Reviving Frankenstein: Making PLR Publishing Profitable

PLR is long from dead, although the amount of really bad stuff out there can make you wish it was.

It still sells. I have a certain set of PLR ebooks which continue to sell through iTunes, Nook, and Kobo. (Amazon won’t take them, and GooglePlay is dead to Indie authors.)

As I was ramping up my paperback production, this was a perfect time to test these.

— Oh, I didn’t bring you up to date on this stuff. Oops.

OK, we’ll get back to our monster on the table in just a second…

The Hows and Whys of Print On Demand

Print on Demand (POD) was the first to start hammering nails into the coffin of traditional publishing. (The creature still lived, although wounded.)

POD is good for very short runs and in smaller page-counts. I can say this because I did the number-crunching to prove it. Regular press does better with larger books and large numbers of books printed. One of the bigger expenses in printing is the cover, especially hardbacks. And hefty books feel like they are more valuable.

The numbers I’ve run show that while the sweet spot for ebooks is $3.99 (per Smashwords’ Coker) the sweet spot for printed paperbacks is around ten bucks. I did find a study from 2013 that said that was the case. And if you look at Amazon, this seems to be true, anecdotally.

(Update: Found another study here, saying optimal paperback price is about $14.95)

Now, you have to make money at this book-publishing stuff. To do that you need a royalty. eBooks are great because there isn’t much overhead in it – so you can sell your books for four bucks and get nearly three bucks as part of it. (Sell it directly and you’ll get to keep around 90% of that price.)

There is an approach to pricing most people don’t get when they start out publishing books, which is to start low and gradually increase your prices until you find the pain point for your audience. Your 3.99 book might be actually worth 8.99 or more. You’ll never know until you try.

So for the purpose of this test, while I could go the 35-cent royalty route, like I do with the 99-cent Amazon bottom feeders, I wanted to keep this interesting for myself. So I figured that a two-buck royalty would keep my attention.

Where we are at now is this: a ten-dollar price point with two bucks coming back into our own pocket.

So, the POD product has to come in at under $8 cost.

There are two POD suppliers which fit self-publishing. Those are Lulu and CreateSpace (CS). Yes, there are a couple more, but their restrictions and extra costs mean you take a royalty cut, or have to price it higher. Lulu and CS are both free. Just my kind of budget.

Lulu was first to the market and has made CS evolve to keep up with them. Meanwhile, since Amazon owns CS, there is an inside track that cuts almost everyone else off at the knees.

Here’s why: when you publish a book, there is an automatic 50-55% markup after you price it. That’s because the other retailers have to be able to mark down the price, as well as take a “fair share” and get their own take out of each sale.

This means that Lulu as an outsider has to raise their price by a at least 50 cents everytime their cost goes up a buck. What costs you 5 bucks on Lulu will have to be sold for 7.50 everywhere else.

CS doesn’t have those constraints. They are almost always cheaper than Lulu or anyone else, except the Mass-Market paperbacks (which have very long print runs and very, very cheap construction.)

That said, I can sell a book on CS and always sell it cheaper on Lulu. which makes it key to have a membership where I can sell these books directly to my readers. So I can add value by offering several purchase options.

CS then responds by saying, “Yes, but if you are already a Prime member, then we can ship it for free.” (That hides the fact that you have an annual payment to Amazon for that service. And meanwhile, Lulu regularly has discounts on their site that can cover all your postage if you can buy at the right time.)

There is also the point that CS can keep certain books in stock if they are regularly in demand, while Lulu is always printing it only after you order it. So you are always going to have a wait with Lulu, unless you are willing to pay expedite fees.

Time versus Money.

That said, here’s how to chose:

Both.

That’s right. Because they are that different.

