Track and Prosper - Bitly Redirect Links

Harnessing the Power of UTM Parameters with Bitly - Bitly | Blog

You need to track which of your books is giving you link-love. Particularly, which ones are generating leads, which from from the Look Inside.

Yes, the primary reason for ebooks is Lead Generation (email subscriptions). They suck at generating income, which "conventional wisdom" is still cheering on. (That definition is commonly-accepted, but unexamined beliefs.)  Sure, the top 1% make 6-figures - for awhile. And as long as they keep cranking out popular books. But everyone else makes between $250 and $500 per year. That same old 95-5 or 95-3 or 99-1 percentile split - depending on the data you're looking at.

So you put a Lead Magnet in the front and back of your book so that anyone can find it and come straight to your website and sign up. But you have one Lead Magnet and a few dozen books. Use the UTM parameters (i.e. "http://yourdomain.com/.../?ref=bestseller01" ) to let you know which one is sending you the most leads. So you can somehow figure out how to duplicate that - or figure that you need to run some Facebook Ads to get more traffic to that ebook.

It can work in print books as well, but you have to make sure that your bitly link is memorable, like: bit.ly/bestseller001 or bit.ly/bookclubaaa (hyphens aren't the greatest, and numbers are probably better than letters.) Remember, they have to physically type it in. I imagine that a scan code would come in handy at this point.

[Of course, that led us down another rabbit-hole. Hope you got another beverage while I was gone. Now that we're back...]

You used to be able to get QR codes from bitly, but they quit over a year ago. Google is another recommended one, since they track the links - but don't have a way to download the image. You'd have to copy it, paste it into GIMP (or similar) and then save it, so you could upload it to your print book version. You can copy/paste it directly into LibreOffice, but it goes in at 72dpi and both Lulu and CreateSpace want 300 dpi images or they auto-alert on you.

So, I had to go looking. Found this: https://designmaz.net/best-free-online-qr-code-generator/ which gives you a few free QR code generators. I picked out https://forqrcode.com/ and am happy with it. You can download several versions of it, even upload your own logo as a watermark. Don't know how they make income to support it, but it's there.

Let's recap:
1. You need a redirect link with a UTM on it so that you can track your leads back to the book that sent it.
2. For print books you need a QR code generator that will give you a QR code that is printable.

Now, there is a added tip you can do to get your QR code onto the back cover (so if it winds up in an actual bookstore, someone could scan it there. I'd suggest putting it on the front cover, but it will always cause your designer fits as it's just an ugly box there - besides, you create your cover at around 1200x1800 so it is big enough for Amazon and iTunes, but will scale down for Lulu. The scaling then trashes the QR code. Also, you do one front cover for both ebook and print in my lineup. So your QR code goes on the back. Case settled. Look, it's inside first and last page already...)

You use Lulu to generate your cover for CreateSpace, as their cover generator is atrociously complicated. All you have to do is to use GIMP to cut off the ISBN that Lulu gave you and leave a big white space there.

Now, to get the QR code on the back of your book, you have to make a white background and put it into the lower left-hand corner high and inside enough to not be cut off by trimming. (You'll see how it looks in the preview.) ISBN's are always lower right.  You pick white to make it simple, and easy to read. Yes, you could do other colors, but black on white is the easiest to read - and it shows off your self-publishing roots. ;)

Now, note that this is all untested. Lulu and CS will tell me if I screwed up their cover system, and then I'll tell you. Otherwise, make sure your back cover text fits above the barcodes.

So, yes, I'm recommending you create your Lulu paperback first and then download and modify that cover for the CS version. Your CS version goes out through Amazon's systems, but only to Amazon itself. Your Lulu paperback (which is almost always more expensive than CS) gets the extended reach so it goes everywhere else. This is simply because you want to get the Amazon sales, the Prime delivery and all that. CS still is having reports of quality issues, so you don't want to bet the farm on them. Also, if B&N wouldn't accept Tim Ferriss' CS-printed book, then I'm not going to take chances with the independent booksellers who are even more prejudiced against anything Amazon.

(And that attitude has helped me leave a lot of money on the table over the past few years, a scene I'm just starting to rectify.)

