my life so much easier, that allowed me to "turn pro"?

I looked up what bestselling authors did to make their income.

• They published in series.
• They published a lot.
• They published new works regularly.

It's that simple.

I published several lots, in series, to see what would happen.

The money started coming in. Somewhere between 1-3% of my published books started selling well. (My unpublished works, of course, never sold.)

I don't expect you to do what I did.

Look up the most famous authors if you want - you'll find in our modern age, it takes about five years after their first book is published (providing they publish at least one book a year in a series following the first) they start making a living at it. Enough to quit any day job they had to have up to that point.

It doesn't take into account how long it took to write that book, it only says that when they published consistently for five years, at least once a year, they got financially independent, if not downright wealthy.

In my case, I ended up publishing more than a hundred books by other authors - but it only took about 18 months.

The punchline is this: I did no marketing beyond cover, title, description, price.

Meaning - I did what any publisher would do. Publishers leave the promotion up to the author. Always have. Since (except for my own books) everyone I published was either dead or anonymous, that meant these books got no marketing.

Here's another interesting point: Only about a dozen were on Amazon. I was paying my bills with books published everywhere else. When one of my books got a bestseller status on Amazon, the money came in better - but that same book was already selling well everywhere else.

Cover, Title, Price, Description. Nothing else.

This means: Financial Freedom.

Which meant I had time to do more research and writing (which was funneled into blog posts that became more books.)

Weird, huh?

I'm right now working out exactly what marketing needs to be for books - and it hardly resembles what authors are being told to do these days.

It does give a program that publishers should be following to actually market their books.

Once I have it polished a bit more, I'll give it to you for free. Even the spreadsheet it sits on.

Because your financial freedom (and freedom in general) is important to me. The Golden Rule says (loosely) that you have to give before you can get (or that you only receive as well as you give - same thing). If you want more freedom, you have to help others get it - first.

The point of this is that you can get your financial freedom as a writer if you become more effective as a publisher.

• Books don't sell unless you publish. 
• Books sell best if published in a series for a specific genre. 
• They also sell best if you sell everywhere possible at once.

Test it for yourself:

1. (Self)publish everything you already have. Edit into shape, get some great covers, write some enticing descriptions, price them to sell, publish them everywhere. 
2. Now write some more related books in that series and publish them.
3. Keep this up until you have at least five books out there. At least.

Contact me once your fifth book is published and we'll compare notes. Just don't talk to me unless you have killer covers, decent prices, and fascinating descriptions.

I'm not saying you'll get rich (or any guarantee, really). The point is that if you work this hard for your dreams, then you have a much better chance at getting enough income to cover your bills - maybe enough to quit your day job.

Up to you.

The question is not how well can you write - it's how well can you publish? That is what pegs your book income.

Writing feeds the soul. Publishing pays your bills.

- - - -

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How to Build a Profitable Business Plan - Selling Your Books Online

(photo: PlanToo47)

Most Authors Don't Have a Business, or Even a Plan

Don't worry about it. That's why 97% of everyone on this planet die broke, including most indie and conventional authors.

Charles Dickens ran a business. So does Amanda Hocking, so does any profitable author.

If you aren't making a living writing books, maybe you should look over your own business.

How to Write, Publish, and Everything Else.

Although a great deal can be left to the major distributors and their "also bought" algorithms, the more you are active in your business, the more income rises.

There is one rule for earning income by selling books online:

Writing Feeds the Soul,

Publishing Pays the Bills.

If your bills aren't getting paid from your book income, your publishing business is failing. 

If you don't have anything worth publishing, then your writing business is failing.

In Stephen King's memoir "On Writing", he lays out a basic way to feed your soul and keep your body fed, your lights and heat on, clothes on your back - and your spouse happy with trinkets.

He wrote in the morning when he felt most inspired. He answered emails and took care of his business in the afternoon. He read in the evening - which then stoked the fires for his writing the next morning.

Each day he had a target of 2,000 words written. Then he worked his business after that.

Dickens had a similar scene. He wrote in the morning, took a 3-hour walk which recharged his writing batteries, then spent the evening with family and associates.

The point is that such a schedule comparmentalizes your life in to activities, so you can focus on one area at a time.