1) Some people are prejudiced against Amazon. Anything Amazon. Something to do with their track record of how they treat other businesses, like that would be a surprise.
2) Lulu books go far more places than CS, using Ingram.
3) CS has a no-return policy. Lulu has satisfaction guarantee, and has consistently very high quality books from their printer in North Carolina. CS is improving, but their model relies on distributed printing (which explains their recent printing problem in the UK.)
4) Key is that you can give more value with direct sales through Lulu.

How you price Lulu vs. CreateSpace

Essentially, the breakdown is in that $10 barrier.

I crunched production costs for everything from a 32 page book up to 300 pages.

The cold bottom line: to stay under a $10 price point and a $2 royalty,

• Lulu has a 32 page-count limit to produce your book.
• CS is about 175 pages as an upper limit to be under that $10 target.
• For Lulu, a 175 page book will cost $14.50 on Amazon, but $7.25 locally.
• One of your readers could buy it as a CS-printed book on Amazon for $9.94
• Also, that book bought on Amazon will improve your sales rank there, which in turn could get your book recommended more frequently.

So: publish on both. Like I said, it only costs you sweat-equity once for each platform.

That said, at 50% price break, Lulu can print and sell a 300-plus page book under $9 if they sell direct to the customer. Of course postage is extra for both platforms (unless you’re paying for Prime, or hit one of Lulu’s specials.) Lulu turns out to be an average of just over $3 cheaper than CS for any print run if you buy directly from either.

How does that work?

Lulu adds close to 25% to your royalty. CS adds 60% more. A $2 royalty will jump your Lulu book by $2.25 above your cost per page. CS does two weird things: a) their cost jumps up by 67% above what you’d pay personally to have that book printed, and b) a $2 royalty will add $5 to that higher cost.

In most actual production costs, CS is less than 20 cents more expensive than Lulu. Meaning that both of them are running with the same basic expenses.

So the difference between them is that extra $3 that CS adds as their pie slice.

CS gets away with this as they don’t have to raise their prices to get into Amazon.

If you want to wade through this spreadsheet, email me and I’ll send you a copy. Then you can take your own data samples to cross-check my figures.

How does our PLR Frankenstein monster work into this?

Well, a lot of PLR ebooks have to be tweaked to even make 32 pages. Most of them aren’t. (In their hey-day, these tiny ebooks were being over-hyped and sold for as much as $97! It’s no wonder Internet Marketing is synonymous with “scam”)

What I really wanted to tell you was about how I brought these all to life again.

The original test was to take all the PLR books I had, about 70, and get them on to iTunes, Kobo, Nook, and Google Play (Amazon won’t take PLR.) GooglePlay quit on me, but gave me a lot of sales data while my books were selling there. These were all ebooks.

So out of these reports, I distilled down a list of the books which sold an average of one book per month for the last 6 months. This gave me 19 books.

The test was next to see if they’ll sell on Amazon. I published all these through Lulu and paid for the proofs. They are now all live. And I only put a couple on CS to see if there is a problem selling them there – some books do get rejected if the same book on Kindle has a problem. We’ll know by the time this podcast hits the air.

But the fun part was how simple this was to create a set up to sell these books online.

Here’s the opt-in page.

And here’s the thankyou page.

So you can see for yourself how simple it can be to get people to opt-in, and then get instant access to the entire library.

Sure, this is a simpler approach, as it has all these books up in a single page. What that does is to get this type of reader onto my site so they can then click over onto the other content I have there. I took this approach because the main reason for the site isn’t to push PLR books related to building an online business. But I have these books, and they are selling otherwise, so I might as well see if they’ll sell as hardcopy versions. Also, I am building up a series of books (and later, courses) on how an author can build their online business, so these are a step in that direction.

You can see I’m not done with what I need to do here. In fact, that to-do list is right at the top of the page.

But this is pretty much a template scene. Once you have all the data in Calibre, you simply take the ISBN’s and build your links out of them.

