Why digital sharecropping is doomed - and other notes on moving to Rainmaker

Thought I could get away from this for awhile while I move to Rainmaker, but moving makes dust - and dust makes you sneeze. Here's some sneezes I've been supressing:

Why digital sharecropping is dying and will take you with it.

Got a comment on one of my other blogs about how he was going along publishing public domain books on Google Play and suddenly got kicked off. So that income line is permanently down for him, from what I gather.

I imagine that his problem is in not having already built his audience. You build your audience, find out what they are interested in and then produce the books in the format they want. Along the way, you also publish the distributors like Google Play, Amason, iTunes, etc.

This is a lesson I'm only just learning - probably just in time.

An old (March 18, 2013) podcast from Entreproducer with Eric Reis pointed out that many times, when you are trying to fit into Amazon's mold, you're actually throwing away income. Think about it - where does Amazon want you to price your book? $2.99 to $9.99. That gets you into their Kindle program, which is a walled garden. Reis sold his as a PDF with lifetime updates, for around $20 - and is still making income off it (at the time of this recording.) He didn't like Amazon because they were forcing him to put his book up against similar titles priced at $4.99.

In short, Amazon is trying to make a commodity out of your books. The original ones. (Amazon's weird policies on public domain books is odd, in that they are already commodities and given away for free on the Internet elsewhere. You'd think they'd want to encourage people to add value and submit truly higher-quality versions and then let the market decide. Control freaks? Possibly.)

The bottom line is that like most of the "free" blogging sites, they are just using you as a sharecropper while they own the field you farm. At any time, they can capriciously kick you off and quit paying you anything. (And they remind you of this every single time you submit a public domain book - one of the reasons I haven't published to them since.)

For those of you who have never farmed: Sharecropping is doing the work and getting a small split of the profit. The land owner pays for the seed and fertilizer. If you also live on the property, that rental is usually taken out of your profit. In the post-Civil-War South, this was a solution that turned out to be just above slavery, since it still kept you on the plantation and too broke to save up and own your own place. It was security, and a living - after a fashion...

Wordpress, Tumblr, Weebly - all these tend to be tenant farmers for sharecroppers, as they need your content, but they don't need you. (In fact, several of my Wordpress blogs became orphans because they suspended my account, but not the blog - hint: set up several accounts under different emails and cross-connect the authors to the  blogs.) What they constantly push at you is to pay them monthly for the privilege of publishing there - and over-charge you for getting that domain you want (which they own, not you). Once a tenant, always a tenant.

Wordpress has been particularly bad about shutting you down when you put affiliate links into your content. But they run their own ads on the site.

Blogger is at the other end of the scale, since you have to enable Adsense ads to run and Blogger doesn't care what you link to. And they encourage you to get your own domain name while they host your blog for you. That's why I've been using them, until just recently...

You want to have someone else host your blog and take care of the backend, while you then build your audience. Blogger does this pretty well, but it's quite limited to what it can do. If you integrate Gumroad, you can get membership options and email capture while you sell your own digital products that they deliver for you. And if you're just starting out, that's probably the best way to get started. Later you can graduate up to Rainmaker or some higher-value hosting.

If you own your own domain, and pay for the hosting, you don't have the headaches of maintaining a site with all the updates, and your content is owned by you. Means you own the title and land you're blog sits on and you can make as much profit as you want from it.

Is there a use for Sharecropper blogs? Sure - you can get traffic from these communities as they all have their various audiences. Using IFTTT, you can syndicate your content from an RSS feed of your main blog over to Blogger, Wordpress, and Tumbler. The same strategy applies to posting there - no affiliate links, but you can link back to your own site - and post regularly if not daily, keeping your posts about whatever is trending so that it will show up in their recommended feeds. There is no duplicate content penalty, actually. Post on your own site first, then everything else will show up afterwards - Google will value the date-stamp of your original post as the one they need to show highest. As far a link-love, these free blogs don't give you much push - but someone searching within those networks for your keyword may clickthrough to that post and then your own site, which is where these bring traffic. It will be up to you to convert that traffic.

