Why Publishers Earn More Income than Self-Publishing Writers

(photo: Jeremy Brooks)

Selling Books Online is What Publishers Do Best (Writers Write Best).

I was looking over my "series of unfortunate events" post - which laid out how I got financially free once I started publishing books for a living.

The weird point I noticed was that I didn't take 5 years at a book-a-year rate in order to make that happen. It was just around 18 months or so.

The difference is this:

I didn't try to write all the books. 

I also didn't mess with trying all the "conventional wisdom" of "building a platform" on social media - or anything else conventional. Factually, the only marketing I did was to make sure the books had decent covers and descriptions.

Otherwise, I left the marketing to the distributors, which was primarily their own on-site algorithms.

The two basic data which are consistent with Indie Authors (or any authors) are:

1. A deep backbench of books, 
2. organized by series.

That tested well, since people could find my books by author and series.

One advantage I had was that most of the public domain books have lousy covers and descriptions. The other point was price. All of these books were priced at .99 - so it's above free, but obviously better quality than the free ones (judging the book by its cover) but was still an affordable purchase.

After that, it was a numbers game. Over a hundred books on 5 distributors, giving me about 35% royalties - all that was needed to cover my publishing bills (internet connection, basically) was for each of these books to sell once per month, on average. Once I got a bestseller going, it pulled along the other books in that series (or by the same author) and I was then able to cover all my bills.

True to form, it was all long tail:

• Most never sold.
• A few sold a handful during the year.
• A small handful sold regularly - one or two a month, never the same on any two distributors.
• The smallest handful (about 5 titles) sold well - a dozen or more a month on all distributors. 
• One title became a bestseller on all distributors.

Most of this reason was as the distributors all have different audiences, even though they are all international (some more than others.)

Why write when you can publish?

I'd realized that my income was coming from publishing instead of writing and so devoted more time to the former and devoted the latter to my blogging.

Some partial tests (again, without marketing) showed that the same rules still applied:

• Get a set of books on the same subject.
• Publish them as part of a series.
• People will find them and buy related books in that series.

That's the essential tipping point to publishing.

Good quality books, with presentable covers and descriptions tend to sell well on their own. But they sell better in a series.

And that explains why self-publishing authors can start earning income after 5 books - and if it takes a year to write and publish a book, then there you go.

All these books were published as some sort of series, even if they didn't sell. That I had a hundred books grouped by series then just sped the process. 

If my memory serves, because Amanda Hocking released several books a year, it made her rise meteoric by comparison.

Again, it's not when you started writing - your income increase starts from the moment you start publishing. It took both J. K. Rowling and Stephen King years to get their first book even published. Self-publishing tends to speed up the process.

(Authors-turned-publishers can speed this up even more, since publishers work with existing authors and existing books.)

The more books you have published in the shortest period of time will determine how fast you become able to live off your writing alone.

Since I edit public domain books as a series - and publish all at once - this then gets near-immediate sales which then increase with time. Recently, I published a dozen books on copywriting as a series, which took me a couple of months to edit into shape - but then started having sales the same week. Instant series - instant sales. No marketing, no book launch, no ads or promotion.

The next step is to start marketing - really.

You'd think marketing was a no-brainer. The problem I've been having is that there are so many very good public domain books out there which answer very old questions. Research in any field will wind up with "unsolved" problems and questions - but a little more study will find that someone half a century or a century ago actually did figure it out. But people can't easily find those books today.

Since marketing is really finding what problems people want to solve, then telling them where to find (and buy) the solution - it makes the whole idea of making a living from publishing public domain books a no-brainer.

My curse up to this point has been that it is much easier to edit and publish books than it has been to market them. It's much more satisfying to find solutions to problems than it is to convince people that this solution is the one they are looking for.

But I've begun to run out of problems that need solving, and the solutions I've found for marketing (which leverage sales into new heights) have begun to need testing, so marketing tests are next up.

In fact, that's what I'm in the middle of as I take time to write this - but this burning question (of why it was such a short period to get financial freedom) needed answering, so you now have a blog post which does just that.

The moral to this story - publish now, publish often.

That's as simple as it gets.

The only other point to add is that you publish as a series in a narrow genre (or problem area.) Look at Amanda Hocking, J. K. Rowling, Stephen King - all write for a specific narrow genre. If you look at older authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, or H. G. Wells - you'll see that any book they wrote outside of the genre they did best is mostly unknown today (or in their own time.)

The faster you can get books published (yours or someone else's) the faster you'll be able to earn a living publishing.

The bottom line, if you haven't guessed, is that publishing earns income. Writing by itself does nothing until you send it to a distributor who can get it in front of as many people as possible.

Want to an have independent income? Want to write for your living?

Publish.

Now.

