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.

Subscribe by email or newsreader so you don't miss out...

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How I Got My Financial Freedom from Publishing Books

(artwork: keep_bitcoin_real - modified)

You can publish your way to financial freedom.

I did.

It's a story I haven't really told before, but probably should have.

I've been publishing books since around 2007, according records on Lulu.com - where I first started.

About 18 months ago, I was able to fire my last boss and start doing whatever I wanted to all day - getting paid more than I was needing to spend.

The route to this was kind of convoluted, as most journeys are.

How it began, a history

Back in 2007, Lulu.com was really a pioneer at this. Print-on-demand, and also selling PDF books. It was also the year that Amazon first released it's Kindle Reader. Sony had its own reader since about 1999, but when Amazon, then Barnes and Noble (2008), then Apple in 2010 came out with readers, the whole arena heated up.

Lulu got into ebooks in 2009, and by  2010, it was (fairly) simple to create epubs and let Lulu distribute these to iTunes and B&N - both of these had come out with their own self-publishing tools for authors by then.

2010 was when I did my own first test with an epub. But it was 2012 before I started taking epubs seriously. Before then I was publishing hardcopy and PDF's via Lulu, and not making any real money at it. And I had already been publishing public domain books as well as my own. By the time I broke through into regular epub books, I'd already published around 140 different versions of books, some titles with as many as three versions (PDF, trade paperback, hardback). An estimate would be maybe 70 books or so published. (My own books were in there, as well as mostly public domain ones.)

I was still in search of the pattern which would get my books selling and making me a regular income.

My financial freedom started with paying off debts.

Years earlier, I saw that I needed to get debt-free if I was ever going to get financially free. And that I had to earn that freedom before I could start getting rich. (I needed investment money, and it made little sense to borrow that as well.)

I was left with some student debt as well as carry-over credit card bills. Checking with my local credit union found I could get a personal loan to pay that off, keeping the same payments I already had, but only taking 3 years instead of 20.

Getting scammed for several thousand (and then worked for over a year to get that refunded) kinda cemented the idea that I needed to not use credit cards after that. My truck was paid off, so I was able to simply live within my means. That still took some discipline, but I eventually got that all in check.

By the end of three years, I had no major debt and was no longer taking any on.

Passive income is the key.

The next trick was getting enough income coming in from passive sources to pay my bills. (I'd been studying Robert Kiyosaki and T. Harv Eker to know that a working job - especially working for someone else - would never make me happy - or rich.) With my debts paid off, I continued my part time jobs while I looked around for businesses I could get into.

More and more, I saw that passive income was the way to go. Publish once, sell many times, over and over.

Eventually, I was freelancing for about 40 hours a month doing SEO and web design. That left me free to do about anything I wanted, so I researched and tested. This work showed me again how ebooks were selling well for many people.  In the fall of 2012, I got fed up with inane work cranking out web pages for people who were clueless about using the Internet for generating leads or income.

 My own epubs were starting to bring me regular income, enough to get me to notice. So, I took a break from my freelance to just research how to self-publish books, and book publishing as an industry.

Building a passive income business.

Those three months of research also showed that a lot of bad data about self-publishing was being spread by various get-rich-quick guru's and celebrities. None of these told you how to build a business, just how to vanity publish for free or cheap.

That research resulted in a book I published in early 2013, and also another parody - they didn't go anywhere particularly. But I was used to that.

The data I had found tended to explain why.

So I did some tests to check these. At that time, Lulu would distribute public domain (and even private licensed rights) books to iTunes and Nook - before they took on Amazon and Kobo, which shut that line down. (Now it's original books only, unless you only want to sell on Lulu.)

I picked out the top 25 or so public domain books and shipped my own versions.

Then I rounded up all the PLR I had on my hard-drives and pulled out the ones which already had covers and were in decent shape - this gave me about 80 books which I then shipped through Lulu.

I mostly avoided Amazon except for a few small tests. Mainly because they didn't seem to want public domain or PLR books (still true). I got about a dozen books up on Amazon during this. My originals, plus a few test books.