Moving to Rainmaker - bit by tedious bit

The reason I've been using Blogger blogs for so long are just a couple:

1. As above, they host for free and don't shut you down.
2. Inherently, publishing on anything connected to Google couldn't hurt.

This has left me with several dozen blogs where I've been testing out content and approaches. The whole idea with Rainmaker is to get all those efforts under one roof - in one basket where I could watch it all very closely.

Of course, you have to export everything, set up categories for all those posts, re-do your tags, and so on. Not an easy task. But it's like digging a ditch - you get so many feet done a day and then sleep over night to dig your next set the next day.

One advantage is that I can work these all over as I import them. Right now, I'm simply getting them into their best categories and turning them back to draft. When I'm ready to put these live, then I'll assign tags and restore or replace missing images, etc.

It's happening bit by bit...

Sidebar note: Workaround for audiobooks.

Just so I don't forget this again. There's a way to get around Audible/Amazon's stranglehold on audiobooks. Produce them professionally, as usual, then submit them to CDBaby or Catapult as "spoken word" albums. Keep your artwork and title the same as your books - and then it will show up on Amazon for any search for that title. Not the same as what they do with audiobooks, but you'll get a much higher royalty, can set your own price, and can also on CDBaby get the CD created and sold through music stores. Meaning you get into other audiences than before.

How does this fit into your assembly line? Blog your book and podcast it. Saving your original files, offer these as part of bundles for promoting your book (and have your text version promote the audio version) and also just sell the complete set as a "spoken word" album.

While Audible has an exclusive contract with iTunes for audiobooks, you can apply to Apple to upload and sell your audio directly as "spoken word" and so again bypass Audible's stranglehold.

You can also sell your singles or albums directly via SoundCloud. You can host on Sellfy or Ganxy, as well as CDBaby (which costs a fee for each one.) This means you have extra income from that podcast.

With Ganxy you can also give people a discount for tweeting or "liking" your audio to their followers. Nice promotion work - more eyeballs to see your stuff.

Of course, in Rainmaker, you host right from their platform and sell from it, too. If you want, you can embed Sellfy or Ganxy - but working with the Rainmaker developers should be able to get you a promote-to-pay option.

I'm always looking out for you and your budget. Blogger and Gumroad with Ganxy is a great way to earn enough regular income so you can afford to make the move to Rainmaker. Lean and frugal - that the route to success.

- - - -

Make sure you've opted-in to recieve these updates in your email - you won't want to miss out on a single exciting, white-knuckle adventure in this cliff-hanging account of self-publishing...


(photo: Jeff Nelson, on flickr)

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How to Use Common Sense (and Search Engines) to Market Your Self-Published Book

(Photo: daniel julià lundgren)

Developing a Common Sense Marketing Plan for Self Publishing - Why So Hard?

When something "makes sense", it's when the logic and emotion agree. This is the point of sales, actually.

And sales are hard to get if you go with what "conventional wisdom" is pitching out. Traditional publishers(and all those making money from indie authors) are against you succeeding, really - unless they can make money from you or your books meanwhile.

The story goes back to the days of vanity publishing, but was also just recently showing up with all the Gold Rush (ie. "Get Rich Quick") books that came out on how to self-publish. Even celebrities got involved.

The best one I heard about as a certain celebrity who told how he arduously wrote, proofed, and self-published his book (and told you how you could do it too - for cheap)... and then went out and blew $10,000 on promotion for it.

What? Oh - he's a celebrity. That makes sense. His book wasn't about helping you publish and sell your own books, it was about getting him more well known. That all made sense when I got the punch line. (Then I blocked that guy on all my lines.) Fake.

There I was, working to make sense of all the various advices that were floating around, only to find out that most of them didn't.