[Update to this post: QR codes are a pain inside a book. 1-bit images need to be 600 dpi to work. You'll first find this in your Lulu rejects, having to wait as long as 24 hours for CS to get to your submission, another reason for Lulu to be first in your workflow. However, they could be useful on the outside - anyone at anytime in the future could find that book and scan it. See sample below. Still testing, though.]

- - - -

Is there a future for this Podcast?
As for podcast episodes, it looks like they are really over for this particular show. I am uncovering very few new tips and tricks to tell you about how to publish your books. Just not finding many. And this blog isn't about getting tips to newbies - there are plenty out ther. I'm not simply going to be regurgitating stuff in order to just have a podcast. Because, as you've been seeing, I'm into the business of publishing. And that is keeping me very, very busy. (After I published that first couple of hundred books, it's gotten pretty routine, you can imagine.) The tips above are about all I've found for the last month or so. This one on bitly came up tonight, and I needed a break, so...

The planning is to turn this blog over into one which is about "Classics You Should Know" - which will be simply reading off the short descriptions of the books I release. 4000 characters is about 500 words, which in turn is 2-3 minutes. 5 books a week, 5 podcasts M-F. 260 books in a year.

Just my kind of challenge.  The math on it is pretty wild, too. 6- figures and all that.

OK, another tip: 
Ebooks, especially, especially, especially on Amazon, are completely over-saturated. At least the broad categories. You have to find small profitable niches (and why I published that last short read about short reads) to generate any income at all. Steve Scott is into the habits niche, for example.

The continuing money is and continues to be in paperbacks. And that is, from my last work up, a great part of Scott's income. But I've always told everyone to have everything everywhere. (And like Scott, I'm working out how to get into translations, but not leave as much money on the table as Scott did.)

Amazon has gotten so bad for PD books, I'm even considering giving Kindle versions away for free on my site. At the very least, I'll bundle the .mobi, .epub, and PDF files together for one low price. The person will just have to learn how to side-load their own books, which isn't all that difficult (and I'll have downloadable instructions and also include these in the files for each purchase.) You can do this with Ganxy or Sellfy, but you pay a nice chunk when you sell on your own - which is why they take 10%, because Paypal very nearly does when you get below $10 or so. (Math it yourself - take off 30 cents and then take another 2.99% - it adds up.)

Other updates:
Now, the idea of porting your content into all sorts of formats mainly stopped with ebooks, print books, cover images, PDF's (Slideshare) and LinkedIn articles - oh, and podcasts. IFTTT makes sure the content goes out to Twitter and Facebook. It's even possible to get IFTTT to port to Buffer and so reach G+ (but it's iffy.) IFTTT also gives it over to five other platforms, which even includes Medium now. The only thing missing is video, and that's because it's huge time-burner with no record of getting any sales or email subscriptions (except, again, for the top 1%.) That should update you on how it's going. It's streamlined quite a bit, even if it doesn't sound like it. When I do an ebook in a single day and link in the existing podcast, that goes out the next day with me doing nothing but post it once. All those places get their version on automatic. My idea of efficient leverage.

Systems.

Use them.

By the end of March or so, I'll have 5 podcasts up regularly going based on audio of the 5 main books I'm marketing this way. Once these audios complete, they simply are started all over again. So they are evergreen. Yes, we'll scrutinize each episode and maybe remaster the audio as needed to update the ads and tweak it here or there. Essentially, though, it just became a marketing system with very little maintenance overhead needed.

So that system works well. I'm seeing some response in the books I offer on Amazon, mainly due to the amount of backlinks which are showing up, as well as all the new short reads I'm creating which all link back to the main book.

My main approach now is to get all possible existing books up on CS with the Lead Magnet in them, as well as QR codes front, back, and outside. That alone should rocket my income. Added to that, I'm planning to put up another hundred or so books.

So you can see that I don't have a lot of time for chit-chat.

Look, keep subscribing to this feed and you'll get a lot of great examples of how to do it. And join the Classics You Should Know book club while your at it. You'll get a free membership to LiveSensical.com when you do (if you don't already.)

Well, I'll let you go for now. Just thought you could use this tip on bitly codes (and the new stuff we just learned on QR codes for paperbacks.) Plus the updates.