I discussed this some years ago. But here’s the short-hand:

• Lulu gives you ISBN’s for every ebook and print version. These are 13 numbers in a group with hyphens. (And CS gives you ISBN for their version.)
• Amazon has a simple address for paperbacks which uses the 10-character ISBN (http://amazon.com/dp/132996716X) The 13-character ISBN can be changed into the 10-character version and vice-versa. (http://pcn.loc.gov/isbncnvt.html)
• The Lulu 13-number ISBN is used for their “author spotlight” (http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/robertworstell?searchTerms=9781329967168)
• ITunes uses the ebook ISBN in a search (http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/isbn9781304777638)
• For the Lulu ebook, you just change the ISBN of the paperback for the spotlight search link. (Nook and Kobo have similar ISBN search links.)

As I said, I keep all the meta-data on these books in Calibre, including all their various ISBN’s. I started this page by simply putting down all the long list of book titles. Uploading the images and setting them as thumbnails was simple, as was excerpting enough description text to be interesting. Then the links are all the same, I just had to change the ISBN’s for each book and keep track of where I was at.

Still to do will be to add the free PDF download for each book, which is just another value-add. If they like it, they can buy the ebook to keep a copy on their smartphone or tablet. This will be through Ganxy, where I’ll offer the PDF, .mobi, and .epub versions all for one price – that’s the “Buy Direct” link. If they want a copy to mark up, they can buy through Amazon or through Lulu.

Yes, if CS doesn’t choke, I’ll have the CS books there as well, but whether I’ll link to them is a question. They already have the advantage of lower price. Linking to the Lulu version gives that version a push on Amazon. So, I’ll think it over some more when I get more data…

Really, this was just to bring you up to date about how POD is working and where it’s a good choice. And also to show you how simple it can be to use PLR (or a set of books you already have on Lulu) to create a buying page for your readers.

A Short Read Publishing Strategy

I’ve covered writing short-read Kindles before – and published that book on both Lulu (http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/robertworstell?searchTerms=9781329835696) and CS (http://amazon.com/dp/1523449683).

To make 32 pages (Lulu’s minimum, CS will start at 28) you’ll need about 8000 words at 250 words per page. The minimum short read for Kindle is 2500 words. A novella is about 10,000 words.

So the upper end of our sweet spot is to stay under 175 pages, which would then mean about 44000 words, a short novel and bigger than many non-fiction books.

This also means that if you are bundling your short-reads, you can put four of them together and then also offer a print version. Just more value for your readers.

That’s an idea you can keep track of. Of course, if you want to give your readers a nice offer, then you can also offer them the Lulu discount as well.

Why did PLR Flatline?

Two reasons:

1. It’s generic by definition.
2. All the data in them needs to be checked for accuracy.

(In short, most of the writing sucked.)

The way you succeed online is by providing great, valuable content. But all that content has to have your particular view and approach to that subject. (See Pulizzi’s Content Inc and his “Content Tilt.”)

PLR is something anyone can put their name on, like store-brand peanut butter. You don’t know what’s in it, and any other store can compete on price with it. PLR has also been sold widely and can be picked up for next to nothing at various places online. It can easily be found online for nothing more than Google search.

The trick with PLR is to use it as your starting point, not a final product. You have to verify everything they cover in there and make sure you are giving people useful data they can use to improve their quality of living. There is often a lot of good data laid out in a simple format. But you’ll have to re-write it completely in order to get it onto Amazon to sell it. And if you just upload a bunch of junk onto a website, it won’t be anything that will build a business. (Meaning: keep your day job.)

Having a stack of PLR articles on your hard drive can help you with inspiration, but you’ll have to take it from there.

Anything you put online has to solve a problem for someone. It has to enable them to get a better life. Generic solutions only solve generic problems, and these are only worth the paper they are printed on. Like “free advice,” you get what you pay for.

Note: none of these PLR books have my own name on them. This is simply a test.

– – – –

Well, that brings you up to date now.