Some of these were:

• Use exclusivity of Amazon (and leave at least as much money on the table from other distributors)
• Price your book at .99 (until Amazon changed it's algorithms.)
• Spend half your day communing on social media, being careful not to pitch your book to anyone (which meant you were burning time you could have used writing.)
• Get your friends and family to leave reviews (unless you got caught by Amazon)
• Buy reviews (the infamous John Locke method - with the .99 book.)
• Note: Reviews only work on Amazon, and only partially.
• Blog about your book (while you could be writing your next one.)

Meanwhile, several surveys (like Taleist and DBW and a recent one from the University of London) came out years apart and told a similar set of facts:

• Most authors made about $500 a year (the same amount as belonging to an average MLM "opportunity")
• Most authors have only published a single book, if that.
• Successful authors (making over $10,000 a year) had published several.
• The small (5%) set of authors actually making a decent living had published at least five and all in a series, tightly written for a genre.
• These pro authors spent next to no time marketing their own books, self-published or not.

What?!?

Read that last one again.

Yes, the best-paid writers spent most of their time writing their next book, not marketing.

Other data that came out is that when they could afford it, they sent that book out for editing and got started on their next one. They also hired covers to be done  - once they could afford to do so. So: they could just keep at what they knew best, which was writing.

All this hocus-pocus about doing the social media circuses, guest blogging, virtual book tours, real-life book signings... That was all bunk.

Thanks a lot, guys.

Where real book discovery happens.

• Other surveys about where people discovered books and made their buying decisions said that real-life friends told them about it. 
• Studies of reviews showed that people mostly ignored them.
• For non-fiction books, the next highest result was search engines recommending them.

Now we can get somewhere with this.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) depends on good content well described in terms search engines can use. Various tools tell us where people are looking for solutions and what they are using as keywords. Who is searching where for what is also known - simple site-traffic demographics.

Look at what really works, not what people have opinions about. Opinions are worth what you pay for them.

It's not touchy-feely to get someone to buy something. Sure, you appeal to their emotional desires as part of the copywriting, but it's otherwise just hard-core Search Engine Marketing that will help strangers buy your books.

The only other real consistent scene was to build a mailing list of buyers and maintain a valuable relationship with them. (This became the real secret to Amazon "bestsellers" - get your list to buy it at a low price and leave reviews. This jumps it to the top of their list. If the book is any good, it will stay there.)

One last marketing strategy continues to work, especially for fiction: Price your first book low or free. Regular price for the rest. When you complete the series, bundle them together and sell as a set (while you are busy writing the next series.)

How to SEO your book and not kill yourself off.

Like the old joke - you don't get down from an elephant, you get down from a goose. (Goose down, right?)

Most books ignore SEO in their descriptions, title, and even the web page authors or their publishers make for that book. I even read today that in non-fiction, even the topic and the book itself needs to be SEO'd - using keyword phrases people are searching for. Search engines can now scan within a book itself and do.

One reason may have been that SEO was full of tricks for so long. Most of those scammers have been busted thoroughly at this point. Now SEO is built on valuable content, becoming an authority people can trust for a given area.

It still changes all over the place, but the main approach is still to simply write content people are looking for, using the terms they think apply.

Fortunately, this hits the author in their strong suite - creating content.

The trick - and test - is figuring out how to do this "SEO" stuff as part of creating content. (Which is another reason most people don't do it.)

The one strategy that has always worked: put your target where they are shooting.

Years of working at computers and SEO taught me that simple idea. People are already aiming somewhere - just find that out and put your target there. Of course, in a crowded arena, there are many targets trying to get hit - so you might not be able to get your bullseye in there. Other arenas have no targets - but the shooters also have no intention of hitting anything (no sales.)

The trick in SEO is simply finding where there are some sales, but least effective competition.

I use Market Samurai to do market research - it's a one-time purchase and they keep it updated. They also have a nice training area, a Dojo. That's where you can get started learning about this if you don't know.

A second working strategy - get in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

While this obviously means porting your book to all possible ebook distributors, it also means publishing the paperback, hardback, and audiobook version. Because no two readers have the same preferences.