See you around.

PS. Email me or leave any questions in the comments. Google usually tells me when there is something to handle in that area. I try to answer them all and my email to. In the otherwise idle minutes I have laying around...

PPS. What I am doing is to start a "Classics You Should Know" book club. Click that link and sign up today. No spam, just great books delivered weekly.

Related articles

• Getting Your Book Published and Marketed: Actions List - Case Study 03
• How to Build a Public Domain (Self) Publishing Assembly Line
• How to Post Your eBook to Multiple Distributors - Ease and Profit
• How to Edit a Book Into Shape and Stay Sane
• How to Publish a Dozen Books in an Afternoon.
• Getting Booksales on Amazon - and Everywhere Else

Solving Competition and Making Profits by Indie Publishing

Competition Can Be Both Good and Bad For Indie Publishing -  Particularly With Public Domain Books

(photo: Ronel Reyes)

Some ebook distributors don't want you competing with other titles, others encourage it. Amazon and Google seem to be at different ends of this scale.

Publishing the same books to both of them shows why.

Amazon hates Competition

Just finished up a rant on getting a reject from Amazon (that made 5 out of a recent batch of 30.)

What this showed was that you want to only submit unique titles to Amazon for them to process as Kindle ebooks. On hardcopy books, they don't (can't) care. If you go head-to-head with an ebook which Amazon itself is selling or giving away, you lose - unless you change the title radically so it's now a "different" book.

The two solutions to dealing with Amazon are to a) Submit content with only new, radically different titles from the original - which includes "(annotated)" or "(illustrated)" tacked to its end, or b) Offer collections of ebooks, which also have titles which aren't in their database of books.

The titles are the key.

Google likes Competition

But on the other hand, submitting those same books to Google Play/Books showed the opposite. Google took them without question or reject.

With Google, you profit when they send people to your ebook and they buy it via Google - or are sent to Lulu to buy your hardcopy book. And in this case, you want to have the exact same title, or very close. Because then you fit into their search patterns for "other editions". And getting your book so Google will index it and send people to you - that is the Holy Grail of online marketing.

Here, having the same title works to your advantage - since Google now sends them to your ebook and your flashy cover shows up better than the stodgy versions that are sitting there. If they want your hardcopy instead, it's just a click away. (And when you sell a hardcopy book on Lulu instead of through Amazon, you can make 2-3 times the income off the same book.)

The titles don't matter.

Caveats

A couple of caveats here: for both Amazon and Google, it doesn't matter if the epub itself is called something slightly different than the book cover.

When you upload your epub to Google, they read it for the embedded meta-data, which includes the title - and so match it up with other books that have the same title.

Amazon takes the meta-data you give it when you submit via KDP. So you could have two titles for the same epub, in theory.

This isn't true for hardcover books. I've had to re-proof books on Lulu going out through their Global Reach where the title page of the book didn't exactly match the cover - at least the title and subtitle and author(s).

Your meta data has to match your cover on iTunes and Amazon, not so much everywhere else. Since we are dealing with an assembly line here, it pays to be excruciatingly honest.

How you win on both counts.

It's all in your marketing. The whole point of commerce is to add value to people's lives. Your bliss has led you to books which are out of print, or poorly offered. And you've done your research to find out that they are in an area which people will pay good money for those solutions. You know where you want to go in order to add value and get rewarded for your efforts.

The trick is in what you are offering.

Ideally, you create a single book which is published everywhere. Just assembly line your batch of books for this area and get them all ready.

But Amazon doesn't want what you post freely to Google, iTunes, Nook, Kobo, and everywhere else (that accept PD books.)

Solution:

1. Edit the books into shape with new covers and nice descriptions, etc. 
2. Post these to Google, iTunes, Kobo, Noot - everwhere except Amazon (yes, the hardcopy versions will show up there, anyway.) That's unless Amazon doesn't have that title in their Kindle database.
3. Create collections of these works and give these unique titles and flashy covers/descriptions, as usual - and post these to Amazon as well as everywhere else. (Now your 6 books can become 9 or more...)

Everyone wins at this.