Volume publishing pays off.

Once all these (28 + 80 = 108) books were up on iTunes, Nook, Google, and Kobo - I started getting some regular income from all of them. It took a few months to build. Some books didn't sell, some sold occasionally, some sold regularly.

The interesting scene was that those 100 books were all priced at .99

And while I'd returned to my freelance job again, that book income kept building.

My freelance boss wasn't all that impressed, and had meanwhile found a young pup who was taking up a lot of my work. Plus, he'd hired another person to take on his one major account - the work I had been doing as well. All this meant that I started to run out of paid work from this area.

But meanwhile, those few books had started generating enough income to cover all my bills (along with my own frugal living keeping those bills down.)

The end of my last job

So I started not caring if I got that freelance work again. I began a study of copywriting classics. The summer went by with no request for work - I didn't push it much. (I was busy pubilshing books, after all.)

My bills were still getting paid, plus one of my tests on Amazon became a bestseller once it got enough reviews and regular sales. It had already been selling well on the other distributors, but Amazon's income 6x'ed during this time and became three times all the rest put together.

I started having excess income, which gave me savings as well as investment money.

Now I really didn't have to work for anyone - and could invest in a few more services and tools to help me write/edit/publish better - as long as I stayed in my budget.

Finally, I went in to see my old boss, more as a courtesy. He didn't have any work for me, and any job would have been the same old, same old. His other hires were doing well at what he needed them to do. So he sent me a email a few days later, and it was over.

Freedom attained - and continued

I was free. That was the fall of 2013. In under two years, I'd made my self-published books become an on-going passive income source which enabled me to do whatever I want whenever I want. As long as I stay frugal, that is.

Now I just work on getting rich full time. Haven't made it yet, but it's coming along nicely.

That's how I got my freedom. It's not a road which I'd tell anyone to follow.

But I'm pulling out the key datums I've learned and distilling these into just how anyone could follow a similar road. Lessons and a case history - and my final book in this series on self-publishing and selling books online.

I now have well over 200 individual books published in various formats online. My print versions are also beginning to sell regularly and I've got one audio book that sells nicely. Meanwhile, I have a great deal of work to unbury my earliest work and market it properly. By the end of my current list of projects, I'll have somewhere around 350 or so books and can then start to just re-market everything I've rushed out the door in the last couple of years.

I expect my income to surge nicely as I do.

The next goal is to promote world peace by enabling people to recover their native ability to become rich on their own. Heady, but can be done.

So now you know.

Luck to us all.

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How to Sell Your Books Online, Old or New.

Selling books online doesn't have to be hard,

...but you have to know what to do when in order to be successful.

(Photo: RIAN archive) 

Just because your book never sold well doesn't' mean it can't. 

Just because most books don't sell well, doesn't mean it can't.

Just because you don't know how to get your book(s) to sell well, doesn't mean you can't.

Just because most authors (self-published or not) never cover their expenses from their books (and have to keep their day job) doesn't mean they can't.

What's possible is that any author can make a living writing, publishing, and selling their books.

While there is no guarantee that any book can or will become a bestseller, any author can get their books to sell decently, or even sell well.

And yes, this is even despite being poorly edited, with a poor cover, and lousy description.

I had to work this up recently, as I'm about to do the same for a number of my books which aren't selling well. 

The main idea for most authors is that when they publish their book, it should be a set-and-forget situation. What drives most authors bonkers is that this is also the idea that almost all the big publishers have (and all of the distributors who sponsor self-publishing.)

It's always been that the author has to do their own marketing.

But writers just want to write.

The trick is to learn what you need to do and then automate it as much as possible.

And we are talking about doing this online, not in person - since most writers don't know how to "sell" and don't want to learn. Writers want to write. That's what their whole life revolves around.

What the indie author needs to have in order to successfully sell books online.