That also means getting as many formats for each book you publish posted to as many of the major platforms as possible. Your cover goes on Pinterest, Flickr, and major image-hosting sites. Your PDF version goes to Slideshare, Scribd, Doc-Stoc and the other major doc-sharing sites. You create a book trailer: the audio goes to Soundcloud and iTunes, the PDF transcript (which you made the images from) goes to doc-sharing sites, the video itself goes not just to YouTube, but also DailyMotion and the other key video sites.

This is an old technique which still somewhat works - of taking over several of the top rankings for a given keyword because of Google and others wanting to give the most applicable content, in all possible formats - "Universal Search".

The real bottom line is that some people like videos, some like images more. Any of these can be encouraged to find and by your book.

The third working strategy - prime the pump with social signals.

While you can do this with a handful of social syndication sites, such as Hootsuite and Onlywire, even IFTTT - I prefer Synnd. It takes longer, but lasts a lot longer - because its distributed amongst it's subscribers. As well, it's not just you sending out social updates on your own. Read up on it.

The point is that it helps great content succeed. If you just put out salesy junk, then your content will never get support and go viral. You can't prime the pump on a dry well and get anything out.

Getting some social signals being pushed along could give you the tipping point you need.

At very least, since 99.99% of the content out there isn't being plussed or liked, or tweeted about - you'll rise higher on any keyword ranking you may have targeted just because search engines still put some weight on what people are talking about.

With Twitter and Google getting back together, this should see another boom in this area. For those self-publishers who are ready, that is.

The common points to these common strategies:

• You can do them yourself, 
• They'll work as well as you use them.
• You can start with just sweat equity, although some paid tools and services will accelerate your efforts.

It's all part of lean publishing.

Start where you are with what you have, if only an Internet connection and your computer.

Profit from day one, by keeping your costs below your income. A handful of self-published books priced at .99 may only bring you .35 per sale - but that adds up. It's much better than having nothing published and available for sale.

The whole subject of Lean publishing is well represented over at Leanpub, which is where I'd suggest anyone new to publishing head first. (And then buy my books in this area - or read the earlier blog posts here, which contain most of the how-to's I've put into books.)

Set a budget of less than you are making from your books and stick to it. There are some inflated ideas of quality out there which can help you spend thousands on editing and covers. Sure, get some help if you need it, but do a swap or call in favors. Don't spend what you don't have. You can even build an audience using Wattpad without publishing anything at all. That audience can help you clean up your text and vote on possible covers.

Remember, like any Gold Rush, there are people on the sides of the race who make their money selling stuff to the miners - until they run out of money, that is.

The Common Sense Marketing Plan is almost ready.

Because this post is so long already, I'll let you have it next time.

Each section of that will take some explaining. I've already covered a lot of it earlier, but not in one spot. This latest batch has forced me to actually set up an case study that tests all the steps I've been researching.

It's a spreadsheet, and more than a bit of work. Fun, though. And will help you remarket any book you've already published. Yes, that is what I intend to do with those earlier ones of mine - in the order of any sales they've already been giving me.

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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.

- - - -

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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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Solved: Amazon Just Rejected Your Self-Published eBook? No Problem.

Just had a couple of rejects from Amazon - I needed more choices for ecommerce, and found a solution.

(Art: Daniel Broche)

Amazon certainly isn't the only game in town.

When they reject your book, it certainly feels like that.

I had to look over why I was giving so many options for people on my landing pages. There are links there for every distributor I sell my books through. Nook, Google, Kobo, Amazon, iTunes - plus some places like IndieBound booksellers to order the hardcopy from.

The reason they were there was to enable people to get the version they want on whatever device they had. It doesn't matter if they had a Kindle, a MAC, or an Android or Apple smartphone.

The problem Amazon gave me was when they rejected one of my books. It's only happened four times - but that's just too many times. There was one good reason for the first two, none for the next two.

The people who lose out on this are the readers. Now they can't match up the ebook with the hardcopy. They can't get an ebook for their Kindle.

With that in mind, I went over to find a way people could get any version they wanted.