• All your readers get high-quality books in the format(s) they want.
• You choose the races you want to win, and win all the races you choose. 
• The race tracks have their nice little races just the way they want them.

Have fun with this...

Related articles

• Tips to Increase Direct Sales From Google Play/Books
• Why all these books and what will you get?
• How to Post Your eBook to Multiple Distributors - Ease and Profit
• How to Publish a Dozen Books in an Afternoon.
• Lulu gets finicky about publishing ebooks - tsk, tsk.
• How to publish public domain books and profit nearly forever

Market Research Starts With Amazon?!?

Indie SOHO Publishing needs market research to succeed. Start with Amazon.

(graphic: Chris Piascik)

Why? Because they will tell you if your book as even a fighting change of breaking into the big time.

While Amazon has been consistently shrinking their market share (now below 50%) they are still the godzilla in the room. With some "nutting-out" you can find all sorts of interesting data here.

Sure, I'm no great example of what I'm saying here, but when I got a bestseller there, it kinda tipped me off to making real money.

My own stats had me making 2 and 3 times on almost every other site besides Amazon for the first year, and then one of my books took off. I doubled down on that with print versions and an audio book, so this has now reversed, as Amazon is making twice to three times what everyone else is bringing me. Yes, it's a bestseller in its category.

These tests are most all with public domain books. Which is said to be a tough row to hoe.

Reason being is that any search of many books will find that someone at Amazon has already taken tons of books (usually from Gutenburg) and made them available for free downloads. So any popular book you want to reproduce is probably already there. (I think this was an early strategy to popularize Amazon itself, by giving away all these free books.)

What Amazon needs

What Amazon is looking for is not just more of the same, but actually distinctly different books. And it's not just another cover. Mainly, it's in the title.

All my research pointed to that one scene. A small test I did gave me quick approvals of books which were now arriving with a slightly new cover, but plainly PD books. (The other change was not to put my own name as the copyright, but a publishing imprint.)

But that's given that there are already other versions of your book out there. That isn't necessarily the case, but with PD, it usually is.

I did some research recently which backed up the strategy of using binders to increase value and get a product up which Google will accept simply.  One of the two books had two different Kindle versions up there. And yes, they both were the same book with different titles (as well as covers and descriptions.)

The simple solution was to build a book which had an extra or bonus in it. One book I created had an article from a magazine which was related to the book. Another included a small book which had also been articles in a magazine earlier. In this last case, both titles were used, and both authors - so that the SEO value would be better. The two books complimented each other, of course. Adding value, always.

In another case, this book was wanted from the view of the small niche I was targeting, but simply wasn't represented online at all - so publishing it is simply not having to change anything at all. Nice.

The real interesting scene I've run across several times is where a "textbook" publisher has the only version of a book out there - and is charging a few hundred bucks for a simple text. I have a test on this right now, where I have not only ebook, but tradepaperback and hardback as well. (It's key to raising cattle, my other lifestyle, so that justifies it.) If these sell at all well, it opens the door to some fascinating price-wars to grab some of that traffic. The real problem is that it's keeping some very valuable data out of the hands of farmers who could be using it meanwhile.

Upcoming projects?

There is a project I haven't gotten back to, which is to take the top 25-30 all-time topselling PD books and create "study guides" by adding a section to each which gives tools on how to improve as a writer. The idea overall is to create a mailing list and a challenge for someone to read each of these in an average of 2 weeks, then get the next book in the series. That project is a fair distraction from what I'm into otherwise, but these books are a key part of my income otherwise (mostly at .99 price-point) so this could raise my income markedly if they were a success. The trick with these is that there are already so many versions out there and they've all become commodities.

(I did a test recently by creating a 3-book collection of the top erotica novels, in conjunction with the "50 Shades of Grey" hubbub - I'll let you know how that turns out. "Her Secret Needs" Tradepaperback. Ebook.)

Simple How to Publish (PD) Tips for Amazon 

For all the warnings and what-not, this is the simplicity of what it takes to publish Public Domain on Amazon.

