Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts

Friday, May 22, 2015

Your Ebook self-pubilshing future just happened.

This is the future of ebook self-publishing - here and now.

Why wait for the big corporations to get their ebook readers which will support epub 3 so you can have video and audio along with your book?

What GalleyCat said:

“H8 Society – How an Atomic Fart Saved the World”” by 2Dans has seen more than 700,000 downloads since the digital novel was first available through an H8 Society BitTorrent Bundle on May 7th.

The interactive digital novel is a dark comedy featuring 26 indie songs created by 4,000 global artists and graphics from Bill Sienkiewicz, H8 Society Art Director & illustrator, known globally for his work with DC & Marvel Comics.

Music id core to the story and each song helps progress the story and develop specific characters and events. The authors modified the 374-page novel by embedding audio files and social sharing tools to help give readers the chance to share content. Follow this link to download the book.

Here's the description:

About this Bundle
A dark nonstop comedy. A new kind of Book with 26 indie Songs and Graphics by Bill Sienkiewicz.

Join two rival gangs who slam into a secret global society hellbent on taking over the world. Witness the power of love to triumph over hate. Answer the question: can music save your moral soul?

"H8 Society - How an Atomic Fart Saved the World" is a dark nonstop comedy that explores the struggle of love vs. hate, on a global scale, through the lens of two rival gangs that are caught in an apocalyptic American dream.

If music has ever kept a lid on your “inner screams”, then get ready for a wild ride that is filled with unexpected twists and turns - and a nuclear conclusion that proves that love truly is the answer.

What you get for free:

H8 Society - SHORT PROMO.mp4

279.8Mb

H8 SOCIETY - BOOK v1.0 for Mac IOS.epub
175.9Mb

H8 SOCIETY - BOOK v1.0 for PC Android.epub

175.8Mb

H8 Society - Installation Guide for Mac iOS.pdf

1.9Mb

H8 Society - Installation Guide for PC.pdf

771.3kb

H8 Society - Installation Guide for Android.pdf

1.5Mb

And for an email:

H8 Society - LONG FORM PROMO.mp4

568.5Mb

H8 Society - Bill's GRAPHICS.zip

82.3Mb

H8 Society - 26 Artist SONGS.zip

154.0Mb

Imagine your book going out to 700,000 readers!

Get your geek on - and find out how BitTorrent is another major book discovery outlet for your media-content.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

How to Build an Ecourse and What to Have In it.

(Photo: Ruschi)

Building an online course is perfect for giving enough value to get people onto your list (and into your membership.)

That's the key point -giving away real value. Cheap stuff doesn't cut it.

This is another post in our series of outlining a case study of how to publish and sell books.

The logic of an ecourse is that

You want to invite people to your list/membership (see #5 and #6 for why).
You need to give them something incredibly valuable to begin with
So they give you their email
So you can give them more valuable stuff
So they become your captive audience
And will finance your writing, as well as help you edit it into what they want.

You build an ecourse so that most people possible can use it.

This mistake is common.

People like me who live in the boonies don't have free broadband and so videos and audio just suck bandwidth - which we pay through the nose for to begin with.

PDF's on the other hand, take little time to download or read - and you're giving live links they can follow whenever they want, even years later.

Rule: On every lesson of your ecourse:

Text
Audio
Video
PDF transcript
Live links to valuable material and your related books.

See how this goes?

They can read the text, but would get fascinated with the video - or download the audio to listen to later. Same for the PDF.

Of course, they get the original lesson, but that just takes them to the web page on your site.

Rule: Link to your own stuff everywhere

You do give a full lesson by email (few things are more frustrating than having to open yet another browser tab/window - it tends to break your unwritten promise of giving immediate value.)

You do include a link and come-on pitch before the lesson.

And also another pitch and link after the lesson, maybe with a video still image to entice them further. (Did I mention free downloads?!?)

Your PDF has at least as many links as your web page has.

The reason to embed your content - get more authority links

YouTube and Slideshare are known for how much Google loves them.

The funny part is when someone comes to your page, this gives a "view" to all your embeds and raises their ranking on that site.