As a note, this is just around 2700 words as I write this sentence. It will probably wind up as about a 5 minute audio file. If you’re following this logic, you’ll see that I could post this article itself as a Kindle “short read” and link to the audio file. Then bundle it with my Short Reads ebook (also podcast) and maybe one other book, and I’d have special books all with “audio inside” links which would send them to my website. Again, write once, publish in as many ways and as many formats as possible.

But that would only be if I had something which would solve problems others actually have. Putting up content just to have something out there is great practice, but seldom profitable. This episode is just another exploration in how to publish simply.

Meanwhile, have as much fun as you can with this.

OK?

See you next time, then.

(Update: All good on CS – time to get the rest published.)

Originally published at: http://livesensical.com/podcast/selling-books-online/frankenstein-making-plr-publishing-profititable/

How to Start a Marketing Bonfire for Self Publishing Sales - Case Study 12

In the days before lighthouses, bonfires would be lit on the heights near a port to guide merchant ships safely to the harbor.

If you stood on a high cliff with a flame in your hand, you couldn't be seen - and ships would stay away from your port, no matter how great it was built.

Our job became building a series of bonfires instead of single series

Of course, we started out this case study with the greatest intentions:

• This series was a personal, bliss-evoking set of books which forwards a later income production model.
• I have always been fascinated with this subject, as it's personally rewarding.
• There are a great series of books in this area which are still popular, yet are poorly marketed.

This meant it made sense to do this - that it was emotionally and rationally the best thing to do. I was sold - and I acted.

On the face of it, we were faced with two obstacles:

1. The spreadsheet developed into a very long sequence of actions. 
2. The total list of books kept growing and is now a total of fourteen - mission creep is always a factor, as there are just so many great books out there which cry out for decent marketing.

So those two factors might have been the final straw. Each could have been overcome independently or together (I've done bigger batches than this, but never with the intention of fully marketing them) - but that wasn't it.

We are again stopping just short of fully marketing per the "Multiple Eyeballs" theorem - because I've found something which is so vital, it makes everything else seem irrelevant.

I've found a way to beat back the darkness by building bonfires rather than starting up a handful of matches.

The Shadow over Self-Publishing

It's a shadow that has grown longer as ebooks became more popular, and as the idea of a digital "book" became less defined as we ported it to more and more platforms and formats.

That shadow is actually over the whole of the book publishing industry, and is forcing them to evolve rapidly.

For the traditional publisher, my news sources tell me that this is really hitting them in the pocketbook, but they have been shifting their losses to the individual author who has gotten hurt most.

Authors, however, are evolving as well. Smart ones are only giving up their print rights to the publishers - and for shorter time periods. They are keeping the ebook rights. Authors are also realizing that merchandising and peripheral products can be more valuable than a book in print or any single media.

You've seen hints of this where I say that your book-as-a-content-envelope can be ported to audio, video, PDF, and various combinations of digital files in a bundle. You can sell print versions in hardback or paperback. You can create CD's or DVD's with your audio, video, or combinations of the two. Even add in other digital material in those discs. There are at least three major Print-on-Demand publishing firms out there which can get your book distributed internationally for no additional cost to you beyond buying a proof copy. Your CD or DVD can be POD as well, through Kunaki.

Meanwhile, you can sell these books directly from your own site and keep 90% of the royalties or more - while not having to keep up the backend. Even embed Kunaki's sales link on your site and have them ship directly to that customer.

As a writer, you are freed to do only the amount of marketing you want to - and have all the backend sales, production, and delivery done on your behalf for between five and ten percent of your self-determined price. (And many of these offer a pay-what-you-want choice - so the client can give you a tip...)

The Audience Shadow Emerges

I started out with the very old-school approach that quality books, with good covers and descriptions sold the books. And that worked out to be true.

I got financial freedom by jumping on the public domain bandwagon (a bit late, it's true) but also unseated several others who went before me - simply by creating better quality representations of those still-popular author's works. The couple of hundred books I published (really just as tests) started covering my bills - so much that I could actually start doing these publishing tests on a full time basis. However, my income was becoming pegged instead of scaling with each new book added.

