How to Self-Publish from India: A Case Study

It started when this reader from Chennai, India emailed me about one of my books being ripped off.

He was just being honest about finding some books being given away for free. So I thanked him and gave him some more.

Over a few years, we've been exchanging comments and books, helping each other out as we could.

Recently, he told me he wanted to write and publish books - along the line of self-help and personal development. 

The trick to this was that he had no computer or home Internet. He was going out to an Internet kiosk

So I made him a deal - I'd help set him up and he'd then help some others get set up.

The main point is this: If a writer in India with only borrowed Internet access can get himself successfully self-published, then anyone can.

I did the usual, which has streamlined even more as time goes on.

Here's the short-hand notes on how to get started: 

How to Self-Publish in India (For only sweat equity.)

Payment:

• Paypal + PAN card

Book creation:

• LibreOffice + Gimp,
• Calibre

Book publishing and sales:

• Lulu + Flipkart,
• Blogger + domain-name + Ganxy (later, + Gumroad),
• Facebook + Sellfy.

Book Promotion:

• Podcasting = archive.org + iTunes + Stitcher,
• Social = IFTTT, LinkedIn
• YouTube.

Let's take these apart - 

Payment:

Paypal has become pretty conventional these days. In India, you have to have a PAN card as well, so that they can collect their taxes. That's the way it goes there.

Book creation:

LibreOffice is accepted and converted everywhere. It's now simplest to upload your native .odt file to Lulu and they'll create the ebook for you. LibreOffice also generates a upload-ready PDF, but you can get Lulu to do this as part of your hardcopy version. Then simply download the epub and PDF versions (as well as selling that PDF version directly on Lulu) - so you can upload these other places.

GIMP is used to make your covers, if you don't get these made elsewhere.

Calibre is used to store the meta-data (descriptions and tags) as well as keep all your versions of the book in one central location. It will also convert your epub to mobi so Kindle users can upload it. (Most people are now using their smartphones or tablets these days, so will use the epub or PDF file.)

Book publishing and Sales:

Lulu will publish your needed versions in both ebook and hardcopy versions. Flipkart is for India and the surrounding area.

Blogger enables you to get sales directly, when you put a Ganxy script on your site. This also allows you to capture emails, which makes even MailChimp unnecessary to start with. You can email your customers directly. As well, it's possible to make a widget that only does email, and put this anywhere. 

You get blogger with a domain-name of it's own in order to get more respect. Blogger doesn't care how much money you make from it and takes care of all the backend support work. Yes, you're limited like anywhere else, but you can concentrate soley on creating more books, not on security updates, plug-in conflicts, etc.

Ganxy allows you to import and export email lists (just follow their terms of service closely.) So you don't have to have an email client to start with. Ganxy also sells directly to your other distributors without having a person have to leave your blog. 

As you get experienced with this, you can then do the needed homework on Gumroad - which has some great tutorials and short courses you can take. Gumroad has extra features such as memberships and subscriptions so you can get more recurring income by selling courses, etc.

Sellfy works with Facebook on a tab - so you can sell all your books in a bookstore setup.

You'll need to upload your books to each of these (Ganxy, Gumroad, Sellfy) in order to enable direct sales.

Book Promotion:

Podcasting is hands down the fastest way for you to get traffic to your blog. Use archive.org for hosting, and generate the RSS feed with Feedburner, then port that feed to iTunes and Stitcher (plus a few others.)

Social updates are done via Ganxy, and your Blogger blog will post to Google+ for you, but use IFTTT to push your content everywhere else. Almost too numerous to mention here. You will need to post to LinkedIn on your own, through.

Take that audio file and create a video from it, then post to YouTube. (And set up recipes on IFTTT so that they promote your video for you.)

- - - -

It's really that simple. A couple of years have boiled this down to what would fit on one side of a 3x5 recipe card. Funny, huh? 

I've got my buddy in India working through these. I did a lot of these for him, as he started out without having a computer and going to a local Internet cafe in order to get online access.

Now he's got a used laptop and is creating podcasts on his own.

As a side-point, Ganxy (and Gumroad, Sellfy) allow you to sell audio on their site as well - even create bundles with many files having a single check-out. So your audio files can be used as promotion (via Soundcloud or YouTube/Vimeo) and also as bonuses.