Meanwhile, those media files have your link in their descriptions, so they are linking to your site - every time someone views those media file pages, some link love goes your way.

And Search Engine Marketing is another term for "book discovery."

What else to have on that lesson page?

You probably don't want to overdo it, but having your book cover and links to the main distributors (as well as a way to buy it directly from you) isn't necessarily overboard.

Links out to the main distributors are mostly to give your book some link authority, so that it will move up that distributor's list.

Should a lesson page remain private?

Technically, no. Unless it's a paid course. Most of the time, people can't guess what the link for the preceding or following lesson is, so having search engines able to put your lesson in their search results just means that it's another chance to get more people subscribing.

This means you need an opt-in for the ecourse itself at the bottom of the page and in the sidebar - with a disclaimer of something like, "New to this ecourse? Subscribe today and get [benefit] - Instant Access!"

This could then mean more subscribers.

More to come

What we've covered here is really only the broad strokes. The value you put in a lesson is what solutions it has for the readers problems.

How to build a video from parts would be the next logical step. Hint: you start with text, create audio and a PDF from that, then combine these into a video. That technical end is a bit much for this overlong blog post.

Subscribe via email or RSS to ensure you don't miss an article.

Monday, April 27, 2015

The Book Income Sales Web You Build

Your Online Book Selling Income is Closer to a Web by Design


(photo: Josef A. Stuefer)

When you sell your books online, you aren't just trying to get them to sell on Amazon. This is actually a bit backwards (even if it's something that Amazon wants you to do for them.)

The better model is that you are the spider in the center of a web you weave - and the distributors simply feed your web - they are not the center, you are.

I realized today that perhaps I haven't given you a model for all this material I've been giving you about how to sell your books using the Internet. You've got lists of distributors, and lists of places to send your PDF's, Audio, and Video promotion pieces.

And you know how to interlink these so that those properties can be recommended by search engines and send traffic to your book's Landing Page and that page gives hard links to the distributors - and all of this resulting in sales, if it's done right.

However, that seems a bit of hard work - especially if you don't see how it fits together.

Let's look at another image of this model:

(Photo: Mike Liu)

You're sitting there at the center of your web, waiting for your book sales to show up (and meanwhile writing your next book.)

Very close to you is your own membership, with it's email list. This is your personal audience and mutual-support network which you care for diligently.

Out from that is the book landing page on your blog where the opt-in form sits.

That landing page links to all the places where your book is being sold, including direct sales of your own. Those are your distribution points, big and smaller.

Out from that are the video sites, doc-sharing sites, podcast directories, book-reader communities - everywhere you've left content and links back to anything closer to you.

The search engines are very busy organizing all of these links so that a person can find your book simply.

If you graph it out, it's not as pretty in organization as a real web, but it is effective.

But you see that the book distributors are out there a bit from you. It's their sales which help you finance your writing. But they are nowhere near the center of your web-network - and they aren't the be-all, end-all of book sales.

How you build your book-selling web

The center is you,
and right out from that is your devoted followers who are part of your membership.
Your blog with all your landing pages are out from that.
Then the distributors are linked from your landing pages,
and beyond those you've created other content which links to those distributors and also link to your landing pages.

For every book, you have a landing page which not only links out to 6 or 8 distributors, but also has embedded video and PDF files, which also link to these distributors. Everything, including the distributors, link to your blog - and that has the opt-in form prominent on every page.

When someone views that book's landing page, signals are sent to the embedded content providers as well - video, PDF - who then upgrade their own notices to the search engines that someone is on that web. Like you have little spiders out there sending people into your web for you. Syndication sites such as Synnd can be utilized to jump start these various social media and alert search engines that something important is happening they should know about.

Try to sketch that out on a flat piece of paper (given that you have maybe a dozen decent video sites, another dozen decent doc-sharing sites, probably another dozen podcast directories - which all link to those 6 or 8 distributors and one or more of your several book's landing page --- and you'll see a very tangled web (without trying to deceive at all, just help people find your book.)

And I haven't included the various posts to a dozen or more social media on the outskirts of everything else.