(It's also noted that many successful authors arranged their lives to be completely un-distracted while writing, and had rather strict schedules to their reclusive lives. They were not social butterflies.)

Self-publishing isn't set-and-forget.

It's too easy to think of an author as simply a person who churns out books and self-publishes them or gets them published, then gets onto the next book.

This is simply another road to immediate or eventual poverty.

There is the fact that the average number of books an author has to publish before their financial success rolls in is five. Most have more than that, in several series.

It is the series of books which invite and hold the reader's interest. The various stages of changes in the character's journeys are the key draw - as people compare their own lives with those of the character.

In non-fiction, it's the author taking them through one or more aspects of that business model or skilset. Something else to learn each time.

The author in both cases is working with their audience to bring more value into their lives.

The Business is in the List.

Internet Marketers are infamous for touting that "the money is in the list." It's their short-hand way of saying, "give the most value to those who trust you most."

When you have a list of emails from your devoted fans, you then have a business of simply

1. asking them what they want most, 
2. writing and editing that into shape, 
3. then telling them when it's ready to purchase
4. (and asking them to review it on Amazon.)

You as the author also have to have all the backend necessary to keep building that list, as well as regular emails to it in order to build your relationships.

But you don't neglect your writing. The more books you have (deeper backbench) the more players you can have on the field, even when you rotate them.

And you also have to recharge your batteries every day to get ready for the next.

Behind the Velvet Rope

The best leverage is to assemble your content into both free and paid memberships, so that people can support your writing on a monthly basis - and get access to your behind-the-scenes world.

Not only do you let them in, you encourage them to become your patron in exchange for personal favors and interaction.

They pay you to help them improve their lives.

This also means that you are regularly producing content just for them, quite in addition to your daily writing - even if it means letting them get access to your daily drafts on a regular basis.

What you also get from this is their feedback on what they think of your plot, characters, and style. This allows you to tailor-make your books to the readers who follow you most.

Every book you publish, especially ebooks, should have a link which encourages them to become members and step behind the velvet rope.

And Let Them Invite Their Friends

The final step is to encourage them to become evangelists by making them into affiliate sales people.  You simply give them a commission for every book they sell. Many of these people have email lists, or at least followers on their social media. You only have to provide them with a personal link they can use which says they sent that person to buy your book. (Lots of programs and scripts out there which can do this.)

Everyone appreciates the recognition. Some will even take this up as their full-time work as they figure out how to make a living selling other's books and products.

In fact, you can actually set up your book on affiliate sales platforms where such pro's gather regularly. Because these people have their own lists, by mailing to these people, you get a certain amount of them who join your list. Then you invite them to join your membership, and the cycle continues.

The bottom line is that you are expanding your bottom line.

Which makes it more possible for you to do just what you want, which is to write great books that people enjoy.

There's more to this, as far as specifics. I'm currently working on an ecourse which will lay this out in pretty specific detail so anyone can do it. That, along with a case study, will then become a book later.

For a non-fiction writer, that's the other side of the coin. Each book becomes an ecourse, which adds to the list or a segment of it. List members can become membership-patrons and clients. Members can become affiliates - who then bring you more people to your ecourse.

See how this just continues to expand?

That's a business plan - at least in the broad strokes.

- - - -

Be sure to subscribe by email or RSS feed to ensure you don't miss a single valuable post!

(Yes, that opt-in for the ecourse is coming soon if you don't already see it below...)

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A New Test of Successful Book Publishing and Marketing - From Scratch

Starting a new and successful book from scratch and marketing it - all as a test and lesson

(Photo: Thomas Leuthard)

We're starting a new book, with a supporting book series, and are going to show you from start to finish how I approach book publishing and marketing. This is to be a test of all I've laid out over the last few years of analysis and testing.

Books tend to get a life of their own. They can get quite insistent about getting out and being able to live that life with others. So much, they tend to crowd out other thought and actions.

The trick is to finish up earlier projects as best you can in order to not get distracted later by bits and pieces of these old projects which trip you up and make you stumble.

In short, clear your decks for action.

The inspiration for this was getting fed up with what we are being handed on the news. A "good news day" for the major networks and news magazines, papers, websites - is really filled with gawd-awful situations you wouldn't want to have happen to a stranger's dog.