1. Books that are published online, or could be. (Yes, that's plural.)
2. A mailing list for their audience.
3. A blog. (On your own domain, not a freebie.)
4. Someone to edit their book, someone to make great covers, someone to write classy descriptions.
5. A daily schedule which allows you some time to manage your books daily, or weekly.

Once you have all these, you can follow the steps below to make your books sell well online.

Steps to get your books selling well online

(Disclaimer: While truly awful books are selling these days, it's also true that really good books aren't. Your mileage will vary depending on how well you implement what follows below. And you can see that I don't say how much you can make - or that you'll ever have a bestseller. You can get your books selling better, though. Rinse and repeat as often as necessary to get the results you want - and cleaner hair.)

We start with the fact that any author who has ever made real money online had two things:

1. a schedule for daily writing, daily business maintenance (emails, etc.), daily inspiration (reading other bestsellers - in their chosen genre or not.)
2. a backbench of books in series.

Those are undeniable, and are found with any bestseller, as well as those authors who simply make a quiet living from their books. Fact. I would be so bold to say that you can't find any author in history - who didn't die broke - that only had a single book which sold well. One-shot wonders, like the music industry, doesn't make for any continuing financial success.

Some other facts:

• Any book can be re-launched and made to start profiting you.
• Amazon needs reviews and sales. Everywhere else needs related books by the same author and/or series (and sales help.)
• In getting a previously published book to start selling, you'll either be creating a new edition, or a sequel.

NOTE: The following steps are only broad strokes - this would be a massive book or course on it's own (and I'll get around to it sooner or later.)  While this is easier to consider from a non-fiction POV, it can easily be done with any fiction series.

NOTE2: Some of these linked tools are affiliate links. 

0. Make sure your book is ported everywhere else as well. 

(List: Lulu, iTunes, Nook, Google Play/Books, Kobo, Amazon, Scribd, Doc-Stoc, Espresso Network, Leanpub - you can use an aggregator, but you'll profit more if you DIY.)

1. Re-do your marketing research:

Audience demographics
Avatar/First Customer
Verify Keywords (Market Samurai)
Similar Books recommended by Amazon
Verify your tags
Verify your categories (BISAC) - Amazon long-tail niches

2. Creat an ethical bribe (ecourse) and start building a list

Requires an autoresponder (AWeber or similar)

Might need a membership backend (Rainmaker, or roll your own)

Update your ebook to have a link to this opt-in landing page

3. Start blogging daily about something related to the book

Needs a domain and webhost - don't use free sites any longer than you have to. 

Then export/import when you have your backend ready (Rainmaker, again.)

Have your opt-in script show up just below each post, as well as in the sidebar

SEO these posts as you build them (Rainmaker built-in plugin's help.)

Include images, embedded PDF's/Videos.

PDF's are also ported to major doc-sharing sites with links to that post as well as book distributor buy-links.

Promote these posts with Pinterest, G+, LinkedIn, Flipboard

Bookmark and Social News campaigns via Synnd.

Buy traffic via Stumbleupon (optional)

4. Get surveys filled out by your list on what they want, like, and have questions regarding your book.

5. Re-edit the book.

Get feedback from your list on the improvements/additions

6. Redesign the cover.

7. Rewrite the description.

8. Create a hardcopy version

Set this for Global Distribution, getting proof(s) approved, etc. (Use Lulu, not CreateSpace.)

Note: The PDFs you get from Lulu for interior and cover are then ported to Espresso Network for their use on that network.

9. Work out a release date and pre-sell the new edition/sequel

10. Get your audience (list) involved in the re-release. 

Gift them free copies (iTunes, Ganxy) or discount coupons - get them to review it on Goodreads, which can happen prior to it going "live" on Amazon.

11. Use the profits to re-invest in additional versions of the book

• Audiobook
• Hardback
• Pocket Paperback

- - - -

Thanks for reading this far. You can see that this is just an overview - a set of points you should know if you want to move out of the $500 level of book payments annually.

I'll have another book coming out soon, once I do some additional testing and research. I'll flesh out all these steps when I do.