What was missing was a real audience - a loyal band of fans who flocked to each new release and was duty-bound to find and buy all the earlier ones.

Publishers don't have audiences, however. Well, not the same as authors do. You can see Dover Publications, and Acres, USA both make sizable income from republishing public domain books. And people do look to them for rare books that are still valuable. I've also found that the much-less-loved textbook publishers have gotten other books republished for extremely inflated prices - and have seemingly a choke-hold on those titles (or so they think) and probably have no audience at all, since it's an extreme niche which can afford to pay those prices.

That is public domain publishing. It's fair amount of work to make income, but if you choose books carefully - the ones which are still popular - you can assemble a backbench which is profitable.

This last case study also brought up why I got into publishing public domain books at all - which wasn't for the money...

The Light Shines Through

I started out researching self-help and self-improvement books to see if they actually worked - coming out of 20+ years in a corporate cult only to find that they were really just after the money and not a humane "free the world" organization as they claimed.

So my idea of self-help was cynical - a bit.

I did find that people could read some of these books and improve their lives. Not too surprisingly, such books continued to sell well if they were simply kept in print.

The main point I found was that I didn't have to write a new series of books to help people improve their lives. There were plenty of very popular books out there which simply needed to be republished. Why re-invent perfectly good wheels - especially when those brands were already well-established?

When ebooks emerged, I jumped on that rising tide with my own boat and tested how I could navigate, successfully. Publishing Private Label Rights (PLR) books also worked. People simply were hungry for more portable versions of books.

A few tests later, with multiple batches of books, and I was sitting pretty. I had fired my last boss from my part-time freelance work and was able to simply publish all I wanted.

Working with leveraging this business, I started running into Amazon's blocks on public domain books. I then saw that actual marketing was needed to expand my sales volumes beyond four-digit monthly sales .

And our case study started in earnest at that point.

Memberships burn brightest.

You may recall in our discussions about this area that Memberships was a topic that came up as highly leveragable.

While I was doing this marketing work on my latest batch of books, I was doing side studies into the how-to's and wherefor's of memberships. I pulled out all the notes and content I'd assembled on this area and started going over it.

This narrowed down to the Rainmaker platform, as well as the real bootstrap operations such as GumRoad - and included dusting off the DIY plug-in InstaMember.

Visit that recent post/podcast about how to reverse-market a book - it's all about building the audience first, even before the book is finished. Memberships are the simplest container for any audience, so that they can get support while supporting you as well.

That was the final straw - I didn't need to invest all my marketing coin (and sweat) into all these other sites when I could get the better result by promoting a single, fully-functioning membership site - Rainmaker. (After all, I was already paying for the service, even though I had nothing there.)

The decision to put this batch of  books - and all other publishing work - on pause became vital. (Yes, I'll still publish this batch as ebooks, and the print versions are out there. But any work on converting the "problem children" to proper print books (even PDF's) are indefinitely on hold.) 

Because I've found a way to build bonfires to guide fleets of ships into the harbor - even as I build it.

New Fuel, Even Brighter Fire

The goal here is to build lighthouses on those cliffs eventually, but for now, we have to work with what we have.

The shining beacon is going to be that series of videos, as Brian Clark proposed in his podcast. What we'll do to get the brightest beam is to use the other resources which have become available since to bring even more eyeballs to that project.

In order to pull this off, I not only have to build a proper membership, but also mine that content to discover and align my books and material to the basic desires of my like-minded audience.

I will be using this same marketing spreadsheet to build a huge audience, far beyond enabling a set of books to sell better.

This may mean I go quiet for awhile as I build this scene. More than likely, I'll move to this new platform and continue blogging from a central location.

Once established properly, this new project will enable me to properly launch all my earlier books as well as any new ones.