- - - -

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How to Build a Profitable Business Plan - Selling Your Books Online

(photo: PlanToo47)

Most Authors Don't Have a Business, or Even a Plan

Don't worry about it. That's why 97% of everyone on this planet die broke, including most indie and conventional authors.

Charles Dickens ran a business. So does Amanda Hocking, so does any profitable author.

If you aren't making a living writing books, maybe you should look over your own business.

How to Write, Publish, and Everything Else.

Although a great deal can be left to the major distributors and their "also bought" algorithms, the more you are active in your business, the more income rises.

There is one rule for earning income by selling books online:

Writing Feeds the Soul,

Publishing Pays the Bills.

If your bills aren't getting paid from your book income, your publishing business is failing. 

If you don't have anything worth publishing, then your writing business is failing.

In Stephen King's memoir "On Writing", he lays out a basic way to feed your soul and keep your body fed, your lights and heat on, clothes on your back - and your spouse happy with trinkets.

He wrote in the morning when he felt most inspired. He answered emails and took care of his business in the afternoon. He read in the evening - which then stoked the fires for his writing the next morning.

Each day he had a target of 2,000 words written. Then he worked his business after that.

Dickens had a similar scene. He wrote in the morning, took a 3-hour walk which recharged his writing batteries, then spent the evening with family and associates.

The point is that such a schedule comparmentalizes your life in to activities, so you can focus on one area at a time.

(It's also noted that many successful authors arranged their lives to be completely un-distracted while writing, and had rather strict schedules to their reclusive lives. They were not social butterflies.)

Self-publishing isn't set-and-forget.

It's too easy to think of an author as simply a person who churns out books and self-publishes them or gets them published, then gets onto the next book.

This is simply another road to immediate or eventual poverty.

There is the fact that the average number of books an author has to publish before their financial success rolls in is five. Most have more than that, in several series.

It is the series of books which invite and hold the reader's interest. The various stages of changes in the character's journeys are the key draw - as people compare their own lives with those of the character.

In non-fiction, it's the author taking them through one or more aspects of that business model or skilset. Something else to learn each time.

The author in both cases is working with their audience to bring more value into their lives.

The Business is in the List.

Internet Marketers are infamous for touting that "the money is in the list." It's their short-hand way of saying, "give the most value to those who trust you most."

When you have a list of emails from your devoted fans, you then have a business of simply

1. asking them what they want most, 
2. writing and editing that into shape, 
3. then telling them when it's ready to purchase
4. (and asking them to review it on Amazon.)

You as the author also have to have all the backend necessary to keep building that list, as well as regular emails to it in order to build your relationships.

But you don't neglect your writing. The more books you have (deeper backbench) the more players you can have on the field, even when you rotate them.

And you also have to recharge your batteries every day to get ready for the next.

Behind the Velvet Rope

The best leverage is to assemble your content into both free and paid memberships, so that people can support your writing on a monthly basis - and get access to your behind-the-scenes world.

Not only do you let them in, you encourage them to become your patron in exchange for personal favors and interaction.

They pay you to help them improve their lives.

This also means that you are regularly producing content just for them, quite in addition to your daily writing - even if it means letting them get access to your daily drafts on a regular basis.

What you also get from this is their feedback on what they think of your plot, characters, and style. This allows you to tailor-make your books to the readers who follow you most.

Every book you publish, especially ebooks, should have a link which encourages them to become members and step behind the velvet rope.

And Let Them Invite Their Friends

The final step is to encourage them to become evangelists by making them into affiliate sales people.  You simply give them a commission for every book they sell. Many of these people have email lists, or at least followers on their social media. You only have to provide them with a personal link they can use which says they sent that person to buy your book. (Lots of programs and scripts out there which can do this.)

Everyone appreciates the recognition. Some will even take this up as their full-time work as they figure out how to make a living selling other's books and products.

In fact, you can actually set up your book on affiliate sales platforms where such pro's gather regularly. Because these people have their own lists, by mailing to these people, you get a certain amount of them who join your list. Then you invite them to join your membership, and the cycle continues.

The bottom line is that you are expanding your bottom line.

Which makes it more possible for you to do just what you want, which is to write great books that people enjoy.

There's more to this, as far as specifics. I'm currently working on an ecourse which will lay this out in pretty specific detail so anyone can do it. That, along with a case study, will then become a book later.

For a non-fiction writer, that's the other side of the coin. Each book becomes an ecourse, which adds to the list or a segment of it. List members can become membership-patrons and clients. Members can become affiliates - who then bring you more people to your ecourse.

See how this just continues to expand?

That's a business plan - at least in the broad strokes.

- - - -

Be sure to subscribe by email or RSS feed to ensure you don't miss a single valuable post!

(Yes, that opt-in for the ecourse is coming soon if you don't already see it below...)