[Update: Been busy fleshing out these steps as part of a real-world case study. One point forgotten - make a BitTorrent bundle of promo clips for your book. Use IFTTT to update your social posts automatically. More later - stay tuned. With Twitter integrating back into Google, Synnd campaigns along this line become more key.]

So - subscribe above to make sure you keep in the loop. ;)

Related articles

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• The Numbers Racket and Amazon's Public Domain Problems.
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Perfecting Passive Income Publishing for Profit

How to Make More Than Just a Living With Profitable Passive Income Publishing.

(Image: WishIKnew...)

It all started out by wanting to learn how to get books I'd written published and making enough to allow me to quit my day job.

It hasn't ended - but has accomplished that goal well over a year ago.

What's next, then?

Jim Rohn gave me that in an old MP3 being passed around. You work full time at your J.O.B. and part time at your fortune - until you make your fortune earning more than your day job so you can work full time at your fortune.

The trick is not just chasing after money, but following your bliss - your truest interests and consuming passion. With that worked up, you then have that "Burning Desire" which Napoleon Hill talks about in his Think and Grow Rich.

I went the public domain publishing route and it made more than I needed to quit my day job. In fact, it has pulled in enough on a good month to exceed what I've ever made at an hourly job doing 40 hours a week.

The trick to this is that I spend a few hours on each book, and the profits simply roll in after that. Some books don't sell, some sell infrequently, some sell regularly. And a small handful will sell very well for a short or longer period.

You can then leverage these bestsellers with more editions and supporting promotion.

But public domain publishing has proved that it's not the fortune-maker I was looking for. (Mainly because Amazon doesn't want more of those-type books on their site - and that is the most obvious place for a publishing business to sell books.)

OK, so what's next, then?

Glad you asked.

My bliss is not publishing. It's illustrating and writing. (Explains why my blog posts are so long...)

Publishing has been a means to an end. It's rewarding and interesting, but the leap to be taken has to be toward original fiction - in particular, children's books.

I'd done this research years ago, to know that it was a good market. And recent look for public domain books after 1923 just confirmed this:
1) Only bestselling/topselling book copyrights were ever renewed. (About 1% on average.)
2) Every single children's book from that era that I checked out had been renewed. Every single one.
3) Conclusion: lots of money to be made/ value to add with children's books.

How do you get started publishing children's books?

I worked out the training lineup and posted it here. It's a natural function. The trick to it is to publish those public domain books as you study them. This means your training will pay for itself.

That's a natural extension of what you've already been doing. All you really are doing is concentrating on a single niche instead of a broad shoot.

The Steps
(do all of these for each and every book from here on out):

1. Study the area and find what people are buying. There are sure to be some sub-genre's which are more profitable than others.
2. As part of this, keep track of keywords. Do a fuller study with Market Samurai to see what the conversations are around these keywords, which are more advertised for (monetize-able, etc.)
3. Get a blog on a new domain, or subdomain on an existing one (like the one you are reading, for an example.) Make sure IFTTT is cross-promoting your blog posts to Tumblr, Twiter, Wordpress (as applicable.) If possible, have your blog post auto-posted to a Google+ page.
4. Work up an ethical bribe and build your opt-in. Do Not Skip This Step (it's cost me greatly to ignore this one.)
5. As you find and create ebooks out of classic (PD) children's books, port these to the ebook distributors. Create a POD hardcopy version (paperback) for Lulu, and sell the PDF of that book there as well. Go ahead and order a proof of your paperback - it will do you good to have a copy in your hands, and you can always give this away to a relative or local library.
6. Put up a landing page for each title with buy links to all available versions. 
7. Set up Ganxy direct-sales links as part of this. Set up Ganxy bundles as you build your book numbers.
8. Pin (Pinterest) and Flip (Flipboard) your blog post.
9. Announce special offers to your list, particularly if you can get them on Amazon. This includes print versions on Lulu, which can be discounted ahead of a broad release. Also let them know about your Ganxy bundles.
10. Create review PDFs and post them to doc-sharing sites. Create video's and post them to video sites. Embed these on your landing page.
11. Create BitTorrent bundles as part of your book promotion as well - include video and any images, PDF's, etc.
12. Run Synnd campaigns on your new book release (also - do this religiously. It takes time for the bookmarking and social news to prime the pump.
13. Start your next book, rinse, repeat.
    