Bad news simply depresses your quality of life, makes it less worth living.

To do something about this is best done when you reach for the stars and try for that brass ring which is almost out of reach.

The solution to bad news, to my mind, is to push for world peace.

I had all the tools I needed to accomplish this, having spent the last few years forging what I needed, sharpening them, and lining them up on the figurative walls of my workshop to be ready as needed.

How to start.

As I said, you have to wrap other projects up. I have that set of 100 books which simply need to be pressed out to a few more distributors (Amazon is done as its own test, Google Play is wrapped up, Kobo is in progress, and Itunes/Nook still have to be started.) But I don't want these nagging me later, so I'll push these all through during the research phase of this next book.

First, you want to see what's been done in this area, and whether this is possible.

I've already done some marketing research with Market Samurai in this area, so know that inspirational and motivational works are searched for.

Looking up the keywords in this area will give me more a taste of what people are looking for in their content.

Searching on Amazon will point out what books are selling best, what phrases they are using, what authors, the looks of covers, etc.

Also, searching on Google Trends will tell me the weight of phrases and also what popular trends are going where.

Market research, demographics - there are more tools than these to use, but these will get the ball rollling. Let you know if/when I pick up any others.

The structure 

It's much like other book series I've done. (See Secrets to the Law of Attraction and it's series.)

The idea is to compile a book from essays of other books, then publish that main book as well as re-publishing all the excerpted ones. But we'll do it backwards this time, based on what we've learned over the past few years...

In this case, learning from what's gone before will improve things. One point of marketing is to have the product ready when you've stoked up the demand.

The overall idea is to build a book from 30 other books, giving a 30-day lesson plan to follow. This gives you a new essay every day, from a different author. The idea behind that is that it takes a month of work to change any habit. This book is to help people develop the habit of peace.

That then gives me 30 books in addition to the one I'm editing together.

In this case, I'm going to re-publish that book as hardcopy and ebook as I select the essay from it. Hardcopy proofing can be a several-week process, so it needs to be done right away. Some of these books I've published before, but not a tradepaperback, so the content is ready. It may serve me well to do the publishing action of getting the proofs started and then come back to find the essays within those books I need.

As each hardcopy book is ready, I then publish that ebook and promote that book's landing page with PDF and video, as well as social signal syndication via Synnd. Each book then gets rudimentary promotion as I go, as opposed to having 30 books to labor through.

Market Samurai will also help by finding additional and related content, as well as ping-back blogs for some immediate link-love.

The video and PDF are embedded on the landing page. Both of these are also syndicated to other video and doc-sharing sites.

Additional essays are excerpted from the book as well, and these Synnd.

Built in social interaction

With this book, the idea is also to have a built-in social networking function. Interestingly, Napoleon Hill said, "You can't get without giving."  The idea then is to make the book itself inexpensive (.99 on Amazon) so people can simply gift it to others. By asking them to gift it even before they've read it, it's starting a "chain letter" sort of idea which will tend to exponentially expand. Nice social experiment.

The hash tag as the title - and domain.

Another integrated scene is to have the book title become the hash tag - so it becomes known that way.

I'll also be sending out tweets via Synnd with a link and hashtag to new quotes. These quotes can simply be gotten by looking up "[author] quotes" and building lists of these to go out on a daily basis.

Also, the book title becomes the domain name - this marketing is done on a new site. It gets its own G+ page to show social acceptance and integrate Google searches into the promotion. Every post will be auto-updated to that G+ page.

All this is just to prime the pump. The key workhorse will be the quality of the book itself - which will depend on my editing.

List building from the get-go.

The other advantage of publishing the sourced books first is to get list-building occurring.  As people check out that landing page and the (hopefully) daily quotes, they'll be invited to subscribe via opt-in form to get these in their in box.

By the time I get all these books published, I'll be well on my way to doing an actual launch on the book itself. Having a list will make that possible. The goal is to make it an "overnight Amazon bestseller" by building demand.

This will move over into a list which is for the book itself, an ecourse which helps people get more peace into their own life as well as passing it along to others. 30 days of lessons.

In turn, that then goes into another list, which is a year study of books (averaging one book every two weeks) so that they can devote themselves to study and self-improvement by studying classic self-help works.