The other option that came to mind was hosting ecommerce on the site, to sell .mobi or .az3 files which could be loaded on a Kindle.

Last time I looked around, it was a complete pain-in-the kahootz to run an ecommerce site.

Ease of use, more features

A new search found a few options. Out of these, there were two which would sell from your own site by just adding a script. Of the two, only one would take PayPal. That made me settle on Ganxy.

They host the file, and keep track of people's downloads - so they can get a new copy for any new device. It's a simple sales script you can put anywhere you want. One per book.

The great part is that when you do a couple or more of these "campaigns", you can offer bundles as well. That then offers up even more opportunities for your readers.

They also offer a pre-release option in order to set up in-advance sales.

Take care with your Search Engines

I was all set to replace my various icons with one of these when I started seeing the problem.

This fancy new sales page is in a script the search engines can't make sense of.

You see, the reason for landing pages is to send link-traffic to the book distributors. Search engine traffic makes your books rank better on the distributors. The purpose of the text on your page is to give the search engines words to work with to make sense of your page and rank it.

And practically, there nowadays are more bots roaming the web than people. So you want your pages to be able to be understood and categorized by them when they come - and come back.

Having a script with the data on it can't be read by the search engines. They see a script, not what it displays. So, keep your text and hard-coded links right on that page. Doesn't mean you can't use the full setup somewhere else. (See below.)

Better sales, better royalties

The real value in this is simply the buy button.

What the reader can buy is anything that's digital. So you can sell them your .mobi or .az3 file, an .epub or .pdf. Factually, you could even sell them a .zip or .exe (although those aren't particularly trusted) and even an app for their smartphone. Anything digital.

You get 90% of the payment. Best you can get out of anywhere else is 70%, and mostly less than that. (Especially if you are offering public domain books...)

Only place close to this is Leanpub, but you have to sell them there.

Of course, you only get the sales you bring to your own site/blog. Not a huge volume of buyers like you get with the distributors. Or maybe you will.

You see, when you get your mailing list, you can give them all the special offers you want through a link like this and everybody wins.

How it went

Here's some screen shots of how easy it is:

Easy sign up. You can even do it with Facebook.

You can do direct sales or special promotions with giveaways.

Upload your digital files - it takes them about 24 hours to clear, as they say.

Connect to anywhere you want to sell everywhere else as well.

You can even collect email addresses.

When you get done, it can look something like this (wouldn't fit on one screenshot).

You can also add a preview and even a video about it - like a book trailer. Nice.

Then you have options to let everyone know about your product - they'll go to a standalone page for it.

And here's the code to embed it. Note - you can turn off a lot of options here, even if you want to use the same script to do your sales elsewhere with all the bells and whistles.

- - - -

The way I'm using it is as a simple buy button, but you can also go to the short link to get everything including the kitchen sink.

And they recommend you send it to Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and all those places so everyone can buy your book that follows you. The full page lets others recommend it as well.

What's in it for you?

• Higher royalties.
• Customized sales pages.
• No hosting and maintenance of your own ecommerce site.

And your reader/buyer gets the version they want.

Note: there's a 2MB upload limit, so watch those PDF's and illustrated .epubs.

As usual - have fun with this...

Related articles

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How to Publish Public Domain Books and Profit Nearly Forever - Part 2

(continued from Part 1)

The How-To Tips of Publishing PD and PLR to Profit From Here On Out

(Photo: Simon Cunningham)

Sorry I didn't give you exact steps last time. (Of course, you can get this from my books, "Just Publish!" [ebook] and "Publish. Profit. Independence." [ebook | tradepaperback])

Here's the simple logic of it... 

The strategy:

• Build a big backbench of titles, 

• Publish these to as many eyeballs as possible. 

• Encourage search engines hock your books for you.

Most authors make their big bucks from creating books for a certain niche in a series. This was the real secret behind (the over-hyped) John Locke and Amanda Hocking, as well as the perennial Stephen King.

These all write to a specific niche and for that particular audience.

