How Rubber Meets the Real World - Case Study 08

Marketing books results in - publishing yet another book.

Got back to work getting my checklist/spreadsheet executed. With the revisions I added.

Now that the site was mobile-friendly for real, I then turned to the next most obvious distraction - no opt-in for the site. Even though I say to get this done as a first action.

I cast around and found several PLR articles which had to do with writing children's books, as well as a lecture from C. S. Lewis on the same subject (public domain as the 1952 copyright wasn't renewed.)  Added an Intro to it, a Summary, and an addendum on how to get it published.

In this book, I also changed something. While I had been only giving a single link to Midwest Journal Press for these books - specific to that book - in this case I set up a Bibliography which linked to all the books in this series.

This is supposed to be hard-linked, so that showed up another problem: I hadn't created minimal landing pages for each of these books. Mainly because I found and added another Art book, and also four Writing books.

None of these books are themselves actually ready, as I would have created landing pages for each of them.

About this new book

It's a little book, about 66 pages. I've gone through all the articles and they make sense and have decent grammar (important to do with PLR - as well as looking for stupid things like keyword padding that makes them read poorly.)

This book is on the other side of where I've been for so long - simply getting a book written. (And yes, this has a link to my "Just Publish!" book so they can learn all about self-publishing.)

It's simple, a quick read, and will be priced low as well. The cover (by John Morgan) is very enticing. As it's mostly PLR, I don't put my own name on the cover and will publish it under the "Thrive Learning Institute Library" imprint.

The description isn't bad, but could be better.

The idea here is to have an ebook which people can buy if they don't want to wait for the lessons to come to them. I'll take the individual chapters/articles and create the lessons from those. These articles will be published as individual PDFs on Slideshare and embedded in the lesson page. Creating pages on Blogger still gives you access to the sidebar material, but can be set up to mostly be ignored by the search engines as they lack a lot of the features of SEO. (One simple trick to hide pages from search engines is to give them the exact same meta-description and use no keywords at all in the title.)

These lessons will come one per week and eventually will give them access to a free membership - when I get back to building that membership site.

Right now, I'm focusing on simply getting this series published and using them as a case study for doing the marketing completely. (Although I'll probably skip testing the affiliate sites on this round, since this is not a major or key book series.)

Catching up is hard to do

Mostly a point of focus. I'd already seen that I was missing both a few of the landing pages and also the opt-in script and ethical bribe. The spreadsheet brought these home.

By setting things out in a spreadsheet, you don't get the opportunity to skimp steps.

And by having a spreadsheet, you can line up any series that had been previously published and fill in the missing steps. (I've got a series on Copywriting and another on Max Freedom Long's Huna, plus several self-help series, and one on sustainable agriculture. All need actual marketing. Looking forward to getting these really done.)

What's still missing from the spreadsheet

Not that I'm going to work on it now, but there is a book launch sequence which is missing. Any book can be re-launched. What we are doing here might be best called "the invisible launch." It's simply published with no send off at all.

Any book can be re-launched. Some authors spend a great deal of time (and money) at this. If you follow Jeff Walker, you'll see this can be ramped up into a very intense, month-long release. And the real work behind Walker's release is to build your list - even from nothing.

Where this really takes off is to have Joint Venture affiliates to push your released product. That is really why I'm not particularly testing the affiliate site section of this spreadsheet. Because it's going to move into quite another set of tests - where I really need that membership site ready to handle the flood.

This is basically an "internal launch" in Walker's terms. I'll announce this to my little list, and then get the social signals working for it through Synnd.  Each book will get a video trailer, which will also be distributed through Synnd. Otherwise, a lot of the work will go through IFTTT. (And I have to go back and verify these as being in place.)

The trick with landing pages is to set them up with an address, and then turn them back to draft while you get them ready for publishing. When you then publish them for real, IFTTT should pick them up and send them along to the other sites. Or that's the idea, anyway. The other option is to set up custom links for them and never take them live until you have everything in place (all video and PDF embeds active, etc.)