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How to Publish Public Domain Books and Profit Nearly Forever - Part 2

(continued from Part 1)

The How-To Tips of Publishing PD and PLR to Profit From Here On Out

(Photo: Simon Cunningham)

Sorry I didn't give you exact steps last time. (Of course, you can get this from my books, "Just Publish!" [ebook] and "Publish. Profit. Independence." [ebook | tradepaperback])

Here's the simple logic of it... 

The strategy:

• Build a big backbench of titles, 

• Publish these to as many eyeballs as possible. 

• Encourage search engines hock your books for you.

Most authors make their big bucks from creating books for a certain niche in a series. This was the real secret behind (the over-hyped) John Locke and Amanda Hocking, as well as the perennial Stephen King.

These all write to a specific niche and for that particular audience.

You can do the same thing with Public Domain books, even PLR.

The problem with writing original fiction is that it takes a damned long time - like maybe 2 or 3 books a year. So you have to keep your day job meanwhile. Hocking is a hit now in her 20's, but she started in high school. Stephen King only wrote weekends until he could get enough books selling so that he could go full time. (Years and years.) Locke took about 7 years, and profited from loopholes in Amazon's system at the time (you can't even use his cheat-system anymore.)

The other point, particularly in non-fiction, is that there are a lot of great books out there which are poorly marketing and mostly out of print. Where these fall in to the public domain, where they are picked up and re-published, even if the quality is decent, the marketing usually sucks. (Just check out the public domain covers at Amazon for a hint.)

You can take any pre-1923 book and republish it as public domain and profit from any sales from there on out. About 94% of the books published between 1923 and 1964 were never renewed or never registered, so can be sleuthed out (see link) to see if they are public domain.

PLR is similar. No, you can't publish PLR on Amazon. But iTunes, Google Play/Books, Nook, and Kobo will take them as ebooks. And if you publish as hardcopy, they are accepted anywhere.

How to build your PD or PLR publishing empire

Know this, it's both easier and harder than it used to be. I got started by shoving a great deal of works up as a test through Lulu and they ported them to iTunes and Nook for me. They won't do that anymore. You simply have to port them all yourself. Google allows a mass upload, but Kobo is still an individual book-by-book publishing scene.

Using Calibre, you can pretty simply create and edit any ebook. LibreOffice will help convert it to a print version for hardcopies. Lulu will publish just about anything you want to publish, they just won't distribute it. See my two books above (and this blog) to get all the details of it. Calibre improves almost weekly, so it's a great tool that has continual updates.

1. Find your passion, find your niche.

This isn't get rich quick. You are going to be at this for awhile. Publishing is the simple part. And it will pay for the marketing you need to do to leverage your sales into something sustainable.

You have to be fascinated by the subject and interested in finding new things about it, as well as talking to anyone who will listen - and that is really all that marketing is, if you think it through.

So narrow down your passion and find a niche in that passion where people will pay good money to listen to you. Searching on Amazon or Google Shopping is a good start. There's a lot said about too narrow or too broad niches - so study up on this.

2. Get a series of books on the subject which are public domain and/or PLR.

PLR is mostly about Internet Marketing, but there are some great books out there on other topics. Frequently, you'll find a series of articles about a topic. These can be edited into a book (which is where most of the PLR ebooks out there started.) The great value to PLR is that someone has already done the research for you - you just have to re-write it into something useful. Most of PLR has already been published somewhere. I pushed several dozen books up on the main distributors as a test, and they've been selling like most books - a few sell regularly, and some every now and then. None are great hits - but they haven't actually been marketed, either.

Public domain is even easier to find. Start looking at the original publishing date and you can find some great ones. But just because a book has been registered, it doesn't mean the original wasn't already public domain. I found one recently which had it's copyright renewed in 1943, but it's original published date was prior to 1923. 

A point here - make sure you are working with original text. Many public domain books have been edited and additional, newer data has been added. That new data is under copyright, but not the original. (See this discussion at Public Domain Sherpa.)

2a. Make sure they are public domain. 

Use the Stanford database. Simple. Again, visit Public Domain Sherpa.

3. Get a batch of these and convert them into all possible formats.

Told you it wasn't get rich quick. You are going to have to know how to edit, some spelling, and grammar. You're going to have to know how to make great covers, or pay someone to do it. You are going to have to know how to write great copy for the descriptions. (Suggested here is to learn from Eugene Schwartz.)

Note: you want landing pages linked into the ebook versions - even if you don't flesh out those pages right away. People will want to find more books by that author/publisher. You probably want to start a blog or have a website - it's own topic of discussion.

4. Port these books to all possible distributors.

Lulu (get your free isbn's without Amazon discrimination), Google Play/Books, iTunes (needs a MAC), Nook, Kobo. 

5. Additional marketing: 

• Covers to Pinterest, Flickr. 
• PDF excerpts to Slideshare. 
• Create/update book pages on Open Library.  
• BitTorrent Bundle, etc.