1. Pick books which are in demand, niches which are profitable. Be suspicious if you see no book competition at all. Do your homework - start with Amazon.
2. Only take the 35% royalty. (They'll eventually bite you on this, so go for more volume.)
3. Change the title slightly.
4. Publish under an imprint. The checks cash just the same.
5. Make sure you use striking covers and gripping descriptions.
6. Always improve the quality of life of your buyers.
7. Publish everywhere else as well, in addition.

PS. If you want to work at it, you can reverse engineer all the free books from Amazon - but it's easier to get quality free public domain content in epub format. And sometimes the .mobi/.azw books don't translate accurately. 

PPS. Geekalert. Simplest way to combine two books (or more) is in Calibre. See this writeup.

Related articles

• Free and LEGAL images for your bloggin' pleasure
• "The Valuation of Unprotected Works: A Case Study of Public Domain Photographs on Wikipedia"
• Help:Public domain image resources
• How Great Books Get Forgotten
• Why study classic fiction? To improve your real-world results.
• How to publish public domain books and profit nearly forever

How to Throw Away Perfectly Good Marketing and Make No Sales

What to Do When You Have Legacy Brand Mojo

(Artwork: Wacky stuff)

Public Domain publishing is profitable if 1) you take advantage of the brand awareness that already exists, and 2) you don't do something stupid to make it undiscoverable.

Right now, I'm just finishing up the publishing of a long out-of-print classic which has an underground following and tons of positive reviews.

The funny stuff is that someone took great pains to find and market the earliest version of it he could find, only to throw it away by changing both title and author.

Oh yes, he did.

It meant that anyone looking for the book couldn't find it. And while he was trying to sell it as an "exclusive" PDF, it was showing up all over the place in various formats under it's new name. (But not, interestingly, under it's original title.)

I researched the book and of course found that this 1957 book had never been renewed under that name or title. So I went ahead and converted one of the free Internet versions and published it. Not too surprisingly, I started getting sales.

Then that guy contacted me, all pissed off. When we talked it through, (and I explained how public domain copyrights worked) he said I just needed to change the title, as it was "his". So he told me the original title - and sure enough, it also had never been renewed. Also, there were a lot of positive reviews about the book with the actual author's name.

Regardless of the fact that this guy was missing out on all these sales by getting it up and on the major ebook distributors lines, the point that he was marketing it as an unknown book by an unknown author put it back at square one for marketing.

Of course, he also edited this new title all through the book, so I had to re-edit the book and get a book sent to me by the library system so I could check to see what other changes had been made. Unfortunately, all I could get what a 3rd edition - but the editing which had been done wasn't major and showed me what had to be fixed. Mostly a search-and-replace job.

The lesson is this: these authors spent a lot of time and effort (and many times lots of advertising dollars) getting that book known and sold (or their publisher did.) That is branding.

When you simply put a new cover and updated description on a book, making it available in all sorts of modern versions (ebook, tradepaperback, even hardback) - then it takes off based on the original popularity.

When you change the title and change the authors name, just take yourself out back and give yourself a swift kick in the posterior - or shins. Because that's less painful than shooting yourself in the foot - which is what you just accomplished.

Build your new marketing on the existing brand awareness of both the book and the author. Amazon and Google look up these reviews and put them with your book if you use the original book's title.  So this puts you miles ahead.

And makes your book start selling right off.

What helped me get ebook sales even with the new title and author? The preview - because when they started reading it, the author's original great content still sold them.

Now that I have everything back to where it started, I figure it should really take off. I might even have another Amazon bestseller on my hands - simply because this is one of those public domain books which has no competition from the other PD resellers.

That other guy could have done this.

Now you can.

Related articles

• Where publishers ought to be behind libraries
• Are there Professional versus Amateur publishers?
• The new and streamlined assembly line for book publishing online.
• DIY Audiobooks for the Self-Publishing Authors - a Review of Sources
• Summary of Getting Started: Lists and Sequences
• The Copywriting Classics Publishing Post-Mortem

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.

Related articles

• Updates to Online Publishing - Easier Than You Think...
• The Marketing Books You've Always Wanted Are On Their Way...
• Why study classic fiction? To improve your real-world results.
• The Acid Test to Anything: Did You Help?
• How to publish 4 ebook versions simultaneously on Lulu, iTunes, B&N, and Kobo
• How to Build a Public Domain (Self) Publishing Assembly Line

The new and streamlined assembly line for book publishing online.