Because we are building an audience, something most publishers (and authors) have missed. It's been my recent studies of Copyblogger which helped me drop the scales from my own eyes - and to see in the bright sunshine again.

You can shine, too.

I'll be telling you my steps and mis-steps as I go. It helps me to help you - and you can learn from my mistakes as I do.

The mantra is: Audience First.

That has uncovered the hardest conventional wisdom to drop. Like the fallacy of simply building a better mousetrap, great books don't sell themselves. Bad books, well marketed, do. Nothing is self-apparent these days.

Every author who wants to self-publish can be a roaring success. It takes study and a concentrated approach.

Right now, each of us is facing that narrow, steep, and twisting path up the cliffs where we can light the beacon to call the fleet to safe harbor.

The trick is that it's been done by others, so we can do it.

See you at the top.

- - - -

Make sure you're opted-in to this series, so you don't miss a single white-knuckled adventure in this cliff-hanging series on self-publishing books.

Thanks for all your help and support. See you next time.

(Photo: George, on Flickr)

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• How Great Books Get Forgotten
• Why study classic fiction? To improve your real-world results.
• Lester Levenson - Releasing Your Personal Freedom
• Update: How Lulu Distributes Your eBook - on a Lag

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

(Photo: daniel julià lundgren)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of these were:

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

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

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

What?!?

Read that last one again.

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

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

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

Thanks a lot, guys.

Where real book discovery happens.

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

Now we can get somewhere with this.

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

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

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

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

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

How to SEO your book and not kill yourself off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The common points to these common strategies:

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

It's all part of lean publishing.

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

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

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

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

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

The Common Sense Marketing Plan is almost ready.

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

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

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

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An Author's Guide to Memberships - How to Sell Books Online

Writers: Get Your Books Selling Online Better - Build a Membership

I've long said (over and over) that the key to any author earning real income came from

• writing well and prolifically
• having multiple books for sale on all possible distributors
• building a list by getting your audience to give you their emails.

After I got an independent income from my book sales, I started looking up how to really leverage book income - and found that those writers having the greatest  success were actually taking it a step further - they were getting people to sign up for a membership.

When to Cave Over a Fake Copyright Claim

When they have a lawyer and you can't afford one.

(Jurisdictionary - lousy packaging, great course.)

Hopefully, you don't have a lot invested in that book. Might be a crying shame, but get over it.

The two questions you have to ask yourself:

• Can I afford a lawyer and legal battle?
• Can I afford to have the government copyright search at $150/hour?

Probably not.

That's the simple business plan for a SOHO Indie publisher:

Back off, apologize, and pull the book.

There's plenty more public domain books you can publish which say the same thing, whether fiction or non fiction. But your budget simply can't afford any conflicts.

Take the hint from Google Play and Amazon. If there's a whiff of lawyer in the air, they simply suspend the book immediately and tell the indie publisher to sort it out. If you come out with your own version of an ebook, Google quickly pulls their free version with no questions asked - even though it's still in the public domain. They simply don't want the hassle.

I ran into this recently. Some claim about how I "infringed" on someone's rights.

Turns out that book has never been on solid legal footing. I searched all over on Stanford Copyright site to find that book. Double, triple checked - looked for different spellings. No one had ever simply renewed that copyright after it expired.

Then I checked Google Books to search through the digital hardcopies of copyright renewals - still nothing there.

Just for a lark, I looked up their version of this book - and found that while it was published since 1977, they hadn't bothered to register that book, either.

What was really occurring was some relative was getting a nice little check every month from the publisher and no one wanted to upset that apple-cart. That relative had enough moxie to look out for and defend his little paycheck by alerting the current publisher.

Nothing is on file with the Government. So they don't have a leg to stand on.

But they do have lawyers.

And I don't.

So it's apologize, pull the book, find another to replace it. Even though I did nothing wrong. Discretion being the better part of valor, and all that.

Other options:

• Publish only in countries which don't support that copyright.