6. Now, take your best book in this series (the one you can talk the most about) and make it your representative.

• Discount the price everywhere - not free, but very low. This is your loss-leader.
• You want to take each chapter and create an ecourse out of it. 
• Then you set up an opt-in form for an autoresponder (Mail Chimp is free for the first few hundred subscribers) to enable people to give you their email addresses.
• Blog about all these books in the series so you have landing pages for each book
• Then set up some hidden pages on your blog/site which have direct links to discount books on Lulu.
• Promote these special offers to your list as exclusive specials. Note: set these up so you make some money on each one, but they are obvious values.
• Create videos for each lesson and get these posted on YouTube and Flickr, as well as DailyMotion, etc.

7. For any new book, set up pre-release prices and do proper releases to your mailing list for new books coming out. 

This is the Amazon Instant Bestseller Tactic. If you can get enough people to buy them at a low price, then leave nice reviews, you will rocket your book up Amazon's algorithms and get more sales. If your book is in a particularly narrow niche, you'll rise to their "bestseller" status - but that takes more homework, again - see my earlier books above.

Then if you leave the Amazon link embedded in all your Pinterest, Flickr, and video posts (as well as your blogs) then the returning link-love will also help your standings on Amazon. 

Meanwhile, your Lulu sales, as well as your other distributors' ebook sales will pay for your other marketing expenses. 

8. From there...

• All your books can have special releases on their own. Each re-release can become an "Amazon bestseller."
• You can create binders/collections of the books and release them on their own.
• You can get someone to create an audiobook of your bestseller, and get this on Audible (sold on Amazon)
• You should create hardcopy versions for each ebook as you go - but the bestselling books should be put out into "Global Distribution" via Lulu, so can be sold everywhere. (You can even get a hardback version created via Lulu - which is even better revenue.)
• More ecourses.
• Create digital product versions which can be sold via affiliate sites (such as JVZoo) and iAmplify. Your readers can get paid for promoting your book - and should.
• Weekly blog posts with audio/video will improve the discovery potential for all these books.

(Note: there may be more money in selling courses based on the book, especially in non-fiction. Check out Udemy.)

9. Then: rinse, repeat.

Once you've done all you can for this niche set of books - and carefully published and marketed any additional books you've now found for this series - then you can do the market research to find a new niche (or related one) and do the above steps on it.

Note: now you have a mailing list, so your work can become even more popular and profitable.

The trick is to work our your own assembly line and market as you go. Stick to a simple batch of books before you start any further ones. Believe me, there's a great deal of satisfaction helping people find a long-dead author's work. But you want to get paid for your efforts. So marketing the books is key - and it's what sets you apart from all the other PD re-publishers.

Why this works - Long Tail Marketing.

Mainly because it's self-supporting. Publishing books and doing the minimal marketing of an attractive cover and enticing description will leverage on the existing brand of any author and their books. Distributing as ebooks to every possible ebook distributor should (depending on how profitable the niche/author is) give you regular income to reward you for your work.

When you use modern online marketing efforts to ensure the search engines know about your books, then you fuel a greater fire under that book - which improves discovery. Up to a few years ago, you couldn't find these books other than in a used-book store. And in many cases, this is still true on Amazon.

By creating ebook versions, you are now introducing a new version so people can see if they like it. Then you also offer the hardcopy version, which most people still prefer.

It's all Long Tail Marketing - meaning there are a lot of people out there for any particular niche. You don't have to have bestsellers all the time, but they are nice. The trick is to give your niche some great value continually. As you add on more and related niches, you build a set of inter-referring web pages and marketing content ("if you liked this book/author/publisher, then you may also like...")

This can leverage you into being able to publish full time - when your book sales approach approximately twice what you make at your day job. (That means it will pay for your monthly bills and Social Security, etc.)

For now, just have fun with this.

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The genius reason behind the madness of publishing as a home business

Genius publishers can get financial freedom if they want to work hard.

My job is to make it easier by leaving a back-trail anyone can follow.

The idea is to create a self-publishing home-business which earns you financial freedom.

I started on this a few years ago, when I saw that Lulu was getting into the ebook business in a serious way. The logic I saw was simple (and I've covered this before):

1. Most books don't sell well or at all. The chances of getting a true bestseller are slim. 
2. Authors who have a deep backbench of works make more income, particularly if they write for a narrow genre (Stephen King, Amanda Hocking).

In my work with tracing down the workable self-help books, I found that public domain (PD) works which were well-written continued to sell well. Their brand had already been established.

Private Licensed Rights (PLR) books came up when I was studying Internet Marketing. They were touted as one of the quick-and-easy ways of "making money online."

So I did some tests, which Lulu carried my water for - I put up 28 topselling fiction books and 30-some PLR books which I'd collected and already had good covers.