The real center of your web.

Book distributors sell your books, yes, but more important is their work to get you members.

Because the greatest value comes from being able to interact directly with your membership, like your personal support-group. Those people pay to interact with you and in return, they get access and also help you create content which is exactly what they want.

That is the real center of your web. You and your membership.

Yes, there's a sales "funnel" - of sorts. It does get people to get into your paid membership so you can afford to simply write full-time. You create paid courses and special members-only discounts to your various books. All that usual marketing stuff.

And you enable your members to become evangelists and make your book part of their web, paying them commissions for any sales they get on your behalf. So the web then takes a bigger 3-D scene - as they get their own lists to buy your book. Plus, you also develop an army of affiliate sales people outside of your membership who are selling independently to their own lists.

Huuuge web - which ultimately are offered a membership from you.

Amazon and other book distributors are just one piece of your web and network. And actually, not your biggest pieces.

The key thing to remember is that you aren't here to "make money". You're here to deliver great value. Your income only represents how effective you are at delivering value to others, how you've helped them improve their lives.

That extra income is just a way to afford to be able to reach even more people and help them, too.

This is then a "value web" - the closer they come to you, the more value you can give them, and they better they prosper in their one lives.

Everyone gets more bliss that way. Nice, huh?

- - - -

Does this make more sense now?

Leave a comment either way.

And do be sure to subscribe by email or RSS feed reader.

(Yes, my opt-in form is coming soon...)

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Is there any Real Money in public domain (self-)publishing?

Why you can make a financially free lifestyle with public domain (self-)publishing, but getting rich (quickly) is elusive.


(Photo: Jeneraly)

For several years, I've been evolving the business plan of re-publishing public domain books as an off-shoot of self-publishing, Recent tests with Amazon shows how limited this is.

There has been a profitable business plan at work, using some advantages.

The key advantage has been being able to convert un-owned books to digital and make high-quality versions available. That hasn't been really possible except for the last few years, as the technology and distributors made access possible.

Even today, that remains the advantage, since the books I've recently run into trouble with via Amazon are still not ebooks, although they could be.

The second advantage is that most people don't understand copyright law, even those who have been publishing a long time. So when you know the rules, you can simply bring books to being published that have been out of circulation for a very long time. (You can wind up with people you have to educate, or - worst case - smile, nod, and pull the book.)

This main disadvantage is that people treat public domain like commodities. Anyone else can bring that book in for sale. Amazon did this in their early days to get adopters for their Kindle platform. Lots of books are still available for free through that platform. What they then did was to carefully close that door until it was very nearly shut.

Amazon has the real leverage in this market, being the one place where you can sell both ebook and print versions, as well as audio (while B-and-N still busy shooting itself in the foot.) While still decreasing, Amazon still owns just under 50% of the book market and are the 900lb. gorilla in the room.

How Indie Self-Publishing can give you freedom but not riches.

1. You don't have to pay authors royalties.
2. You don't have to hire people to work for you - low overhead.
3. If you cut expenses to the bone, live frugally, your living costs require less of your income.
4. A low-cost lifestyle, plus a low-overhead small business can mean financial freedom.

I was financially free over a year before one of my books really started taking off on Amazon. That book was an orphan, meaning no one cared enough about that author to ask about it. The title was very, very good, an inspired one I haven't really duplicated. The content was very, very good.

And it only happened once.

Because Amazon penalizes public domain books heavily on their Kindle platform. That book succeeded because it wasn't named for any earlier successful book. People knew the author, and that is still the risk of that book.

It's defense as an orphan is that it's built from transcripts of audio works. You can do this with any audio - the person who first transcribes an audio work - and publishes it - owns the copyright (not true for song lyrics.) It's a hole in the copyright scene. So that book is relatively safe - as long as I don't try to make it a mega-hit and get gold-diggers and their lawyers after me.

