I owe it all to you - Thanks. (Some notes on future-past.)

You are who I do all this work for. 

Really.

So this blog post and podcast is a thank you note.

What did you do to deserve this?

It all started long ago - or maybe a few minutes for some of you. You decided to click on a link with led you here, or bought one of my books, or otherwise set yourself up to hear from me.

My story started over 50 years ago, when I started wanting to figure things out around me.

Those two paths converged at some point. And I've been working to deserve you ever since.

OK, let's break that down a bit further.

There's this thing called a Golden Rule. You know: "treat others like you'd like to be treated." All those variations. Every religion and philosophy mentions that as a truth somewhere in it's texts or scriptures.

The funny thing is that this works as "As you give, so you get." or as Napoleon Hill had it: "You can't get without giving."

My bottom line is that to the degree I'd like to be successful, rich, and all that - I have to help you achieve these too.

What does all that have to do with book publishing?

Good question - I'm getting there. (Sometimes I can get long-winded.)

You know, if you've looked up my back trail, that I've been talking to you about how to make a success of it with book publishing. Nice passive income, financial freedom, take the day off to go fishing and still earn income while you've sat in the shade all day and drank your tea (or equivalent beverage.)

That type of lifestyle. Great, huh?

I did it with an assortment of books, but saw that if I wanted to take it to the next level, I was going to have to ask for your help.

So, thanks.

You're here, you're listening to this, you're aboard.

Where are we going, then?

Boy, are you right on the money with your questions today...

If you want to make a really decent income (like into the "getting rich" category) you have to open up and help others get rich on their own.

Looking around found that the best tool to do this was to form a membership where you could help people more directly than just anonymously selling them a book.  I mean to really help them.

Actually, that research found the model for all online passive income. It's true for spammers, it's true for their brothers, the Internet Marketers. It's even true for pure rip-off schemes like the Government and their cronies.

Advertisers use this plan, as does Facebook and any social media. Even our book distributors use this. They are all memberships after a fashion. Anyone who gets your email and sends you stuff uses this.

My approach is to find out why this works and tell everyone I can how to do this for themselves.

Of course, what I researched before this tells a great deal about how the universe works beyond this - and the tools which help you earn income online are the same which help you improve your health, lose weight, enjoy your life every day, live with no cares and a calm, cheerful expectancy that everything you want to be and have is coming your way.

That's a bit thick, you might be saying.

And you're right. Let's just stick to book publishing.

This new site I'm building is taking a bit of time. And while I have some other blog posts describing what I'm going through - this one is a filler for now just to keep you posted in general.

That's because the sawdust is still flying and you can still hear the distant noise of hammering and screwguns as all that construction happens.

We're standing over here to avoid all the trucks delivering material and the concrete being poured.

Go visit livesensical.com and you'll get a preview. No big deal. Your choice.

What I'm still going to give you - no strings attached.

Yes, we were right in the middle of a Case Study. And we'll get back to it - promise.

That case study led us to the brick-wall-solid fact that an author or publisher of any type needs to build their audience from square one - even before they create their first book.

And that's why I had to stop everything and get my own membership built.

You can count on me to eat the dog food I make - just to ensure it tastes good enough for your pets.

I'm into Rainmaker as the platform of choice (and that link should wind you up with a free trial, if you want it.) What I'm finding is that this really does have all the tools you need for publishing and a lot more.

Most of these, we've already covered. One example is putting all your links inside the book into Bitly links so you can track them better. In Rainmaker, they have this built in so that you can track where people come from and go to. In Bitly, you can't have several links going back to the same spot - but if you have several book versions pointing to one page (like the PDF, the Kindle, and the epub version) you want to know which one is bringing you the most traffic. That way you can promote that version more.

Can't we just do this for free?

Sure. I'll always tell you how to do the same thing for nothing but sweat-equity. If you want to do a membership with on-page sales, use Gumroad on a Blogger blog.  Lulu will still sell my hardcopy books and port my original works to all the main distributors. But I'll be selling books directly, where I can make 100% royalties.

The point is that you need to get independent from having to depend on distributors. You need to sell directly to the audience you serve.