Both sets were published as 99-cent offers and went everywhere I could get them, ignoring Amazon as they had peculiarities. This was Lulu, iTunes, Nook, Kobo, and Google Play/Books.

I started getting sales right off from some of each category. Books I'd put up on Amazon, some based on PD, took almost a year before I started getting any serious income. Then one book took off and still makes me over twice what the rest of the books did combined. Meanwhile, I made enough from the other books to literally quit my day job as all my bills were being paid, plus some went into savings.

I'd achieved Financial Freedom, if not yet a millionaire (my current and on-going project.)

The reason I blog about this is two-fold: 

Helping you get your own financial freedom makes my own freedom grow.

Self-Publishing Lessons Learned

• It's a lot of hard work. And it only expands and becomes more profitable the more you refine your approach. Left to itself, the sales will ebb and flow, gradually working down in time. So you have to keep adding more books and marketing the books you have.
  
• Marketing is enabling discovery. Online, this is making them easily accessed by search engines (SEO) also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM.) While you can run ads, they are expensive and are mostly ignored by online viewers. What is most effective marketing currently are a) Content Marketing (Native Advertising), b) Direct marketing to a list, or c) A combination of the two, such as building a membership from your online presence which builds your list so you can give special offers to those who pay to get behind your "velvet rope."
  
• Because of the work and marketing involved, the actual competition is low. If you look over the bulk of the ebooks available for sale, you'll find that they have lousy covers, and lousy descriptions. Yet these are the two points which people use for buying. Sure, they look at the preview and price, but not the reviews so much, if at all.
  
• You never stop learning and improving. Marketing and the Internet are both evolving at a rapid rate. But the old axiom that 97% of conventional wisdom is bunk also holds true. You need to test everything and look for the 1-3% of recurring truths which keep showing up (providing you are keeping your eyes wide open.)

Why PD books make you money

1. Their audience and word of mouth has already been established - all you have to do is dust them off, repackage them, and make them enticing and available. In short, ADD VALUE.
2. Because 97% of the people on this planet won't take the extra steps to make something succeed, they won't do the hard work it takes to build up these passive income streams. (Actually, they are trained and want a wage-slave JOB so they can pay for their entertainment. That's their life.) 
3. 97% of the wanna-be entrepreneurs out there are in search of the "get rich quick" approach and won't see the Field of Diamonds they are already standing in.
4. In today's world, people want their information pre-digested and summarized. This is why you use a blog to Content Market. What you are offering is solutions to common life problems. It just happens that humankind hasn't changed much in 10,000 years and the writers who successfully told people how to solve those problems left behind their writings. You are just making them discoverable again.
5. The Velvet Rope approach (as Jay Abraham refers to memberships) is how you develop a captive audience who will digest the flow of useful and valuable information you are providing. This is how you can take any of various books and create an "instant bestseller" on Amazon, earning you a tidy sum which will continue for a very long time - even if you don't do much of anything to market it later.
6. Continuing marketing (which most companies don't do, but the successful ones do) of a set of books or course (the "Do You Make These Mistakes in English?" campaign was a great example) is what builds momentum and sales. You don't have to run ads - you do have to keep telling people that you have the solution to their problem(s).

The reason I continue to do what I do

Is to help you earn your freedom. Because the Golden Rule applies - in order to get, you have to give. The route to peace is through prosperity, which is through commerce. We all want a more peaceful life. We'd all be better off if we were rich. To get rich and have peace of mind, you have to help others get rich and their own peace of mind.

The books I publish help you to this end-result - and my end goals.

Your well-being is my highest concern.

Because if you do better, I'll do better - we'll all do better.

A permanent, ongoing world peace is the ultimate goal.

It will happen if we all help everyone around us live prosperous and free lives.

And so, I publish.

You can, too.

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How to Drive Yourself Sane - Checklist for Self-Publlshing

It's easier to plan things out and work your plan, especially when publishing many books at once.

(photocredit: Seattle Municipal Archives)

(I've been owing you an update to "Just Publish!" [see links above right] - and this isn't a complete one, but it's a step in that direction. Note: this will be looong - and will ultimately wind up as a chapter, or replacing a chapter in that book. Get a cup of your favorite beverage...)

First rule to know:

1. You feed your stomach by publishing. You feed your soul by writing.

Note the differences.

• Writing keeps you happy, contented. 
• Publishing keeps you fed, a roof over your head, clothes on your back - and trinkets for your spouse.

Your Job, should you decide to accept this, is to get your work published and marketed to the world.

Your Bliss is writing the stories within you - so you can get them published and marketed to the world. 

Don't confuse the two. Both are necessary. Both have their disciplines.

Stephen King, in his "On Writing", used his most inspired times to write - which was the morning for him. In the afternoon, he answered emails and did the mundane. At night, he read books - which set him up for more inspiration for the following morning. 