This means we are still playing with the bubble-wrap, this is so new.

I still haven't found anyone else who is attempting this precise use of SEO and social signals as part of their marketing. So you're seeing a very pioneer work - even though all the steps of these have been tested thoroughly, none of this has been built into a single, comprehensive sequence of steps that I know of.

This spreadsheet of actions could actually be used to promote any digital product online. Some Internet Marketing guru's I've read of would give their hind teeth for this spreadsheet, as it's a course on it's own.

When this (and the additional testing of launches and affiliates) is run through completely and tweaked, I'll go and make it a course on its own - and launch it as a full system.

Meanwhile, I have a few dozen books to publish and a dozen dozen which haven't been marketed at all. So don't hold your breath...

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Solving Distractions and Getting Your Book Ready - Case Study 02

(Artwork: Birger King)

You have to handle distractions to finish getting your book(s) ready for publishing.

It's not just the social media. It's life itself.

I've gone over the successful action of working in batches, of having a proven assembly line, of lining everything up by spreadsheet to make it efficient.

But the bottom line is: You Have to Get Things Done.

Happens to me regularly, and this Case Study was no different. I'm at fault, usually (blaming me is easier to solve, than why others do what they do.)

Of course, I live on a working farm. Certain seasons require a lot of physical labor and then rest. Don't expect to maintain any sort of inspiration level if you're tired all the time.

Right now, we are also renovating the main house here - which started last spring and is only now wrapping up (I'm doing the wrapping.)

I told everyone recently, "Look I've got three full-time Jobs right now: This farm, this house, and my books. Please don't ask me to do anything else."

And pretty much, they've understood.

I know if I don't push my own bliss, I can get very cranky - and that bliss is books. So I work on this daily - even if it's just getting out a blog post (explaining why I don't have the next book ready or published - or what I just found out about how to do this easier or better.)

Compartment Your Time

That's easy to say, and the discipline of keeping it in is even harder.

I've always liked Stephen King's approach of writing in the morning, answering mail in the afternoon, reading in the evening. Other authors had similar schedules, depending on when they felt most inspired.

King also held himself to 2,000 words each day. Maybe more, never less.

With three jobs, I do at least two of them every day. Farming everyday, so the book writing/editing/publishing/marketing might get pushed to a small piece - or
even put off for a couple of days, if I was hitting up against a deadline on house renovations.

If its really rainy or extremely cold, I'll do what I have to do for chores and then get back inside. Cold days have been great for publishing, as it's been too cold to work on the house as well. Januaries and Februaries usually get a lot of book-work done.

Pressures of visiting family will push the house up in the schedule and minimize other things.

Eventually, I'll get the old house done. With all the leftover wood and parts, it's also telling me that there's some other things that ought to get fixed as well. Barns, outbuildings, making basements usable, fences, gates, gardens...

Inspiration as a distraction

"Look a squirrel!" That can happen to the best of us.

My publishing is in four main areas, one of these being natural living. There are tons of books in the public domain about farming which are crying out to be recovered.

Some months ago, I found an old book which was going to take some work. It was all about fruit and nut trees as crops (that matches a subject called silva-pasture, which is about grazing our cattle in between trees). But there were no good versions of it which wouldn't take at least a week to get into shape. So I put it off.

Recently, I found another book on how to grow trees from seed which was in good shape - suddenly I had an answer to making this farm more profitable. With some finagling, I got a decent copy of that other book - and simply cranked out a good version of each, published them through Lulu (so I'd get a proof copy to read and correct) and then parked them in Calibre on a library of books to wrap up.

That distraction kept me from doing anything on these picture-book series.

I brought it on myself.  The point to learn is to keep on the point of finishing things up. (Note that I parked those two books for later publishing and marketing work.)

Note that these tree books aren't fully published. I switched the sequence around so that I'd have the hardcopy books available. The ebooks are there, they just aren't published fully to all the distributors.