You can do the same thing with Public Domain books, even PLR.

The problem with writing original fiction is that it takes a damned long time - like maybe 2 or 3 books a year. So you have to keep your day job meanwhile. Hocking is a hit now in her 20's, but she started in high school. Stephen King only wrote weekends until he could get enough books selling so that he could go full time. (Years and years.) Locke took about 7 years, and profited from loopholes in Amazon's system at the time (you can't even use his cheat-system anymore.)

The other point, particularly in non-fiction, is that there are a lot of great books out there which are poorly marketing and mostly out of print. Where these fall in to the public domain, where they are picked up and re-published, even if the quality is decent, the marketing usually sucks. (Just check out the public domain covers at Amazon for a hint.)

You can take any pre-1923 book and republish it as public domain and profit from any sales from there on out. About 94% of the books published between 1923 and 1964 were never renewed or never registered, so can be sleuthed out (see link) to see if they are public domain.

PLR is similar. No, you can't publish PLR on Amazon. But iTunes, Google Play/Books, Nook, and Kobo will take them as ebooks. And if you publish as hardcopy, they are accepted anywhere.

How to build your PD or PLR publishing empire

Know this, it's both easier and harder than it used to be. I got started by shoving a great deal of works up as a test through Lulu and they ported them to iTunes and Nook for me. They won't do that anymore. You simply have to port them all yourself. Google allows a mass upload, but Kobo is still an individual book-by-book publishing scene.

Using Calibre, you can pretty simply create and edit any ebook. LibreOffice will help convert it to a print version for hardcopies. Lulu will publish just about anything you want to publish, they just won't distribute it. See my two books above (and this blog) to get all the details of it. Calibre improves almost weekly, so it's a great tool that has continual updates.

1. Find your passion, find your niche.

This isn't get rich quick. You are going to be at this for awhile. Publishing is the simple part. And it will pay for the marketing you need to do to leverage your sales into something sustainable.

You have to be fascinated by the subject and interested in finding new things about it, as well as talking to anyone who will listen - and that is really all that marketing is, if you think it through.

So narrow down your passion and find a niche in that passion where people will pay good money to listen to you. Searching on Amazon or Google Shopping is a good start. There's a lot said about too narrow or too broad niches - so study up on this.

2. Get a series of books on the subject which are public domain and/or PLR.

PLR is mostly about Internet Marketing, but there are some great books out there on other topics. Frequently, you'll find a series of articles about a topic. These can be edited into a book (which is where most of the PLR ebooks out there started.) The great value to PLR is that someone has already done the research for you - you just have to re-write it into something useful. Most of PLR has already been published somewhere. I pushed several dozen books up on the main distributors as a test, and they've been selling like most books - a few sell regularly, and some every now and then. None are great hits - but they haven't actually been marketed, either.

Public domain is even easier to find. Start looking at the original publishing date and you can find some great ones. But just because a book has been registered, it doesn't mean the original wasn't already public domain. I found one recently which had it's copyright renewed in 1943, but it's original published date was prior to 1923. 

A point here - make sure you are working with original text. Many public domain books have been edited and additional, newer data has been added. That new data is under copyright, but not the original. (See this discussion at Public Domain Sherpa.)

2a. Make sure they are public domain. 

Use the Stanford database. Simple. Again, visit Public Domain Sherpa.

3. Get a batch of these and convert them into all possible formats.

Told you it wasn't get rich quick. You are going to have to know how to edit, some spelling, and grammar. You're going to have to know how to make great covers, or pay someone to do it. You are going to have to know how to write great copy for the descriptions. (Suggested here is to learn from Eugene Schwartz.)

Note: you want landing pages linked into the ebook versions - even if you don't flesh out those pages right away. People will want to find more books by that author/publisher. You probably want to start a blog or have a website - it's own topic of discussion.

4. Port these books to all possible distributors.

Lulu (get your free isbn's without Amazon discrimination), Google Play/Books, iTunes (needs a MAC), Nook, Kobo. 