So you write, you publish, you veg-out. The three actions any writer does.

This post is about how you publish.

When I started writing, I knew I had something to say - and kept writing until it all came out. Then started again the next day.

I write my most inspired stuff in the early am, often before breakfast, or right after.

Then I work on the farm, checking animals, fixing fence, etc. After lunch, I come back to my computer and do what's on my docket for the day, which is often publishing. (If I do have something inspired which is incomplete, then I'll come back to it and peck away mid-morning over my second cup of coffee before I get back to the farm work.)

In my life, the farm keeps me fed and a roof over my head. My publishing buys me clothes and trinkets.

When I sorted out that I could make a living from publishing and never again had to work for anyone, I quit working for anyone and looked around to see what else I could publish. Lots easier discovering what was deposited in my accounts each month than having to do dull, repetitious, dumb work which went no where. I play at life now, and get paid for it even better than having a JOB. Big difference.)

Some tests I did found that both Public Domain (PD) and Public Licensed Rights (PLR) texts sold well for very little time invested. (PLR -  think generic peanut butter anyone can slap a house-brand label on.)

You might think this sacrilege, but I found while my own books were appreciated, I needed to do substantially more work in marketing them - and I needed to study more about marketing. Meanwhile, I needed money for trinkets while I did these studies.  So it's a logical step to arrange things so that I can go back to "school" while continuing to have income meanwhile.

Real World Marketing

The first basic I learned is that every book has a market, and every market is a niche. No one market fits all.

When you pick up PD or PLR books, you are not just figuring that it's going to make you money simply because you are re-publishing it. Right now, there is a bit of a Gold Rush in getting books converted to digital versions, but most of this is already out there. Public Domain isn't liked by Amazon  or Smashwords because so many people are working at trying to get their version of some classic up for sale. 

Similarly with PLR - most of these have been around for years.

The trick is to discover a profitable niche and then provide that niche with value. 

Classics continue to sell well because 

a) they are damned good books, which inspire and entertain, and 

b) they've been well-marketed in the past.

The value of bringing these back to life is in 

1) A better quality edition - more accessible.

2) A better price (more value) as it's become a commodity of sorts, and you compete on pricing.

3) Access to valuable related materials (thank the "also-bought" and "related" algorithms.)

My SEO background says that I can add value by producing web sites for these books which enable someone to find all the "greatest hits" by that author in one place - a website which also then sends people to their distributor of choice in order to find related books. That such a website could be grown to enable anyone to join a membership of like-minded people where they'd welcome receiving related offers.

Right now, the main thing with most of these classics is that they are being poorly re-marketed, with drab covers, poor descriptions, and high prices in order to discourage readers. Converting these to quality ebooks at low prices and marketing them freshly as if said author is a new rising star - that is what people want. (Apply John Locke publishing theory without the scamming he did. Think 99 cent classics - all you can download.)

PLR is the same point, but in reverse. Peole are searching on the Internet for certain keywords in order to find solutions. You provide these with ebooks that they can find on Google Play or iTunes - and then they'll be able to find your site where you have related books and other offers. 

Or so the theory goes. 

My own work right now is to build a backbench of consistently-selling books so that I can then afford the time to get the websites and membership sites built for these niches. (Which is the subject of another post on a different blog.)

What to do with several dozen books to publish?

Now I can start to explain the assembly line basis for publishing books. 

I don't expect you to follow in my footsteps - only to just tell you that the below sequence has proved rather efficient. Pushing all these through has brought home what works and what doesn't.

To End Right, Start Right

OK, say you only have a half-dozen books you want to publish. These could be stuff you wrote years ago, or repurposing your blogs - or you found some really great books which have been out of print for years, but you know some people who would buy them...

You want to assembly line this, so you aren't bouncing around all over the place and getting nothing done.

The steps below we get done for every book you want to publish:

While you can work in about any word-processor, I work on Linux - so this means a cross between  a text-only editor (gedit is my choice) and LibreOffice (aka OpenOffice).  The easiest way to export a file to both epub and PDF is Libre/Open Office.

Note: This is a Lulu.com-centered process - because they work cheaply and fast. Cheap meaning it costs you only your time - which is like the rest of the programs below. We are going to use the lowest common denominator here in order to make it simple. If it can post to Lulu as an epub, you can post it anywhere - that will take that type of content, anyway.

1. Get your text cleaned up and all your chapter titles assigned either H1 or H2 headings. Make sure your body text is all one style, preferably a default one. Really, this doesn't have to be more than that. Your epub won't have (or have to have) special formatting to display on any smart phone.

2. Use GIMP to create a stylish, attractive cover - or pay someone to do this for you. 

The specs on this from Lulu say at least 612 x 792 pixels and at least 72 DPI. (If you don't know what these are, it's a good thing you're paying someone to do your cover - or have time to learn.)