That brings us back to our sequence of actions.

The Spreadsheet of Actions

When I decided to make this particular batch a Case Study, I knew we needed to do things right, and to finally follow every step I've been recommending (but haven't applied in every case.)

The strategy here is simple:
Collect a series of books and then publish and market them as a batch.

This follows the generally proved concepts of

• Follow Your Bliss
• Deep backbench
• Multiple eyeballs

Marketing is to follow on these, which then gives you

• Caring Sharing
• Velvet Rope
• Friends Fly, Too.

(Yes, I've explained these before - but these phrases [mnemonics] are an easy way to remember the whole strategy.)

The trick was to get this long list finalized into one place, as I've revised this several times.  I did get it on a spreadsheet, but want to give you the long list here, so you can do it yourself (I'll link my spreadsheet for you, once I'm fully happy with it, which will be as this Case Study wraps up.)

The Publishing/Marketing Action List:

For each book title...

Landing Page

Versions
    PDF,   epub,   mobi
Lulu,  
    epub,   PDF,   tradepb,   GlobalReach
Distributors
    Sellfy,   Payhip,   Google,   iTunes,   Nook,   Kobo,   Espresso BM
Amazon Edition

Landing Page Update

A/V
    Audio,   Presentation,   Video
Synnd Campaigns
    Video,   Bookmarking,   Social News,   Twitter
Doc-Sharing
    Slideshare,   Scribd,   Doc-Stoc,   Issuu,   Gdrive (public)
Video
    Synnd
Audio,  
    Archive.org,   Soundcloud
Cover Art
    Pinterest,   Flickr,   G+ (public)
Book Sites
    OpenLibrary,   Library Thing,   Goodreads
Other Promotion,  
    Bittorrent Bundle,  
Audiobook

Affiliate Sales Bundles (under testing)
Distribly,   Scubbly,   JVZoo,   MyCommerce,   PaySpree,   Click2Sell,   DigiResults,   BlueSnap

(The bold face are the main categories of action, the plain face are sub-steps or sites.)

Yes, that's a lot of work. A lot of details. That's why I recommend a spreadsheet - so you don't omit any steps on any book.

What it does is to set up your books on their own little network of sites which all interact and help the search engines let other people discover your work.

I'll detail all these steps as I go - the reason for making this Case Study - so you have the documentation (ultimately in book form) to follow along and improve on.

OK?

That's enough for this morning. Thought to get this out to you before I had to go do chores (bottle feed a calf, fix some fences the cows went through yesterday, mow some lawn, put some more trim on the house, etc.)

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An Author's Guide to Memberships - How to Sell Books Online

Writers: Get Your Books Selling Online Better - Build a Membership

I've long said (over and over) that the key to any author earning real income came from

• writing well and prolifically
• having multiple books for sale on all possible distributors
• building a list by getting your audience to give you their emails.

After I got an independent income from my book sales, I started looking up how to really leverage book income - and found that those writers having the greatest  success were actually taking it a step further - they were getting people to sign up for a membership.

Rambling Prose and Lack of Focus Explain Why Tradition Publishing Fails

Traditional publishing Won't Use the Tools That Make Indie Self-Publishing Work - They Can't Afford Them.

(art: Tobias Mikkelson)

Found a great piece with gold nuggets in it. 

His rambling prose is off-putting (how's that for a typified descriptive phrase?)

The value of this work to indie publishers and self-publishing authors is so intense, I thought to excerpt it so you'd see the fruit trees out of the forest they grow in. (I'm excerpting directly without prettying-up these phrases - or the ellipses which cut to the chase.) My comments follow.

audiences are at the heart of it.

unique research is needed into the audiences for every book and every author and that the flow of data about a book that’s in the marketplace provides continuing opportunities to sharpen the understandings of how to sell to those audiences.

Marketing research starts ideally before you publish anything. Or - you can work like all hell to get the entire series out and then find out what the market is buying and why, as you then get your marketing going.

the book descriptions are the basis for all marketing copy

Give by-title attention to the backlist

Research, analysis, action, observation. Rinse and repeat.