Again, we are after world peace. All the tools are there, all the people are there - they only have to be trained to use the tools and then given the encouragement to use them toward a goal.

Production schedule is tight

As mentioned, this requires the discipline of having all the other projects wrapped up, not just put on hold.  There can't be any distractions. As I'm publishing content daily as well as pushing books through.

So it may be a smart move to get all these books into the proofing queue and then wrap up any other publishing cycles I have going. Editing the book and amassing quotes can be done as I start releasing the books themselves. Interestingly, a way to do this would be to blog the book itself - releasing an essay every work day, which also promotes the landing page for that book. Additional essays could be scheduled to appear on that blog.

The daily schedule would be getting the quotes out (looking for something which would delay them, like Buffer) and then creating that book's landing page and setting the Synnd campaigns going.

Probably want to include daily and weekly analytics reviews.

The missing membership

One point I haven't covered is building a membership to invite this list to. One great idea which Copyblogger worked up is having an ecourse they opt-in to and then a surprise free membership they joined as part of it - filled with all sorts of great ebooks and stuff they might also be interested in.

This then eventually gets into a paid membership, that velvet rope area, where they can have access to discounted book offers and access to materials which aren't easily available to anyone else. As well, posts to this area would be more tuned to that crowd's tastes.

Memberships themselves are a research job I've not completed. I do have a Rainmaker platform reserved, but not built out - so this is ready to go.

I'll implement this just before or as part of the launch itself.

Those two days on the weekend will be used for book editing as well as any research I'm still needing.

A 7-week launch window.

Yes, that's what it turns out to be - 30 books at 5 days/week. The final week is for the book launch itself.

I'll be blogging here as I go, to give you the notes of what I've discovered.

During these first 6 weeks, I should line up J-V partners to promote this as well. Mostly, this is known as an "internal" launch, which is to prove the value of the product as I build it. But know that affiliates will be offered a part in this - which could be lucrative if they get a slice of people gifting 10 books away to others.

(Oh - if someone gifts you, you reciprocate by gifting 10 more. Should be quite interesting. And there is the great point of the affiliates gifting their entire list in order to get them going on the flow. I'll have a certain amount of iTunes vouchers to hand out...)

That whole launch scene should be fascinating. Factually, it's a test of indie publishing and lends well to promotion and Press Releases - how many people do you know who publish that many books in that amount of time?

Stay tuned - the best is yet to come.

Yes, subscribe above right - so you don't miss a day of the excitement...

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Some copyright notes - where to check for public domain issues

Some places to check for copyright orphans before you give up on that great public domain book.

The safest approach is to only use books printed before 1923. That limits what people want to read, though, since the language and grammar is quite a bit different from what we use today.

However, there are tons of books which were "orphaned" between then and now. I don't need to bore you with copyright law right now - it gets a bit involved.

Best shortcut I know is Public Domain Sherpa's flow diagram - or their easy to use calculator.

What you are looking for is checking a book you found to see if it was ever renewed. Just because it's being published by someone today doesn't mean it was properly renewed. They may be simply publishing a public domain book. Perfectly legal.

And this is why it's often profitable for an self-publisher to get in on this scene.

So: was it ever renewed?

Using that calculator or diagram will give you a quick approach to finding out - but you still need to check if a copyright was renewed.

One online shortcut is Stanford University's Copyright Renewal Database. This covers 1923-1963, by tracking renewals up through '77. Another approach is to get Google's XML file (it unpacks to a huge 300+ mb!) and search through this yourself. (I found a program called Base-X which doesn't choke on it. I'm on Ubuntu Linux, though - your mileagewill vary.)

The advantage of that last one is finding where someone has copyrighted a revision of the original work, which happened to both Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and Robert Collier's "Robert Collier Letter Book." The original of both of these is in the public domain, but not the revisions (in both cases done by relatives.) Dorothea Brande's "Wake Up and Live" and "Becoming A Writer" have dubious renewals, since in one, the author's name is mentioned as part of the title, and in the other it has Brande as a co-author. The only way to be really sure may be to have the copyright office do a $150/hr search for you. (These above examples from cursory search only and do not constitute legal anything.) As well, they have a tough row to hoe as there are so many free versions of these books out there, they would have to be challenging quite a few places all at once. (Lawyers cost big bucks even then they are only churning out boilerplate ceast-and-desist letters.)