Anything can be automated, even book self-publishing.

(Photo credit: Pascal)

We aren't' talking about how you publish books by machine, but we are talking a pretty set procedural system to make your publishing life continue easier. Publishers publish many books. Use the same series of steps to get you many books which all sell well. In short: an assembly line.

Your overall goal is to get a volume of books published to serve a particular niche. A volume of books, such as a series, is how any author makes (or has ever made) real money. The authors who only ever wrote a single bestselling book usually got famous after they died - check it out.

My approach has been to test the self-publishing lines with other people's books. And it's gotten me financially free. I can do whatever I want and still get the checks deposited to my account with no other work. (So if I need to take a month off to renovate a house, I have that option. Like what I'm just wrapping up instead of keeping this blog more active...)

Earlier, Lulu used to do a decent job with whatever you threw at them. When they expanded to include Amazon and Kobo, they got picky.

My recent reject:   •   Our retail distribution partners no longer accept content that is freely available elsewhere, including but not limited to public domain material, content aggregated from online sources, and content that is identical to existing publications by other authors or publishers.

Lulu, like Smashwords, only wants to distribute original works. But they will publish your book on their own store for you.

A General Series of Publishing Steps

0. When you are publishing, you have to have the publishing mindset.  You aren't an author, you aren't an editor, you are there to publish books. Publishing also means marketing.
1. Select your niche. Best if this is something you are absolutely fascinated and love to find out new information about. Something you could talk all day about. Research this thoroughly with Market Samurai or something similar to find out the demographics, potential profit, keywords, etc.
2. Find some books which add value to this area. Many PD books have been poorly marketed now that they are in the public domain, and many have never been marketed well. The push to create ebooks has resulted in a bit of a boom-town mentality, which you can use to advantage. But don't stop there. More value is needed.
3. Create some great value in the books. Find a set which make sense (same author or same area or fills a missing need.) Get these into shape so they are available. You'll also be publishing in many formats, which helps to bring more authority to these books. Also consider publishing a binder or collection of ebooks - in addition to the single volumes. All books get hardcopy versions as well as ebooks.
4. Get these edited into shape. I'd say publish around 5 books at once is simplest. Watch out for Mission Creep. I've started with 7 and wound up with 13. Too many and you start losing track of details. The money is in the details.
5. Distribute these books. Print version via Lulu to Ingrams, Amazon, etc. Get your ISBN for that version through Lulu, then go ahead and publish your ebook version. If PD or PLR-based, don't distribute through them. The other distributors are Google Play, iTunes, Nook, Kobo. You can publish PD books on Amazon, and that takes more details than this one. Overdrive is another. Also, consider publishing PDF version on Scribd (if it's not already there) and DocStoc. Once you have published many, many books, you can qualify to publish on Overdrive.
6. Part of your distribution will be creating a landing page for every book, which is part of the ebook itself (they'll have the link in front and back to go to for more material and related books.) Google also want's this link to send people there to buy it.
7. Create a podcast, presentation PDF, and video (from those two combined) for each book and publish these everywhere you can. Slideshare for the presentation PDF, as well as another 8 or so other doc-sharing sites. Ship the video to as many different places as possible. (The search engines don't consider these duplicate content.) Consider getting an audiobook made for each book. There is also an upcoming release of Pixxfly which will do your distribution and syndication for you.
8. While you promote the book via Google+ when you publish, you'll then also go further to get social signals by using Synnd. These "prime the pump" so that the search engines find the landing pages and push people onto the sales pages of the distributors.
9. If you want more traffic, buy ads from Stumbleupon.
10. Create an opt-in lesson series to build your audience and collect their emails by permission.
11. Offer that list special deals on print versions to your list (you can create private address hardcopy books via Lulu at a much lower cost) and similarly sell ebooks that way.
12. Start blogging about each book, with chapter excerpts and reviews. Ensure you also put these up as PDFs on Slideshare and other doc-sharing sites. Review each book in the series and add any additional data about the author as well as your own thoughts about how people could use these to improve their lives - or be entertained, at least.
13. Set up a digital set of these on affiliate sales sites and promote these to your list as well - if they like the books, they can make some extra income promoting them.
14. If you're energetic, you can create an "evergreen launch" which is a set of videos which give a special offer to those who arrive on that page. Affiliates love this if they convert well.