And while you can create bundles on Gumroad (and BitTorrent, plus Sellfy, Ganxy, and Distribly, among others) - you can also do this directly from Rainmaker.

One last pitch for Rainmaker - and you don't have to use all sorts of different sites and logins to do the same thing. (OK, there - I'm done.)

What the future holds...

We're going to spend a few podcasts describing how to start up a membership as a complete unknown. You could set this up under an existing domain you already have, but we also need to take the idea of where someone starts from scratch.

At that point, I'll do a series on just how you start up from nothing - as these podcasts started in the middle of a project I was already on. So we'll just fill in the foundations as we go.

Meanwhile, I'll be busy in the background setting everything up on that beautiful new membership so you can find everything you need. (You're always moving furniture around in a new house as you unpack and put everything on shelves - and wondering how you ever collected so many knick-knacks...)

Once we restart that case study, then we'll open that up as a section of the membership all on it's own - and you'll be invited to try it out first and let me know what you think. Lots of wheels to kick and test rides to take.

That will pretty much wrap up that last book in this series about self-publishing. Of course, you'll be able to have access to the complete set, plus all my notes and everything.

Because you're worth it - aren't you?

After that, I'll test out that plan on a new book series and podcast that as I go. But don't be concerned. That next series has everything to do with how you promote your books and yourself and your business.

I can't see how I'll run out of stuff to share with you, as I'll be re-marketing all my books, series by series - and there is something to learn with each one. Things also change all the time - like right now, it's easier to have Lulu create your ebook than do it yourself. That throws out quite a few other datum's, and puts wrenches into some other works.

All you need to know is to sit back and enjoy the ride. I'll be doing the hard work of testing everything and you get to try out the streamlined, polished version for yourself - and let me know how it worked for you.

Which brings up - Let me know what you need.

The question is: What is the biggest problem facing you?

Just answer that for me, and I'll see what I can do to help you with it. I'm sitting on a half-century of research and I probably have something around here somewhere that gives a clue on how someone else made it through that particular problem already.

Very little of what we are doing currently is really new. Most of humankind hasn't changed in 10,000 years - so the answer to any particular problem was probably known in ancient Greek times, as well as in Victorian England, or maybe the Roaring 20's.

If it's something to do with publishing books, I'll probably have covered it somewhere.

Oh - and that brings up: Look for some Q-and-A podcasts coming up. They might be longish, like webinars, but I'd like to cover what people have as questions in this area.

Of course, you don't have to wait, you can just go ahead and email them to me (of course, you're subscribed - aren't you?)

When I get a big enough stack to make it interesting, then I'll throw one of those into the mix.

- - - -

Hope that brings you up to date. And that you're life is half as interesting as what is going on around here.

See you next time.

- - - -

Make sure you're signed up for updates through your email - so you don't miss an issue!

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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.

- - - -

Be sure to subscribe by email or news reader to keep up to date...

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Why Publishers Earn More Income than Self-Publishing Writers

(photo: Jeremy Brooks)

Selling Books Online is What Publishers Do Best (Writers Write Best).

I was looking over my "series of unfortunate events" post - which laid out how I got financially free once I started publishing books for a living.

The weird point I noticed was that I didn't take 5 years at a book-a-year rate in order to make that happen. It was just around 18 months or so.

The difference is this:

I didn't try to write all the books. 

I also didn't mess with trying all the "conventional wisdom" of "building a platform" on social media - or anything else conventional. Factually, the only marketing I did was to make sure the books had decent covers and descriptions.

Otherwise, I left the marketing to the distributors, which was primarily their own on-site algorithms.

The two basic data which are consistent with Indie Authors (or any authors) are:

1. A deep backbench of books, 
2. organized by series.

That tested well, since people could find my books by author and series.

One advantage I had was that most of the public domain books have lousy covers and descriptions. The other point was price. All of these books were priced at .99 - so it's above free, but obviously better quality than the free ones (judging the book by its cover) but was still an affordable purchase.

After that, it was a numbers game. Over a hundred books on 5 distributors, giving me about 35% royalties - all that was needed to cover my publishing bills (internet connection, basically) was for each of these books to sell once per month, on average. Once I got a bestseller going, it pulled along the other books in that series (or by the same author) and I was then able to cover all my bills.