    Later:
14. As any particular book starts to sell, release the proofed hardcopy into Global Reach via Lulu. Especially if its on Amazon - which will match the two.
15. Consider getting any topselling book you have converted to audiobook via ACX (Audible) for even more leverage. It's also possible to sell audio via Google Play, ITunes, and iAmplify - if you are non-exclusively on Audible.
16. Upgrade the audio in that video from this and sell via iAmplify and/or as a DVD from Kunaki. Update your landing page links for these new products.
17. You can create bundles of digital goods and host on JVZoo or similar so your fans can become your evangelists and get paid for it. 
18. Expand into a full-fledged membership (both free and paid) to reward your list participants, as well as leverage additional income from your hard-core fans.

More detail here.

Complete list of distributors:

• Lulu, 
• GooglePlay, 
• iTunes, 
• Nook, 
• Kobo, 
• Amazon, 
• Espresso Network. 
• (Scribd and Doc-Stoc might be additional ones.) Lulu won't distribute non-original books for you, but will sell all versions of your book. 
• Leanpub will take your original book and create the .mobi, epub, and PDF versions for you.
• Smashwords will distribute original books to all the above, as well as OverDrive (not Espresso that I know of) - Smashwords and Lulu save you time, but cost you income from royalties you'll never get back. (But you don't get time back, either.)
• For your video, you can port to iAmplify and give a pdf book away as part of this. While Kunaki can sell your DVD,  they aren't a distributor and have no audience for this.

The future - what about original books?

Once you know you have your chops down, then edit your own book into shape and run it through as above. Since you can get any original book onto Amazon, get your list to buy and vote for your book. (Intro price at .99)

That will jumpstart your sales for any original book, and whatever PD books you have managed to get ported into Amazon (if they are by the same author or part of the same series.) If your book is really good, then those sales will continue. Once your initial offering is up, then raise the prices higher on all platforms (Amazon won't let you use them as a loss-leader, but must be the lowest of everywhere else you have your book. Only on Amazon.)

You sales on other distributors will depend on your cover, description, author, series. The more books you create, the better chance of them selling.

A nice production plan would be to create at least one book a week, and run it through that sequence. If you pace yourself, and pay attention to details, you could possibly have 50 books published

What else to expect?

I'm pretty well wrapped up here on what you need to do to market your books. What I will promise is some case studies where I do this exact market strategy on some upcoming children's books - forcing myself to do this disciplined route and streamline it as I go.

My new work will be on training people how to write and illustrate children's books - while I build my own deep backbench of these at the same time.

Just had the idea to convert the other two sections above just to cover these other two areas - writing and artwork. That would save me immense time on building yet another website...

Later, then.

Update: Reconsidering my efforts. This blog has capacity to cover what I want with publishing. There are actually two other blogs connected to this (although they all look pretty much the same - on purpose.) http://topsellingbooks.midwestjournalpress.com will be the landing pages for these new books. http://selfpublishingnewsreviews.midwestjournalpress.com/ will start aggregating short links to stuff I find daily about book (self)publishing.

That saves me building a new site completely - since I already have Google grooved into this one...

Related articles

• The Expresso Network - the 7th Book Distributor.
• Focus on Value Instead of Delivery
• The new and streamlined assembly line for book publishing online.
• Rambling Prose and Lack of Focus Explain Why Tradition Publishing Fails
• Another distributor for self-published authors - Feedbooks
• How to Publish a Dozen Books in an Afternoon.

The Great Amazon Suck - Why Other eBook Distributors Don't

How to Blow-Off Any Chance at a Fan Base.

(Cover: Seattle Weekly)

[Rant Alert]

For all the hype about Amazon, you will seldom see any fan clubs for Amazon or its execs. (Just lots of those "smiley" boxes.)