About this point, you start your next set.

Key points to this self-publishing assembly line

a. You add value always.
b. You publish everywhere possible, in all formats possible. Let the distributors do the sales for you.
c. You use Search Engine Marketing to get your books discovered on the distributors. (Affiliate sales sites are just additional distributors.)
d. You build your audience by collecting email addresses - which can be used to create "instant bestsellers" on Amazon.
e. The whole thing has to fit together hand-in-glove. Your next book series has something to do with the earlier series you just finished. Narrow your focus to exactly what you like to talk about most - and become an expert in this area.

I've got more to do in order to flesh out this scene. The above is the broad strokes of how to market your book as you publish it. An overall hidden point is that the book you publish isn't the end-all - it's just the beginning of a journey for you and your readers.

Related articles

• How to Publish a Dozen Books in an Afternoon.
• The Copywriting Classics Publishing Post-Mortem
• How to Post Your eBook to Multiple Distributors - Ease and Profit
• The "Eyeball" Marketing Strategy for Self-Published eBooks
• A Comparison of Distributors - Who's on First?
• Lulu gets finicky about publishing ebooks - tsk, tsk.

Update: The Distributors Discriminate (against your profits.)

In any book sales, it's bulk vs. originality. There's room for both.

(Photo Credit: Phil Roeder)

Viable book sales depend on volume of books first, quality second, originality third. 

But this isn't how the distributors see it. No reason for you to lose at this.

Yes, I've been busy and haven't kept up with keeping you informed. Sorry.

I've had some home renovations get in my way, which has kept me from publishing for a couple of months right before Christmas. The good news is some insanely cold weather allowed me to bundle up in front of my computer and play catch-up.

The Recent Book Publishing Project

I was doing yet another test. Just before I went into hand-on carpenter-plumber-electrician-builder-mode, I had been working up about 70 books to publish. These were all PLR (private license rights) or PD (public domain) books, along the lines of my interests, as well as harvesting any and all books I had sitting around on my hard-drive.

This was based on earlier tests a couple of years ago which gave me financial independence so I could publish books full-time and not have to work for anyone anymore.

The short-version results:

• The good news is that it's still relatively easy to find, edit, and publish books.
• The bad news is that it's not as easy as it used to be.

The bottom line is that aggregators punish non-original book submission. They simply won't send them on.

However, the individual distributors still readily accept all sorts of books (except Amazon, which needs it's own post.)

These 70+ books were submitted through Lulu, which used to forward PLR and PD books to iTunes and Nook readily. Since they got Amazon and Kobo on board, they don't. While only about a third of the books got through Lulu's conversion process (they all pass epubcheck) all were rejected in distribution. PD and PLR alike.

All of them.

Lulu has started to fail as an aggregator. 

Here's what they said in the reject:

  •   Our retail distribution partners no longer accept content that is freely available elsewhere, including but not limited to public domain material, content aggregated from online sources, and content that is identical to existing publications by other authors or publishers.

Their loss.

First, they have gotten lousy revenue deals with Kobo and Amazon - you receive less than 50 percent of your price if you go through Lulu to get to them. Individually, both Kobo and Amazon will pay you 70% revenue (minus VAT for EU sales). We've known for some time that the highest profits were from publishing direct and to as many distributors as possible.

Second, they are now refusing to distribute anything except original content anywhere (per this test, anyway.)

Third, a perfectly good epub usually won't get accepted (but you can get the free ISBN from them. The reason is the changes they had to make in their automated review script.

They still have a use in this process, though.

What is Lulu's best use? Publishing your hardcopy books.

Yes, still get your free ISBN's for ebooks from them. But back up your ebooks with hardcopy versions via their Global Reach. It's simple, cheap, and you'll get PD and PLR books into Amazon where you can't get them in as ebooks.

And revise your bulk-publishing plans.