Of course, that knocks out about 80% of your potential revenue - but you'll still have some. Simple enough to do - just check the countries you know you have rights in.

• Publish with distributors who aren't in the US. 

Even worse income. Can be done. None that I'd bother to mention here...

• Set up digital sales on a server outside the U.S. on a non-signatory nation like China and do your own promotion to sell the book from there.

Oh, come on. You just made Indie publishing an expensive hobby.

Look, there are tons of great books which are out of copyright. Many are unquestionably so. Invest your time in the ones which will give you real returns, not headaches.

Like the old Queen's approach to a parade: nod, smile, and move on.

PS. The pity is that these books aren't being made into ebooks, just suppressed from them. So people can't easily find the data. Solution: extract the data as a "review" or "study guide" under fair use (less than 10% of the original text).

PPS. Just realized that this same publishing executive who didn't renew his copyrights (or have them checked) also gave me bogus data about a book originally written and published in France. The translation is a different edition, different copyright - and was never renewed in the U.S. where it was first published. I'm not trying to republish that original book in French. So I'm good until someone complains... Just keep a low profile - which means less sales. (sigh.)

Related articles

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How to Really Profit from Self-Publishing - Follow the Disney Route to Success

Use public domain to inspire your own works - that's their greatest, and most profitable use.

The real reason for works returning to the public domain is to inspire the next generation. The long-dead authors no longer need to profit from their works. It's also why corporations have a longer copyright than actual people do - thank Disney for that.

This breakthrough started with a sentence at the bottom of another post:

Original works are always wanted.

The result of this bombshell has changed my plans completely - and gotten me back on track to what will not just leverage what I can out of public domain books I've already published, but open doors to the fortune I've always known was possible.

Let me show you how the logic on this panned out...

Additional data on copyrights:

Got a query yesterday from Amazon saying that I'd supposedly infringed on someone's rights - and they gave me an email contact. So I sent an email off to him. The problem was that the Stanford database didn't have the registration in it. Of course, Stanford says there are errors in less than 1 percent of the time - and I've published over 200 books, so that figured my time was up.

That contact was nice enough, telling me a long story of how this work had been published through the years and falsely put into the public domain where I'd found it. At this point, I'm having to accept his word for it as I don't have time or money to verify it.

The other point is that the copyright problems are showing up mostly when I get an Amazon book published. People don't tend to look at Kobo or Google Play or iTunes or Nook so much. But a hit on Amazon will bring you 3 or 4 times more income that the same book brings on the other distributors.

You have to realize that not only is Amazon targeting publish domain publishers to protect themselves and their bottom-line profits, but the higher profile you get by being on Amazon, the more you are going to wind up being someone's target.

Just the way it is.

It all makes publishing that much harder and more costly. You don't have to work at months of writing an original book, but you are going to have to do a lot of back-end work to ensure that what you offer up to Amazon will meet their (arbitrary) standards and not get you booted off their system.

Does public domain have limits?

With that copyright data, and the earlier Amazon publishing experiment, it really says that the amount of leverage your average public domain book has is limited. The closer your book is to 1964, the more likely it's going to show up as renewed - particularly if it's been a bestseller at any time. The farther before 1923 and the less likely people are going to understand it - or buy it.

This next project I have started will base of this test above, and also give another 20 books to Amazon for testing. I expect that I should be able to get even better approval rates than the above on these. We'll see. (Most of these books are pre-1923, so the text is harder to read, but the copyrights are clearer.)

This also seems to cast a final shadow on public domain as becoming any than just a decent living in book publishing.

This is where I doubt the viability of leverage for public domain books on their own. At least as far as creating a fortune.

Disney leveraged public domain stories into big hits (and his corporation later extended copyright laws to protect those hits.) Extensive re-work (differentiation) is what's needed. While you're at it, you might as well re-write all that PLR you have laying around. Same difference - you're coming up with an original work which will fly on Amazon and everywhere else.