That became crystal clear when self-publishing a few public domain books to KDP Amazon recently.

The pattern became obvious: your first communication is apparently from a computer, not a person. If you're accepted - great! It's a form email!  If you're rejected, it's one of about five responses that computer spits out.

When you answer that, you'll get someone like "Sophie T." or "Ford K." - who won't answer any query other than a single terse sentence or short paragraph.

Nice bedside manner.

There's nothing about public domain that any of the other distributors have any problem with. They all accept it - no questions asked. They let the market take care of it. And will even pay you like a regular author. Only one other distributor will make you take a lower royalty is Kobo (who says that 20% is  "standard" - compared to Amazon's 35%. But Kobo doesn't mess you around with impersonal emails.)

Having "done the dance" with Amazon over public domain, I've found that they positively will make your self-publishing life hell - and it doesn't mean anything to them. (Example: in every single email - other than the glossy "your approved" ones - they threaten your account.)

Amazon really, really only wants original works.

Really.

I've just never had any problems at all with publishing everywhere else virtually anything I wanted, testing all sorts of various texts to all the major distributors. Only Scribd (which isn't a major distributor) has some sort of "duplicate content" script which auto-rejects anything they already have.

Aggregators (like Smashwords) won't accept public domain or PLR at all. Lulu will accept it, but won't distribute it. And those two questionably fit as "major" distributors.

Kobo will flag a book if you don't declare it public domain - but that's an easy fix.

No emails flying back and forth, no suspense, or angst.

In the middle of these Amazon tests, there was a short interaction with an editor who claimed I "infringed" on his work. He was very charming in his first email, but then wouldn't reply to other requests for data (such as emailing Amazon that we'd handled his problem.) My "infringing" book is still blocked, and I'll have to make another version of it and go through resubmission process again.

All for a silly Kindle version. (No, Amazon won't block a hardcopy book. They can't be sued for that.)

What that editor doesn't see is that his reputation - and that of his company - just lowered a few notches. There's seems to be a seedy side to this industry - where people are unimportant.

The moral of this story: treat people like people. Treat them like you'd like to be treated - or better.


What you send out is what you'll get back.

Hope this helps you with your own business.

PS. This reminded me of some work I did with a character who had a problem with being criticized (not my first time). He was himself critical of others,   constantly, behind the back or to the face of everyone around him. I blogged about it to vent - much like this, keeping it all anonymous. Of course, he searched this all out. After our association was over, he sent me a final email, which gave me the links to those posts. Of course, "it was all my fault." But the email itself wasn't worth even reading. His final email just confirmed what he felt about all humanity, not just me. All he will ever attract to himself are those who use critical comments to boost their own self-esteem. The truly talented and gifted will move away from him - he's just shutting down any creative impulse they offer, as an attempt to protect himself from imagined slights. Sad, but everyone dances their own way.

Related articles

• The Numbers Racket and Amazon's Public Domain Problems.
• What We Got Wrong About Books
• Focus on Value Instead of Delivery
• Screw Leanpub - original works only.
• Making Sense of Amazon's Public Domain Policies
• Getting Booksales on Amazon - and Everywhere Else

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.

1. Reviews
2. 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

1. Build your list outside of Amazon. ((See books in this area - means using a website and search engines, etc.)
2. 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.
3. Get those books to give you more followers to your list - or reward those who already follow you.
4. Build a membership where you can give extra value (such as discounted book versions or paid online courses) - again, outside of Amazon.
5. Build affiliate sales to expand your list.
6. Encourage your list to buy and review your books on Amazon.
7. 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.
8. 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.)

Related articles

• The Improbable Copyright Case of "It's A Wonderful Life" (video)
• How to Really Profit from Self-Publishing - Follow the Disney Route to Success
• How to publish public domain books and profit nearly forever
• How to Get Sales and Really Enjoy Selling
• How to Develop and Sell Your Own Products Series
• How Great Books Get Forgotten