It's possible to look up the actual record from the Copyright Office - via Internet Archives for anything before 1977 via those PDF's. Everything 1978 and later is in digital form, and can be searched online directly. You'll probably find the Stanford site or that mongo Google XML file is all you need to look up renewals.

And that was the point today - to get these links up so you could search yourself.

- - - -

Now, what do we do with this? 

Once you've found out that it's never been renewed, or it never had a copyright notice to begin with, then you can do whatever you want with it.

If you want to claim a new copyright, you can make a derivative version of it, but realize that you only have rights to the material you added - even if you quote the entire book.

This is where I was going around with the "coordinator" from Kobo, who insisted that I put my books in their 20% royalty set because they contained the whole book. That's not what any law says, but it is the way she wants to run her fiefdom.

You can go ahead and publish your books on other sites without a problem, providing you follow Amazon's rules about public domain and announce them as such. B&N will also allow you to publish public domain material directly. Along with Kobo, they offer low royalties for these.

The profit is then in derivative works or collections which are definitely not in the public domain (except on Kobo, where you "still have the copyright." while your books now earn you squat.)

However, you can publish hardcopy versions of these with abandon, derivative or not. Know that there is a lot of competition for the popular versions. POD costs are higher than bulk printing, so it leaves you to find other options if you try to compete on price.

The money looks to be in how you market these to your audience. PD books, if they were ever successful originally, already have a demand for them. By doing the scene of building an online publishing house, you can start attracting traffic to buy these. Some search engine marketing may net you a few sales.

While we're on that subject, getting your newly-copyrighted book up on GooglePlay will help you link to your own landing page for this book, as well as the print editions you've posted via Lulu.

(Why Lulu and not CreateSpace? Createspace is now going to about everywhere Lulu has been going to all this time. The problem is that they are an Amazon entity, so indie bookstores and big box competitors may not want to stock your book. This is exactly what happened to Ferris' 4-Hour Chef. Had he simply published it via Lulu, he wouldn't have had to market it through bittorrent.)

I'm leery of putting up a book on Amazon (or Nook or Kobo) with the original PD title without following their requirements. That could get all your books banned there. But there's nothing saying you can't get that book linked to your hardcopy version, or that you can't sell the same book as your own via Lulu and GooglePlay. Same price, higher royalties. Fun, huh?

PLR

With the exception of Amazon, you can treat PLR with a broader stick than PD books. Amazon simply won't take them - unless you almost completely re-write them (which is still faster than doing all that research again - you can verify their facts as you re-write) and can compile several of their shorter reports into a decent-sized book.

But when they come with decent covers and a word .doc or openoffice .odt file, then it's simple to convert them into ebooks and also print books (again, they usually don't have enough pages unless you combine them.)

One of the crossovers in this is where they are giving away a PD book as PLR. So you really need to simply check the copyright sites above first, but you'll also find that people have already published these ahead of you.

After that, it's like a different brand label slapped on the generic detergent box. The marketing is the difference.

As ebooks, I haven't had any problem getting the main distributors besides Amazon (and Smashwords) to accept and sell them. 

Next for me is a 30-day workfest

With the outline above, you can see that I'm getting ready for something.

I have 100 all-time topselling fiction books which I want to get out so people can learn from the time-proven successes on how to write in that genre. It's going to take awhile, but I can get these published and use them to link to my sites and other books meanwhile. (I have written 4 books now on how to write and publish, with these blogs forming the backbone of a fifth on its way.)

As well, I have over a hundred PLR books on various subjects which only need conversion, as well as linking to a backing site to add value (and capture emails.)

If I do 8-10 per day for 30 days (think: NaNoWriMo), then this is somewhere around 250-300 books published in 30 days.

The point of this is to build a huge backbench so I can cover my expenses and invest the rest in marketing - while I find out what sells well and back these up with marketing, finding what doesn't sell and revising these in title/cover/description/content until they do.

I've got to go now, as I'm already a few days into this month and don't have today's quota ready...

Luck to us all.

PS. There's a dirt-simple to check a copyright - look up the book on Gutenberg.org or Internet Archive (archive.org) - they'll tell you a lot about copyright and save you having to search or doubt.

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