It seems the simplest is also the easiest and cheapest. 

This doesn't get you around editing your book, or creating enticing covers, or the work in watching your sales and running promotional campaigns. But if a guy in India can do it, then anyone else in the world with Internet access can as well.

- - - -

Make sure you're subscribed above in order not to miss out on any hair-raising, white-knuckled, cliff-hanging adventures in self-publishing.

See you next time...

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I'm Sorry - Updates Galore Coming Soon!

I've been quiet too long. And I apologize.

It's not that I don't have stuff for you - I do. About 5 podcasts which have to be recorded and posted so you can be alerted by email or RSS feed/podcatcher/iTunes, etc. (You are subscribed, aren't you? Good.)

Because I do this all for you.

What's happened that I don't want you to fall into.

I went back to my hard-drives and pulled every backup I had. Of course, because I didn't always have this habit, they only went back to 2005. I look around old files and found that I'd been blogging since at least 2003, but they were on platforms which have since gone extinct.

Anyway, this gave me nearly 5,000 (yes, five thousand) blog posts to sort through. Taking out obvious duplicates narrowed it down to under 4,000. When I simply trashed or turned to draft anything you wouldn't be interested in (like the details of getting a refund from a scammer company that finally went under last year) - this pulled it down below 3,000.

Finally, I had to go through everything which wasn't assigned a category and put these where they belonged.

Moving back to Wordpress off Blogger

I've always liked Wordpress, but had a love/hate relationship with the free blog-hosting sites that used it. All free blog hosting sites have trouble with spammers. Some have taken fairly draconian (harsh) measures to protect their servers and financial backend.

Wordpress.com was one of these. I've had more blogs and profiles turned off on that site than I can easily count. They simply won't tolerate obvioius affiliate links. And will ban you at the drop of a hat. (While meanwhile labeling you a spammer - hope you're not using your real name...)

Since I need to make an online living by offering products (my books) - I had to get onto a platform that would not just tolerate this, but encourage it. So I went to Blogger.

And I was happy, overall. I knew it was more limited than Wordpress, but the minimalist simplicity of it didn't keep you from feeding your muse and working to get paid for it.

Blogger has one major drawback - it doesn't have categories, so exporting and then re-importing to a Wordpress platform leaves you with a huge stack of stuff which is "uncategorized."

Then the fun begins.

(I did see, after a couple of days at this, that it's possible to turn tags ["labels" on Blogger] into categories. And then within Wordpress, to move from one category to another, or combine them.)

Since "uncategorized" is a default on Wordpress, I had to move all these over into a new temp category, sort them, to where they needed to go, and then delete that temp one.

It took days, close to a week of my part-time schedule working at this (the farm chores and other duties still take their fair share.)

And Just When I Thought I Was Done...

...I found out how deep this rabbit hole goes.

Rainmaker is an amazing platform. Amazing. As I don't use that word often, it means a lot.

I was down to about 1200 posts (with at least that many as draft or trash to revive as needed.)

Unfortunately, it isn't really like Blogger or Wordpress, where you can pick out a nice template and just start in. It's way more powerful with built-in memberships, podcasting networks, online courses, and of course - the ability to directly sell digital products.

I'm getting this podcast out to you on the old system to let you know what's coming up. Because I've got a lot of work to do - still - just to help you get the data you want the way you want it.

The problem is that it's going to take some time before I can get a nice base set up and turn on stuff bit-by-bit.

There's no reason to have to have everything ready at once, but let me lay out what looks to be possible at this point.

The Grand Design Revealed

...drumroll, please.

You should really go over to livesensical.com to sign up. That's my new site. Nice video there that starts to explain it.

This site will really be in four parts, which is how I've organized my 50+ years of research and all the workable resources I've collected so share with you.

There are going to be both free and paid memberships, which allow me to fine-tune this material. To begin with, it will all be a free membership - but I'll have a lot of blog posts which live free out there to get people to sign up at all.

These four areas will each have their own podcast, probably bi-weekly, as that's a lot of work.

Just in the self-help area, I already have 4 or 5 ecourses which can be revived. In the online marketing area, there's another 3-4 or more.  This is just what I've found when I was moving stuff around. Other courses exist on video and PDF which can be brought in and connected. Then there are PLR video and audio courses which I've got stashed away and are still fairly useful.