Study "Breakthrough Advertising" by Eugene Schwartz. You analyze the market and analyze the product (book) and then work up your approach accordingly. All book descriptions need to pull like a well-tuned advertisement (which they are.)

“landing pages”, are one of the most useful tools to improve discovery for books and authors.

much basic knowledge about discovery and SEO is lacking in publishing. 

Every book has a landing page, period. This page uses SEO to enable search engines to more rapidly digest it. Meanwhile, your marketing is creating backlinks to that page on other properties, such as YouTube and video sites, PDF's on Slideshare and doc-sharing sites, covers on Pinterest, Flickr, and G+, etc.

Hugh Howey described the sales curve of the successful indie — “steadily growing sales”.

“word of mouth” is the most effective means of growing the market for a book. (Such) books would tend to have a sales curve that was a relatively gentle upward slope to a peak and then a relatively gentle downward slope.

This is capturing email addresses with an opt-in on your book's landing page (which could become a blog in and of itself, with excerpts and so on.) Surveying your email list will find out what content they want more of - which you then blog about and even use to write the next book.

distributed retail demands a completely out-of-synch sales curve. In the brick and mortar world, the book will effectively be dead if it doesn’t catch on in the first three months. And the reality of staffing, focus, and the sales philosophy of most publishers means it won’t be getting any attention from the house’s digital marketers either.

in the world of indie success, you are repeatedly seeing authors breaking through months after a book’s publication, at a time when an experienced author knows a house would have given up on them.

one challenge in the digital age is to see readership as many pretty small and discrete audiences, not one big one at the level of the “subscriber”.

This explains why these huge traditional publishing firms cannot reliably earn enough income for the bulk of the indie authors/publishers out there.

Let’s say you have a story on any particular topic. Your total “theoretical market” within the publication’s readership is every person who ever read a single story on that subject. But your “core market” is every person who has read two stories on it.

seeing your audiences that way, and growing them that way, will allow monetizing them more effectively. This would be harvesting the benefits of audience-informed content creation.

Even in your email list, you will have subsets of this which want different things. If they will pay you for it, they are worth catering to.

looking for search terms that suggested opportunity (lots of use of the term and relatively few particularly good answers), could tell through research what book to write.

the same point that SEO should be employed before titling any book.

SEO is part of your basic research on any book. One of the few tools left standing in this area is Market Samurai.

Of course, we don’t sell that kind of help very often or we haven’t so far. It would require getting marketing money invoked early to pay for research like that. But we know it is useful.

Again, the indie author - following their bliss, their burning desire - can afford to do this, where the huge traditional publishing dinosaur can't turn fast enough.

Luck to us all.

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The "Eyeball" Marketing Strategy for Self-Published eBooks

(photocredit: Skrewtape)

The simplicity of ebook sales can be simply stated:

Get Your eBook in Front of as Many Eyeballs as Possible.

But it's not all that simple. 

Sure, there are at least 7 main distributors of ebooks. (And there's another 5 or 6 additional outlets as well...) 

No one distributor has any given set of eyeballs in a monopoly. As a matter of fact, at no time can any one of them claim they have all ebook readers under their spell. The closest they can get is this paraphrase from old Abe Lincoln:

You can reach some of the readers most of the time, 

You can reach most of the readers some of the time, 

But no distributor (or author) can reach most of the people most of the time.

Added to this: 

Poor marketers only try to reach some of the readers some of the time. (That's why they're still poor...)

How to reach as many eyeballs as possible

One trick in this is that no given set of people agree on how they like their content served up to them.

We are starting out with ebooks - most people would still rather read printed books. There's also audiobooks. With digital downloads, these are becoming ever more popular, especially for commutes. On top of that, there's also video versions that can be generated from the same audio. As well, the text can be converted to PDF's and slideshow presentations. And there are packages with combinations of all of these, like you can post on Bittorrent, as well as service providers such as iAmplify. Meanwhile, there is at least one ebook publisher who allows you to package A/V files with your ebook - Leanpub.