For me, this brings up another view - which has been to create children's stories based on old legends. Illustrate them and publish. Found today that the formula for a children's book (young ones) is 32 pages. Means it will just barely get published as a book by Lulu. All that is really just a long powerpoint, with facing illustrations, giving you about 16 pages of prose.

Children's books are a highly rewarding niche - meaning a hit there sells very, very well. (As a sidebar, a check of the list of classic children's stories shows that all the books I've checked - most of them - after 1923 have their copyrights renewed per Stanford. Thats how much of a hit they are. (I can see a test of making collections of these to fly on Amazon and everywhere else... just kidding.)

Just thought I'd leave you with even more ideas of how to leverage public domain...

The sun still shines very brightly behind the thickest of dark clouds.

What this means for all the projects I've planned.

Shelved, mostly. (Apt phrase for a book publisher.)

You can bite off more than you can chew, easily.

I was going to do a massive project which is proving unnecessary.  Because I was again reminded that "there's no place like home" as I reviewed the book selections I was going to use. 

My own prose was easier to understand than these long-dead authors. My own books haven't taken off because I simply haven't done the marketing that I was lining up for this new series of books. 

If I want to leverage public domain books, I simply have to market the best ones.

That's the secret.

Any decent public domain book is still fought over. That's Amazon's lesson.

See those children's books above. Those copyrights were renewed because they are cash cows that keep giving. Same for any really decent book. The battles I've lost in public domain publishing have been a) because the book was still selling well, and b) they've not been very long in the public domain.

Fights which go into foreign registry, or whether the rights were actually properly transmitted will get you nowhere.

Sure, you can "get away" with it - but you'll never have any income leverage to speak of. And you'll always tend to look over your shoulder for the inevitable - however long it will take.

Find a niche, get inspired, make a fortune.

That is my new mantra. The people who get insanely rich provide incredible value to a very narrow niche. As Warren Buffett quoted even older wisdom: "You can put all your eggs in one basket - but you have to watch that basket very carefully."

Besides writing, my other talent has always been drawing and illustrating. I've disappointed many art teachers and relatives when I went off to figure something else out rather than spend my time creating beautiful art.

The analysis of children's books and Disney above lays this out well.

All the tools needed are already there.

So I'm back to properly market my earlier books, one of which is an orphan that has done really, really well for me.

All I need to do is to help people find that book more easily by doing all the marketing I was planning for that new project. What I had found is that the new project had classics which don't read well today. People won't follow them easily. 

Children's books are different. When you read a list of classic books, you'll see the ones we all read growing up. That most of them after 1923 are still copyrighted say how much they are still popular - and still sell.

What Disney did was to take these classic tales and convert them to a new art form - animated movies.

You'll find the same happened over and over to many of these classics. 

New works, based on the inspiration of classics, will make their profit both on being based on a popular work and also being well-crafted in adaptation.

The bottom line is a brighter one

There is only so much money to be made from mechanically re-publishing books.

Narrow the focus down to just what works and do more of that.

This one set of books will be a nice production.

But that is just to leverage those profits to get into a much wider and more lucrative scene of producing children's books. 

That last project I just shelved was to create a tipping point for world peace. The best way to do this, really, is through children's books which all ages enjoy.

An illustrated 32 page book - with 16 pages of text - will make an insanely nice video for this day and age. Simple, direct, easily viewed and shared.

This niche is so wanted, Lulu and two major distributors have both created self-publishing areas just for children's books.

I have a study coming soon which is to find the books which are illustrated and public domain - then study these for the craft itself. Almost bought a course on this last night (except their buy button made me go somewhere else instead of simply opt-ing in right there. (Too bad, they were in the top 5 of Google. Throw-away marketing.)

Publishing several of these will shake out the model which is needed, as well as the technical details. This recent study of Amazon has already exactly what's needed to break into the "big time" of bestsellers. Now it's time to make some.

Related articles

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