There are only two distributors I know which will take a bulk of books:

• Google Play/Books
• Overdrive (yes I owe you a post on this one, but it's still in progress...)

Everywhere else, you have to submit your books one at a time.

But everywhere else (except Amazon) will accept PD and PLR books directly.

This then leads you right into a sensible marketing plan and out of any idea of building a deep backbench of titles quickly.  Yes, it's the end of an era, but a new door opens.

I have another project, which is taking the 100 all-time best-selling PD books and republishing them everywhere, including Amazon.  But instead of getting 100 ready, I have to do them about 5 at a time.  Because Lulu used to carry my water, but now won't.

Meaning you can make more money off each book, but have to work harder.

The good point is that you can adjust to the various distributor demands as you go. Better than having to go back to revise all your books based on yet another change (like Lulu just did for us all.)

And even better, your marketing can keep up with your publishing. (More or less.)

In an ideal world (like you write and publish original stuff) you'd take your few books, publish them everywhere individually, create spin-off promotion like PDF excerpts and video-trailers, then promote them on social networks, while building your audience from each release.

For PD, PLR books, my marketing has been short-changed, since I have been concentrating on getting a deep backbench built. So I've been missing sales as the books are not readily discovered other than the "also-bought" and "also by this author" algorithms. As well, I've been avoiding Amazon as they really don't like PD or PLR books. (In fact, I discovered that Amazon has created free versions of most of the commonly popular PD books. PD books simply won't get accepted there.)

Which means you are going to spend a much greater time editing and adding value to every PD book you post there. (Another post upcoming which expands on this...) The key is that when you find a valuable niche with PD books, you create a campaign from the beginning. Books are just one part of helping people improve their lives. Publishing is not the end-all.

The Full Book Marketing Cycle

What I've gotten worked out so far is relatively simple:

1. Deep Bbackbench
2. Multiple Eyeballs
3. Social Proof Promotion
4. Audience Velvet Rope
5. Everyone Wins Better

Deep Backbench - profits are made from multiple titles in a series. So find and publish many, many books in your niche area. Add value to each one to make them distinctive and not a commodity.

Multiple Eyeballs - publish them to as many distributors and in as many formats as possible. ebooks, paperbacks, hardbacks, PDF's, videos, audiobooks, images. People prefer different versions of your book. Plus, all these link to each other and build authority.

Social Proof Promotion - get these versions known on social networks. If you can, get and use Synnd this. A new one, Pixxfly, is upcoming and will be a game-changer in this area.

Audience Velvet Rope - build your audience using a membership. Means you can now talk directly to them with emails. The Rainmaker platform seems the best for this right now.

Everyone Wins Better - incorporate affiliate sales into your mix, so people can promote your book and get a split of the income for themselves. Readers can become evangelists. This can also be expanded in to product launches, which point to "evergreen" launches as least time-consuming.

There's a whole book coming up as I build and test this scene for you. Yes, it's been years. Above is the short version of the strategy I'm working.

Even shorter:

1. Publish lots of books.
2. Promote them to search engines (lots of fresh content and social proof.)
3. Collect email addresses with permission.
4. Use launches and affiliates to expand sales.

Batch publishing is best:

Finding a niche,
finding helpful PD or PLR content,
editing these into acceptable and value-added shape
publishing them everywhere you can
promoting them via search engines and social networks
setting up a membership backend with ecourse on autoresponders
building evergreen launch systems, which encourage affiliates to help you (as well as your loyal fans.)

Obviously, working with around 5 books at a time would make the most sense - as you can them keep your marketing up to date.

My approach is to build the backbench first, and then market based on what has already proved to get sales - letting the distributors show me which books are worth my time investment (especially PLR books, but also long-tail PD books.)

-Whew-

OK, I've got more electrical to do today. So that's all for now.

Luck to us all...

Related articles

• How to Post Your eBook to Multiple Distributors - Ease and Profit
• Lulu gets finicky about publishing ebooks - tsk, tsk.
• The Marketing Books You've Always Wanted Are On Their Way...
• How to Build a Public Domain (Self) Publishing Assembly Line
• How to publish public domain books and profit nearly forever
• Self-publishing to iTunes - Simple or Extreme?