I've mentioned before that I have a couple dozen-dozen books out there already. Some are very applicable to your studies, some were just tests (aka: cannon fodder). There are a great number of these I want to make available for free, and then offer the other version of them (epub, mobi, audiobook/podcasts, videos) for small fees - well, at least higher than they are sold on Amazon.

Eventually, I'll get onto some major projects I've been laying out and putting off - such as

• a set of classic evergreen fiction bestsellers made available to authors to improve their craft. 
• There's also an online marketing training course to enable people to really think with what they find online and be able to spot real winners and the scams. This has particular use to people who have been into Network Marketing. 
• My series on Masters of Marketing needs quite a bit more work - and porting to LinkedIn for their use.
• There's a final book on selling books online, which takes all the data I've set out here and packages it up in various formats. This also needs to be a course, plus bundled with audio.
• Eventually, I'll be caught up and will start in on Children's Books, both writing and illustrating them, but they'll have a companion set of books so anyone can train themselves on this genre. (It will probably be it's own site, although that's a future scene I haven't fully figured out as yet.)

The Rainmaker platform has built-in SEO scripting, so all the surviving posts need to be gone through and updated. That alone would take weeks if I didn't also have some forward progress to make (and bills to pay, and promises to keep.)

The backend bells-and-whistles to set this up take a bit of study - but there is an excellent set of tutorials and walk-throughs which tell anyone how to build their own stuff.

The great part of Rainmaker platform is that this is the same tools that Clark & Co. have used to build Copyblogger into a multi-million dollar annual income. Same tools - just like they use. In short: it's truly powerful.

What happens to these old blogs?

Well, they stay right there. One datum you must know is that you never, ever delete a blog once you set it up. Fill it with usable content, put an opt-in form on it, update it if you can here and there. But like vintage wine, it gets more valuable with time, not less. Google gives them more authority (meaning: higher rankings) the longer they are out there. Even free blogs. Put them on a spreadsheet and drop some content in on them from time to time. (If you can set up IFTTT to syndicate your content, that fine.)

You see, each of these free blog hosts have their own community. So they recommend your stuff to their followers differently. That means more people can find your stuff that you'd not necessarily connect with otherwise.

Meanwhile, the search engines can link all these in on very long-tail basis to help other people find your stuff. 

I don't really have a system in place to deal with all these. Like I said, I've got a spreadsheet which hs most of them on it - some will stay forever lost to my access, but will never be deleted.

In some cases, like that scammer content, this can be posted back to specialty blogs just on that subject - the history of a particular Utah scammer company. Might even become a book if I can ever get around to it. But having this content on a Blogger blog is a fitting bookend to this chapter of my own history.

You also never throw away old content - you just re-purpose it when you can.

Well, thanks - Gotta run.

I really, really appreciate the time you spend listening to these rambles. It's all designed to help you learn from my mistakes and earn your own extra online income faster. 

I've got a long post (just written last night) on free blogs all by themselves. Another on how to effectively promote on social media without having your time sucked away with no income. And some others I wrote last week about what I'd been inspired on through this journey. 

These are all waiting for me to find them, record them, and get them out to you.

Today, though, I though you deserved an update.

Let me know what you need covered in more detail. I'll get to it when I can - you can see above that my schedule is a bit packed now...

Luck to us all.

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Getting Your Books Discovered with Social Book Networks.

Social Media and Book Discovery only work when the Search Engines are involved.

(Photo: Phil Roeder)

While social media/networks are all the buzz about how to promote your book - as usual, the conscious work at ignoring what passes for conventional wisdom winds up usually easier, more efficient, and more profitable.

Confession: I have a very nasty personal habit with social media: I spend my time writing and publishing. I spend minutes each day with social media - less than an hour. Occasionally, I visit G+ and plus some nice photos. But mostly, I simply post great stuff I find. Completely opposite what "they say" you "should be" doing.

Otherwise, I'm working at what I need to get done that day in terms of published books or market research. Part of this is working out how the actual world works, not the ways we are being told about constantly.

I only post to G+ and LinkedIn, as they are content-based. Recently, I've been discovering Flipbook, and have been studying Pinterest as a way to promote my books - beyond the cover itself. All four of these are recommended because they are ranked well by search engines and reputed to bring you traffic.