But you have an option for larger files, since their default (and Apple's preference) is much larger.

3. Open up the LibreOffice properties dialog and fill in all these blanks.

4. Using the Writer2Epub plug-in for LibreOffice, get ready to export this into your epub. You'll see there is now a place for your cover image and some other blanks. Make sure you fill all of these out - most of them are in your properties - so you can simply copy/paste all these into your text editor, as you can't have two dialog boxes open at the same time on LibreOffice.

5. Now - go ahead and export your epub.

6. Open your new epub up in Sigil. What you want to do first is to create a new table of contents (under Tools) and it's also suggested you remove unused style sheets. iTunes and BandN are sticky about details, so just go ahead and do these - take my word for it.

7. Open up Calibre and have it add your book. Here, you again need to open up the MetaEditor and check all the spaces to make sure you've filled out everything there. Calibre will keep everything organized for you - just copy/paste from there.

While we are on this subject, read this Lulu notice: 

The first letter of all words in the title, subtitle and author name should be capitalized, except for the following words: a, an, and, for, from, of, or, the, to. The first and last word of the title and subtitle should always be capitalized.

Besides using anything besides H1 and H2 headings, this is the most common reject. Learn these nine words - memorize them until you notice them everywhere in titles. It's a good idea to simply put all your content into this format to save you later on.  Saves time and frustration.  (H3 and lower headings got eliminated late last year some time. No biggie. But it took some hours of forum searching and test submissions to find that using anything besides H1 and/or H2 would cause all sorts of mysterious rejects.)

Another minor point is to use the same punctuation in your title as on your cover. (See Lulu's "Top 10 Reject Reasons.")

Next in Sigil, do the epubcheck and fix anything that comes up - until it gives you a "No Problems Found" signal. Then save it once again - and you're ready with that book.

- - - - 

Do the above seven steps with all books you are publishing now.

A note on descriptions

The 1000 characters that Lulu gives you should be enough. Yes, you can have over 4,000 in all of the rest. But you may notice that when your book comes up, they all cut the description off at a few hundred...

What you are doing is writing compelling copy which will prompt the person to either buy the book outright, or click onto the preview to find out more. This is the smallest sales copy you need to write - and is probably an art form by itself (yes, this will be another chapter somewhere, some time...)

Remember - your opening line gets them to read the second sentence. And that sentence gets them to read the next, and so on.

Kobo and Google Play allow you to bold, italics, and generally fiddle around with your copy. Lulu only allows straight text and paragraph breaks (too many people abused their earlier html-enabled dialog box.) Yes, you should use bold, italics, and bullets. But the lowest common denominator to worry about first is whether the copy you have is well written. Later we can spruce it up on these other two.

How to Publish - Overview

Now, while I should have mentioned this easier, you've probably figured out that it's simpler to keep everything in one folder. All your text and word-processing docs, your cover, and your epub.

You are going to publish to Lulu, Kobo, and Google Play. I assume that you've already set up accounts with all these. And I did a separate write-up on how to publish to Google Play (as linked.)

What this does is get your ebook able to be accessed on 93% of the smartphones and tablets out there. By default. And you'll also get published on B&N and the largest international ebook distributor out there. As a side-benefit, you'll also be able to come back later and publish a hardcopy version - which is encouraged, since it looks like the market will settle down at a 60/40 or 50/50 split between the two. 

Again, we are leaving out Amazon because they don't like PD or PLR. You can take PD books and add 10 images to it, per my last check of Amazon's terms and conditions. However, they don't make that distinction with printed books. (Yes, you pay nothing beyond the proof copy to publish via Lulu to Amazon. But that is yet another chapter.) The other point is that Google Play will give you a link where people can buy your print book directly, right up there with Amazon and B&N.

Your workflow - windows on your world

You are going to have several programs open at once now. So it's a good idea to invest in a couple of monitors (or a second one) so you can see these easily. 

0. Close all the windows on your machine. This frees up machine memory and enables you to focus.

1. Get your directory up there as one window on your screen. Make a new folder outside of the rest. This is where your Google copies will go. You need a copy of the epub and a copy of the cover (can be PNG, JPG, TIFF, or PDF.)

Note: You can create a PDF file by opening up the JPG in Firefox and then printing to PDF.

2. Get your Browser up and open tabs for Lulu, Kobo Writing Life, and Google Play Partner (I use Firefox for this. IE and even Chrome still have issues which will bug your progress.)

Note: When I'm posting all-original content, I still start with Lulu and have Amazon's KDP open in yet another tab on the browser. The workflow below works the same. Chances are, original work will start selling on these other distributors before it will start selling on Amazon. You still want to distribute to the five other channels in addition to Amazon, because with their KDP exclusivity, you'll never know what income you just missed. In my case, it was hundreds per month - which started right off the bat on the other lines.