5. Additional marketing: 

• Covers to Pinterest, Flickr. 
• PDF excerpts to Slideshare. 
• Create/update book pages on Open Library.  
• BitTorrent Bundle, etc.

6. Now, take your best book in this series (the one you can talk the most about) and make it your representative.

• Discount the price everywhere - not free, but very low. This is your loss-leader.
• You want to take each chapter and create an ecourse out of it. 
• Then you set up an opt-in form for an autoresponder (Mail Chimp is free for the first few hundred subscribers) to enable people to give you their email addresses.
• Blog about all these books in the series so you have landing pages for each book
• Then set up some hidden pages on your blog/site which have direct links to discount books on Lulu.
• Promote these special offers to your list as exclusive specials. Note: set these up so you make some money on each one, but they are obvious values.
• Create videos for each lesson and get these posted on YouTube and Flickr, as well as DailyMotion, etc.

7. For any new book, set up pre-release prices and do proper releases to your mailing list for new books coming out. 

This is the Amazon Instant Bestseller Tactic. If you can get enough people to buy them at a low price, then leave nice reviews, you will rocket your book up Amazon's algorithms and get more sales. If your book is in a particularly narrow niche, you'll rise to their "bestseller" status - but that takes more homework, again - see my earlier books above.

Then if you leave the Amazon link embedded in all your Pinterest, Flickr, and video posts (as well as your blogs) then the returning link-love will also help your standings on Amazon. 

Meanwhile, your Lulu sales, as well as your other distributors' ebook sales will pay for your other marketing expenses. 

8. From there...

• All your books can have special releases on their own. Each re-release can become an "Amazon bestseller."
• You can create binders/collections of the books and release them on their own.
• You can get someone to create an audiobook of your bestseller, and get this on Audible (sold on Amazon)
• You should create hardcopy versions for each ebook as you go - but the bestselling books should be put out into "Global Distribution" via Lulu, so can be sold everywhere. (You can even get a hardback version created via Lulu - which is even better revenue.)
• More ecourses.
• Create digital product versions which can be sold via affiliate sites (such as JVZoo) and iAmplify. Your readers can get paid for promoting your book - and should.
• Weekly blog posts with audio/video will improve the discovery potential for all these books.

(Note: there may be more money in selling courses based on the book, especially in non-fiction. Check out Udemy.)

9. Then: rinse, repeat.

Once you've done all you can for this niche set of books - and carefully published and marketed any additional books you've now found for this series - then you can do the market research to find a new niche (or related one) and do the above steps on it.

Note: now you have a mailing list, so your work can become even more popular and profitable.

The trick is to work our your own assembly line and market as you go. Stick to a simple batch of books before you start any further ones. Believe me, there's a great deal of satisfaction helping people find a long-dead author's work. But you want to get paid for your efforts. So marketing the books is key - and it's what sets you apart from all the other PD re-publishers.

Why this works - Long Tail Marketing.

Mainly because it's self-supporting. Publishing books and doing the minimal marketing of an attractive cover and enticing description will leverage on the existing brand of any author and their books. Distributing as ebooks to every possible ebook distributor should (depending on how profitable the niche/author is) give you regular income to reward you for your work.

When you use modern online marketing efforts to ensure the search engines know about your books, then you fuel a greater fire under that book - which improves discovery. Up to a few years ago, you couldn't find these books other than in a used-book store. And in many cases, this is still true on Amazon.

By creating ebook versions, you are now introducing a new version so people can see if they like it. Then you also offer the hardcopy version, which most people still prefer.

It's all Long Tail Marketing - meaning there are a lot of people out there for any particular niche. You don't have to have bestsellers all the time, but they are nice. The trick is to give your niche some great value continually. As you add on more and related niches, you build a set of inter-referring web pages and marketing content ("if you liked this book/author/publisher, then you may also like...")

This can leverage you into being able to publish full time - when your book sales approach approximately twice what you make at your day job. (That means it will pay for your monthly bills and Social Security, etc.)

For now, just have fun with this.

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