True to form, it was all long tail:

• Most never sold.
• A few sold a handful during the year.
• A small handful sold regularly - one or two a month, never the same on any two distributors.
• The smallest handful (about 5 titles) sold well - a dozen or more a month on all distributors. 
• One title became a bestseller on all distributors.

Most of this reason was as the distributors all have different audiences, even though they are all international (some more than others.)

Why write when you can publish?

I'd realized that my income was coming from publishing instead of writing and so devoted more time to the former and devoted the latter to my blogging.

Some partial tests (again, without marketing) showed that the same rules still applied:

• Get a set of books on the same subject.
• Publish them as part of a series.
• People will find them and buy related books in that series.

That's the essential tipping point to publishing.

Good quality books, with presentable covers and descriptions tend to sell well on their own. But they sell better in a series.

And that explains why self-publishing authors can start earning income after 5 books - and if it takes a year to write and publish a book, then there you go.

All these books were published as some sort of series, even if they didn't sell. That I had a hundred books grouped by series then just sped the process. 

If my memory serves, because Amanda Hocking released several books a year, it made her rise meteoric by comparison.

Again, it's not when you started writing - your income increase starts from the moment you start publishing. It took both J. K. Rowling and Stephen King years to get their first book even published. Self-publishing tends to speed up the process.

(Authors-turned-publishers can speed this up even more, since publishers work with existing authors and existing books.)

The more books you have published in the shortest period of time will determine how fast you become able to live off your writing alone.

Since I edit public domain books as a series - and publish all at once - this then gets near-immediate sales which then increase with time. Recently, I published a dozen books on copywriting as a series, which took me a couple of months to edit into shape - but then started having sales the same week. Instant series - instant sales. No marketing, no book launch, no ads or promotion.

The next step is to start marketing - really.

You'd think marketing was a no-brainer. The problem I've been having is that there are so many very good public domain books out there which answer very old questions. Research in any field will wind up with "unsolved" problems and questions - but a little more study will find that someone half a century or a century ago actually did figure it out. But people can't easily find those books today.

Since marketing is really finding what problems people want to solve, then telling them where to find (and buy) the solution - it makes the whole idea of making a living from publishing public domain books a no-brainer.

My curse up to this point has been that it is much easier to edit and publish books than it has been to market them. It's much more satisfying to find solutions to problems than it is to convince people that this solution is the one they are looking for.

But I've begun to run out of problems that need solving, and the solutions I've found for marketing (which leverage sales into new heights) have begun to need testing, so marketing tests are next up.

In fact, that's what I'm in the middle of as I take time to write this - but this burning question (of why it was such a short period to get financial freedom) needed answering, so you now have a blog post which does just that.

The moral to this story - publish now, publish often.

That's as simple as it gets.

The only other point to add is that you publish as a series in a narrow genre (or problem area.) Look at Amanda Hocking, J. K. Rowling, Stephen King - all write for a specific narrow genre. If you look at older authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, or H. G. Wells - you'll see that any book they wrote outside of the genre they did best is mostly unknown today (or in their own time.)

The faster you can get books published (yours or someone else's) the faster you'll be able to earn a living publishing.

The bottom line, if you haven't guessed, is that publishing earns income. Writing by itself does nothing until you send it to a distributor who can get it in front of as many people as possible.

Want to an have independent income? Want to write for your living?

Publish.

Now.

- - - -

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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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The genius reason behind the madness of publishing as a home business

Genius publishers can get financial freedom if they want to work hard.

My job is to make it easier by leaving a back-trail anyone can follow.

The idea is to create a self-publishing home-business which earns you financial freedom.

I started on this a few years ago, when I saw that Lulu was getting into the ebook business in a serious way. The logic I saw was simple (and I've covered this before):

1. Most books don't sell well or at all. The chances of getting a true bestseller are slim. 
2. Authors who have a deep backbench of works make more income, particularly if they write for a narrow genre (Stephen King, Amanda Hocking).