The Amazon Profit Chasm

Being on Amazon is a two-edged sword. Your higher visibility brings you more sales, but also brings you more people to challenge your work. All - repeat all - of my copyright challenges have occurred on Amazon. (I did have one DCMA complaint on Lulu which was simply bullying and I let it slide.) The Amazon challenges are always sent to you with a warning that your account is at risk - so they throw salt in the wound as well. Amazon doesn't care about the indie publisher or anyone else. They are there to make money. That is why they continue to lose market share - they aren't building community.

Being able to get a hit on Amazon depends on originality, high-quality content that people talk about, and being able to jump-start your book on their algorithms.

Being able to sell public domain books cheaply depends on having a readily available known book and known author.

While you can sell your public domain ebook on Kobo, iTunes, GooglePlay, and Nook (...and Lulu, FWIW) - Having a hit on Amazon is the night-and-day difference. I got free of a day job when I started regularly selling on these other five distributors. Once I had a single hit on Amazon, it quadrupled what I was making everywhere else. And I was able to invest in an audio version, as well as the print versions, which compounded my profits there.

This freed me up for other investments, like print versions of different books, and testing more extensively on Amazon to open that market.

I also started watching my savings grow.

But Amazon really only wants original titles. Authors don't matter so much. That then takes out a great deal of what makes public domain books profitable - they are known entities which are poorly marketed, with bland covers and pitiful descriptions.

We haven't dealt with how to really leverage sales on Amazon - their open secret.

How to Get Rich With an Amazon Bestseller

They hid this in plain site. And most of the GRQ books tell about it. To some degree, they've swapped their algorithms around, but getting a bestseller on Amazon consists of mainly two factors - and you can control these.

Reviews
Sales

Yes, that's the bulk of it. (There is driving search engine traffic to Amazon, which ranks your books better, but not as significant as those two.)

Books that don't get reviews or don't have appreciable sales are doomed to the long-tail slag-heap. It's easier to get a Kindle book buried on Amazon than any other distributor.

My own experiences showed that my financial freedom was coming from iTunes, Nook, Google, and Kobo sales. And these were proportional to the number of books I had available on each at any given time. Different books sold on different distributors - completely different audience for each.

The one exception on all distributors was that one bestseller I had on Amazon. That title and that author (I'm sure the cover and description helped) were popular everywhere - and the sales on the other distributors were high way before Amazon "found" it.

What made that book a success on Amazon was the regular sales it was getting, and the reviews people were leaving. The text quality was high enough that the reviews were routinely good. The other point was leaving it at a .99 price so it would sell.

Once it had enough sales and reviews, it was featured more, which meant more sales and reviews, etc. A positive feedback loop.

The way to roll your own Amazon bestseller is to have a mailing list you can control to buy your books on Amazon and leave positive reviews.

Do a launch to build excitement, then open the flood gates. Done properly, it catches the algorithms' eyes and sales take off. A jumpstart.

You can even do this with books you published years ago.

What no one really talks about is how to build and maintain that list.

Building the list is the core of marketing. And something I haven't been doing.

All this research on public domain book publishing has been simply by putting ebooks up everywhere I could and seeing what happened.

Meanwhile, I've seem people who have been selling books through building a list go on and have their bestsellers - then translate those into an even bigger list and sell them something else, such as a course or personal coaching.

That is why my work in book publishing is moving to marketing and media production.

The book-sale is just the beginning of the "get rich online" chain.

It's not the end-all you are looking for (or where to find those droids.)

The first key action is setting up a core stable of books, or a deep backbench of titles, which will routinely sell for you. That frees you up to do whatever else you want. You want to break open the self-publishing world to get that stable base. And this has been without really fine-tuning my analytics, but simply looking for books and then converting and publishing them. Getting a massive backbench.

In short, that's how I made my own financial freedom.

The concentration recently is how I break into a higher range of income where I can help others even more because I can afford to.

Meanwhile, I've been studying and collecting resources from people who are actually making an honest living. Sometimes, these two crossed - as when I found that the classics in copywriting told everything that the modern boys are pushing - and publishing these classic texts tended to give me more income.

Otherwise, I've been finding what works broadly and either started using that service or reserving it so that it's ready when I am - again, that extra income is making this possible to pay for monthly services I'm not fully leveraging at this point.