3. Calibre is open in yet another window with the meta dialog, preferably on that second monitor.

4. Get your text editor open with that quote above in it.

You now have four windows open. If you have to fix an epub reject, then you can open up Sigil again, but it probably won't be needed. Same for GIMP and your covers.

The publishing steps in sequence

5. With the Lulu tab open in your browser, enter your title (watch those nine words) by copy/pasting from Calibre. Remember that iTunes/B&N figure you've got a subtitle by seeing either a hypen ( - ) or colon ( : ) in that phrase.  (Kobo and Google Play don't work that way.)

Go ahead and put in your Author name and select the radio button that says you're ready to publish everywhere, not just Lulu. (They'll always ask - "are you sure?")

6. The next screen will give them permission to give you a free ISBN. 

7. Then they give you a screen with that ISBN with hypens in it. Copy that number and paste it into Calibre. Click on that little clipboard symbol next to that form box, and here's a tip: instead of editing out all the hyphens, just click "Back" and then "Forward" and Calibre will do it for you. If the ISBN disappeared you didn't click on that little clipboard symbol.

8. Select that un-hyphenated ISBN and copy it. 

Go to your Google folder and rename the epub and cover with that ISBN. That's the way they want it for upload. It's easiest to do it at this point.

9. Go to your Kobo tab and enter everything, copy and paste from Calibre and uploading when asked. Take this all the way through. 

10. Now, back to Lulu and finish up with them, again - all the data is in your Calibre dialog.

(Leave the Google files until your done with all the others - we'll get to this shortly.)

Click Forward on your Calibre dialog and go to the next book. Repeat steps 5-10 on each.

11. Once you're done with Lulu and Kobo, now open your Google tab and click "Add Books. " This gives you a dialog box where you can select all the files in that Google folder and upload them all. 

Now is the interesting part. 

• Google will take some minutes or hours to process your books. 
• Kobo might take a couple of days to get them showing up.
• While Lulu itself is done, over the next few days they will be processing your books for iTunes and B&N manually, where they will give you little error notices for you to correct. 

12. In Google, copy/paste your data from Calibre into their form fields. Again, there's more about self-publishing on Google Play in this write-up (as linked.)

13. If Kobo doesn't get your books processed in 48 hours or so, send them a polite email. They will have to find the file and manually put it back in the machine hopper for processing. 

14. The Lulu alerts just need to be worked over daily until they quit showing up. The Lulu people will give you extra hints to help if they can, particularly on the 2nd or 3rd fix - if it takes that much. (Oh - I forget to tell you that not only does Lulu send you an email that you have something to fix, but they also send you an email about each new ISBN and having successfully published. So you'll have some in-box to clean up once you're done.)

At this point, you are published on the 5 biggest distributors outside of Amazon. (Technically - iTunes, GooglePlay and Kobo each all bigger than Amazon as far ebooks and countries they sell in, but don't have the volume of sales in general.)

Note 1: I made more sales for months - almost a year - from the other 5 than I did on Amazon, until just recently when one of my books finally got noticed by their algorithms. (This is about the same rate that John Locke did - before he started gaming their review system.) But meanwhile, I was making enough money to pay my bills from the other five distributors. I'll take eating over popularity every day of the week...

Note 2: I don't figure Smashwords into this as I'd have to make a special book just for them. And they can't convert epub to other formats as they do for Word Docs. Also, they simply won't take PD or PLR ebooks, so I stick with Lulu. 

Lulu gives me the lowest-common-denominator publishing approach which works everywhere else. I also don't have to buy a MAC and pay an annual fee just to publish on iTunes. 

Again, I just ran several (dozen) books through this process this last week, so it's pretty smooth overall. Needless to say, I'm right in the middle of chasing down the Lulu errors and filling out the Google Play forms right now - which might take a few more hours over a couple days. I've been publishing these books for just under a week at this point, not including rounding up all that PLR to begin with.

I expect that within two weeks, I'll start seeing some sales from these books. Some will never sell. The key is to providing value for people who are looking that way. "Put targets in front of where they are aiming." Meanwhile, I'll be busy setting up the SEO Marketing needed to alert Google about just how valuable my new books are. Again, this will result in a later post on a different blog. But will wind up as part of "Just Publish!" eventually.

Next is a test of this assembly line with a series of PD books on Copywriting. That post will show up here - expect it next week some time. 

Meanwhile: Good Hunting!

Related articles

• The only Constant is Change - ebook publishing continues to shift.
• How to publish 4 ebook versions simultaneously on Lulu, iTunes, B&N, and Kobo
• Author Vs. Publisher - Creating Your Stable of Books
• Beginning of a New Book Series
• Notes on Book Publishing
• Audience (or lack of it) is Driving Traditional Publishing Authors to DIY.