In my work with tracing down the workable self-help books, I found that public domain (PD) works which were well-written continued to sell well. Their brand had already been established.

Private Licensed Rights (PLR) books came up when I was studying Internet Marketing. They were touted as one of the quick-and-easy ways of "making money online."

So I did some tests, which Lulu carried my water for - I put up 28 topselling fiction books and 30-some PLR books which I'd collected and already had good covers.

Both sets were published as 99-cent offers and went everywhere I could get them, ignoring Amazon as they had peculiarities. This was Lulu, iTunes, Nook, Kobo, and Google Play/Books.

I started getting sales right off from some of each category. Books I'd put up on Amazon, some based on PD, took almost a year before I started getting any serious income. Then one book took off and still makes me over twice what the rest of the books did combined. Meanwhile, I made enough from the other books to literally quit my day job as all my bills were being paid, plus some went into savings.

I'd achieved Financial Freedom, if not yet a millionaire (my current and on-going project.)

The reason I blog about this is two-fold: 

Helping you get your own financial freedom makes my own freedom grow.

Self-Publishing Lessons Learned

• It's a lot of hard work. And it only expands and becomes more profitable the more you refine your approach. Left to itself, the sales will ebb and flow, gradually working down in time. So you have to keep adding more books and marketing the books you have.
  
• Marketing is enabling discovery. Online, this is making them easily accessed by search engines (SEO) also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM.) While you can run ads, they are expensive and are mostly ignored by online viewers. What is most effective marketing currently are a) Content Marketing (Native Advertising), b) Direct marketing to a list, or c) A combination of the two, such as building a membership from your online presence which builds your list so you can give special offers to those who pay to get behind your "velvet rope."
  
• Because of the work and marketing involved, the actual competition is low. If you look over the bulk of the ebooks available for sale, you'll find that they have lousy covers, and lousy descriptions. Yet these are the two points which people use for buying. Sure, they look at the preview and price, but not the reviews so much, if at all.
  
• You never stop learning and improving. Marketing and the Internet are both evolving at a rapid rate. But the old axiom that 97% of conventional wisdom is bunk also holds true. You need to test everything and look for the 1-3% of recurring truths which keep showing up (providing you are keeping your eyes wide open.)

Why PD books make you money

1. Their audience and word of mouth has already been established - all you have to do is dust them off, repackage them, and make them enticing and available. In short, ADD VALUE.
2. Because 97% of the people on this planet won't take the extra steps to make something succeed, they won't do the hard work it takes to build up these passive income streams. (Actually, they are trained and want a wage-slave JOB so they can pay for their entertainment. That's their life.) 
3. 97% of the wanna-be entrepreneurs out there are in search of the "get rich quick" approach and won't see the Field of Diamonds they are already standing in.
4. In today's world, people want their information pre-digested and summarized. This is why you use a blog to Content Market. What you are offering is solutions to common life problems. It just happens that humankind hasn't changed much in 10,000 years and the writers who successfully told people how to solve those problems left behind their writings. You are just making them discoverable again.
5. The Velvet Rope approach (as Jay Abraham refers to memberships) is how you develop a captive audience who will digest the flow of useful and valuable information you are providing. This is how you can take any of various books and create an "instant bestseller" on Amazon, earning you a tidy sum which will continue for a very long time - even if you don't do much of anything to market it later.
6. Continuing marketing (which most companies don't do, but the successful ones do) of a set of books or course (the "Do You Make These Mistakes in English?" campaign was a great example) is what builds momentum and sales. You don't have to run ads - you do have to keep telling people that you have the solution to their problem(s).

The reason I continue to do what I do

Is to help you earn your freedom. Because the Golden Rule applies - in order to get, you have to give. The route to peace is through prosperity, which is through commerce. We all want a more peaceful life. We'd all be better off if we were rich. To get rich and have peace of mind, you have to help others get rich and their own peace of mind.

The books I publish help you to this end-result - and my end goals.

Your well-being is my highest concern.

Because if you do better, I'll do better - we'll all do better.

A permanent, ongoing world peace is the ultimate goal.

It will happen if we all help everyone around us live prosperous and free lives.

And so, I publish.

You can, too.

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