All to make it easier for you to earn your own financial freedom from book publishing.

The story is how to earn income online with little overhead and turn this into 1) financial freedom, and then 2) a nice personal fortune to reinvest in more freedom.

You probably have guessed, my huge publishing empire, which has hundreds of books (well, just over two hundred right now) is just me and two other employees - myself and I.

So overhead is nil. Most monthly costs are for webhosting, broadband, and an autoresponder. I've also invested in Copyblogger's Rainmaker, which will become my membership backend once I finish this current round of testing.

How I got my financial freedom and started earning my fortune starting from scratch and personal debt.

First, I kept my day job and paid off my debts as a priority. Quit charging anything on a credit card I couldn't pay that month. Learned how to not fall for scams (especially those with a credit card.) Got really frugal in my lifestyle. Turned all my free time into getting a functional online business.
Second, when my bills were paid down and I had some savings in the bank, I quit the full-time day job and found a part-time freelance job. So I then had more time to invest in making a functional online business.
Third, when that business (publishing public domain books) started paying all my bills, I got myself replaced at the freelance job - and became permanently unemployed.

There are a few more details, but those are the broad strokes.

Next is concentrating on making a fortune. Which is why the recent tests about publishing to Amazon, which I'd basically ignored in favor of the much easier approach to iTunes, Nook, GooglePlay/Books, and Kobo (plus Lulu.)

Amazon showed me the gnarly side of publishing. I started getting dinged by lawyers and publisher gold-diggers for books that never sold. And that the only books that were accepted quickly by Amazon had original titles - or they simply didn't have a Kindle version of that book (extremely rare - and usually books that wouldn't sell well.)

So it really led me right back to the point that I needed to build my list and get that going. That always has been the key to any fortune.

Why work at getting rich?

It's easier to help people as you can invest in more promotion and delivery.
You invest what you don't need to live on in passive income sources (which won't take your time in maintaining) and will leverage your income more.
Once you build it up more than you need to even take care of (worst case) total disability in old age (what used to be called "retirement") - then you give increasing amounts to charity.
You then turn over your business to deserving relatives (like Sam Walton did.)

Note that three of the four are to help other people live better lives directly, and the fourth makes it more possible do more of that.

How to approach profitable Amazon self-publishing

Build your list outside of Amazon. ((See books in this area - means using a website and search engines, etc.)
Publish only those books which are worth it to you personally. Follow your bliss closely. Original works, or public domain books that match your most fascinating interests.
Get those books to give you more followers to your list - or reward those who already follow you.
Build a membership where you can give extra value (such as discounted book versions or paid online courses) - again, outside of Amazon.
Build affiliate sales to expand your list.
Encourage your list to buy and review your books on Amazon.
Meanwhile, make sure you are publishing those same books everywhere else you possibly can, as well as making the hardcopy and audio versions available as sales take off and those books can pay for the extra investment. This mostly leverages Amazon sales, but shows up as Lulu and Audible revenue.
Rinse, repeat. Ask your list what they want and then publish that. Your sales on the other distributors can predict this somewhat.

Look that over closely. You see that Amazon isn't the end-all, just a side-journey. All this hype about Amazon is really someone selling other services and using the Amazon brand as a promotion gimmick.

You're only really interested in Amazon because it's possible to leverage it to increased income far better than other distributors - but you don't neglect those other distributors when you are going for that brass ring. It's like ignoring the beautiful horses and calliope music accompanying your ride meanwhile... The journey is more important and more valuable than the end.

Going from brass ring to brass ring could be an incredibly stressful journey.

The sensible steps to Real Money in (self)publishing are these:

1) A frugal lifestyle, paying off all debt and ignoring expensive status bling.
2) Building an online/low-overhead business which starts paying all your regular bills so that you can afford to quit any day job, full-time or otherwise.
3) Keep doing what's successful, but narrow your focus onto what will leverage your time into the most earned income returns. Again, passive income.
4) Get positive feedback loops going (Amazon sales/reviews, offering new releases to your list, turning your list into an affiliate salesforce free/paid memberships, reinvesting passive income into more passive income sources.)