This gives a new twist to the old phrase: Write Once, Publish Many Ways...

Write once,  

publish as many ways,  

in as many formats,  

to as many eyeballs  

as possible.

eBooks - The modern ebook author needs to realize that to reach the maximal amount of people viewing your work, you're going to have to be on all possible distribution lines - not just stick with Amazon. There's 6 other distributors who want to host your content - and they all reach different readers.

You want to translate (port) your text into multiple formats. Smashword ports your content to multiple formats - all written. epub, mobi, PDF, plus another half-dozen versions for different readers. Leanpub only covers PDF, ebpub, mobi.

Audio - Then you have audiobooks. Of course, there's ACX which gets you into Audible, Amazon, iTunes. Better have your best show on there - they have serious quality standards.  But you also have to realize that simple podcasts by the author are also in demand. Particularly as a bonus. iAmplify will host your media files, and add your PDF (or probably epub or other) as an afterthought.

Video - iAmplify will also host your videos. Of course, you can put previews on the major and minor video sites as well. (Use your audio as a soundtrack, then add in a powerpoint built on the outline of your text.)

PDF's - For promotion, PDF previews can be posted on all the doc-sharing sites, which will bring your site traffic. Many powerpoint-viewing sites take PDF's as well.

Graphics - And then, there are always creating infographics to promote your content, based on the content itself. Pinterest, Flickr, etc. love these.

- - - -

Your Bottom Line - The trick is to have your money-making backend sites and your promotional sites for generating traffic, search engine ranking, etc. There's going to be a balance.

This is again the whole point of writing. An avid fan base will boost sales and get the ebook distributor algorithms working in your favor.

By contrast, low-selling ebooks are mostly condemned to that pile by those algorithms, it seems especially with Amazon. All distributors have their own versions. Only Amazon really seems to value reviews, for instance. (Reviews have been proved to have little to do with actual purchase, higher is who originally told them about the book.) For my own use, out of 17 books posted to Amazon, the only ones which consistently sold were either .99 or free. But since Locke gamed their system, Amazon has been down on the 99 cent books. So -finally- one 99 cent book started taking off. A year later.

Meanwhile, I have several dozen books on other distributors (who aren't as restrictive on submissions) and know these same books routinely sell in good percentages. But no two distributors have the same audience. Some books I've put up on iTunes don't sell well on Kobo. I've got some books on Google Play which are accounting for about 50% of sales, while only 30% on iTunes, but less than a quarter of my sales occurring on Kobo. (And for a short while, one of my 99-cent public domain classics was favorited by Kobo, which gave me a few hundred more in royalties - while it lasted.)

Backbench - The point in profitable publishing is to have a long back-bench. The most successful authors have dozens of books up there.

I found that it's far more profitable to be a publisher than a writer. So I look for books which are under-marketed (which are easy to find in the public domain and in PLR) - then put them up with appealing covers and good descriptions, then publish them as widely as possible. Some sell well, others don't.

The trick is that for a few hours' work per book, I have quite a few which sell routinely for me. And these will be selling for me from here on out. I can then take these and market them further with additional versions, and Search Engine Marketing by providing a back-up website, previews on doc-sharing sites and Bittorrent, etc. I can also use that base popularity to generate extra sales by creating audiobooks and videos based on that proven seller.

Also, I can go back and review the non-sellers to see if something needs to be tweaked in their cover, description, or preview.

So that's my own algorithm, after a fashion.  

It starts with having a ton of books up there, on as many distributors as possible, in as many formats as possible. This is now being expanded by being able to collect emails into lists, and offering that audience the alternative books they may have been missing. While this is still in its infancy, I can see this is the best route to leveraging all the above into some serious income.

Again, publishing pays more than writing. But the best writing will make publishing simpler and more profitable.

Eyeballs drive profits.  

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