Most of my use of social media is - gasp - to help search engines find my books and recommend them for me. Well, that's not entirely true. I send lots of #publishingtips out on Google+ nearly every day. Because I want to help, and that is an outlet for these fascinating things I find. It also helps me promote my blog posts - or that's the idea. (Hasn't worked much, it seems.)

Recently found the 5 key sites via Newbie Authors Guide that they recommended  about 3 years ago. (Starts at http://newbieauthorsguide.com/2012/03/26/shelfari/) 4 of the 5 are still valid.

The test of uploading your backlist to social sites

Criteria here is how you can quickly get your books listed, particularly if you've been busy publishing for awhile, and neglected your social graces. Ideal is to be able to upload your books without having to upload them one by one.

The point is to aggregate your published works and get the reviews sorted so you are listed as the author, etc. That help you rank better on Amazon, and in general helps the search engines find your books.

Out of these, I found that 3 will allow you to upload your list of published books.

Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/review/import) and LibraryThing (https://www.librarything.com/import.php) support CSV format. So you can download a CSV of your books from GooglePlay, edit that file to delete unnecessary columns, then re-import to these other two.

Shelfari is possible once you've uploaded them to LibraryThing and have a tab-delimited text file. (http://www.shelfari.com/addbooks)

Sidebar:

There is a vital promotion point: Open Library. However, they can't accept CSV's at this time. There is one way to add books, which is https://openlibrary.org/books/add. You have to have an account. But it's simple to cut/paste from Calibre. This is just a single book at a time.

(There is another, involved way to upload to OpenLibrary - create and upload a MARC21, UniMARC, or ONIX file. Some searching found Booknet Canada which will convert to ONIX for you - although it's a bit involved. 

MARC is a format that deals with Library of Congress books. A nice description of MARC from the documentation of a free DOS-based tool is found at http://www.loc.gov/marc/makrbrkr.html IMHO - way too geeky for the average indie publisher.)

Why get your CSV from Google Play/Books?

The real question is why I can't get CSV's from Lulu, iTunes, Nook, or Kobo.

As I try to publish everything to every distributor, Google is representative of just about all the books I've gotten up and out, as ebooks anyway.

The way you do it is simple:
1) Log into your publisher account (http://play.google.com/books/publish)
2) On Book Catalog, click the "Export Books" button

3) A dialog box comes up - select our options and then the download will start.

4) Then you can simply delete the columns which have nothing to do with the book (I leave ISBN, title, subtitle, author - and search/replace-deleted the phrase "ISBN:") and save, then upload the CSV.

The results?

• Library Thing added 145 books but only the title and author. Generic covers there - so these need to be updated.
• Goodreads choked on it - kicked out 166 right off the bat, said 24 were already there, and imported 3. While they had about 23 yet to import, I uploaded the text file to see if that would help.
• Shelfari found 223 books in that list. But needed help identifying 218 of them, which made no sense of adding them by text/CSV file.

Frankly, after editing several dozen books on Shelfari, I quit. Tedious, and I didn't see much return on this. I'm no big fan of Amazon and haven't seen anywhere that  this shows up on Google - Goodreads does, though. I don't need more of Amazon's "walled garden". It may help there, I don't know. The point of this is to get the search engines to recommend the books I'm publishing - so if I can't see anything show up on Google from within Shelfari itself, then there's no point in working it. LibraryThing reviews and author pages show up on a test.

Your best  bet is to add these one at a time when you publish the book. Just LibraryThing and Goodreads. Put these two above right next to OpenLibrary.

Looking over LibraryThing, and Goodreads shows that this is a fair promotional area to use when you do a launch. Pre-release reviews are possible with LT - these point out how more research is needed at these, along with the hardcore evidence that any of these actually help with recovery.

Was this a failed test?

No. With every test, we learn. We found out that Goodreads and LibraryThing reviews and author pages show up. Shelfari is a failed experiment by Amazon. We know to keep this as a regular part of publishing any new book.

Again, the best way to publish is to do this in batches. That makes updating sites like Goodreads and LibraryThing less tedious. (Skip Shelfari.)

And - stick to what you've proved to work, even though you can try new stuff if it looks possible. Test everything for yourself, especially what I say.

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