Getting Your Book Published and Marketed: Actions List - Case Study 03

Any Man (and his brilliant wife) Knows - Things Get Done When You Have a List: Self-Publishing Truth.

(Photo: Rob and Stephanie Levy)

There are lots of details to get done when you publish books, let alone market them.

And I made a great list, just to keep track of things. Of course, I just realized we missed a few points there - which we've covered in our first installment, a couple of days ago.

The story behind this started with a long history of having my books ignored. Lulu is great a publishing, but has been only so-so for sales of my books.

When the ebooks scene really opened up a couple of years ago, I got into this and soon found that by being on the Big Boys, I started getting sales. Next for me was to do several tests to see if conventional wisdom held true. Like most fairy tales, some basic points were accurate, but the bulk of what has been passed on as Gospel is mostly fiction. (No matter how many celebrities endorse it.)

These tests formed the core of what gets books sold online.

The rest of this list is based on hard-core testing and understanding of Search Engine Optimization and Marketing. (SEO and SEM)

Most authors have problems with publishing. Marketing is even worse. Writers want to write, not spend a lot of time doing anything else. Those lucky few (extreme cases) have been able to make a living from simply writing their books. There have been some examples of authors getting into promotion and being successful. But the same steps Jacqueline Suzanne used to promote her books won't work these days - especially for a non-traditionally published author (AKA: Indie or Self-published.)

Very few of us can afford to hop around the country by jet to give in-person book signings. Factually, damned few of the big authors have done this as a practice since ebooks hit the mainstream. Book signings are good for printed books written about local areas. Otherwise, look up some of the more recent failed book tours (Hillary Clinton's comes to mind) and you'll see they don't get the results they used to.

Let the search engines recommend your book...

This is the point of discovery which undercuts friend's recommendations. Word of mouth has to start somewhere. Any author can get an "instant bestseller" on Amazon if they have a strong audience and fan base - that are connected to the author by an email list.

The trick to getting sales is in enabling sales after those first two weeks. Your list, and even a lot of the steps you'll be hearing about here, all have to do with "priming the pump." Good books don't necessarily sell just because they're good. Badly written books can sell well also. Authors always produce the best one they can. Audience preferences are fickle - and fads are common everywhere.

Let the search engines take care of the fads as they happen. If you set up your backend properly, you'll ride out any fad for the niche you are writing for and publishing to. Your book will come back to the top when these fly-by-nights are long gone (celebrities not-withstanding.)

What I've been testing for the last couple of years is just what works. I've been looking up authors and their back-trails to  see how they got where they did. What you'll see here is just those methods which have proved to get your books published and get them to sell online as much as possible.

The short hand to marketing is to let the search engines do it - by doing all the steps they've always told you to do.

Key Steps to Book Selling and Pump Priming

Again, let's review the main points which are all tested:

1. Know and Follow Your Bliss
2. Have a Deep Backbench
3. Get In Front of Multiple Eyeballs
4. Share with Care
5. Let Your Fans Behind the Velvet Rope
6. Let Your Friends Fly, Too.

What fits just within the first and second steps are these:

  a. Find a niche which fits your bliss.
  b. Find out if that niche buys books.
  c. Create and publish books which add value to that niche.

After those steps are done, you're now into Deep Backbench territory.  Authors who succeed in sales have several books in a series. For public domain books (my publishing specialty) this extends to finding and editing a related set of books into a series - and marketing them as such.

Practically, whether you personally write the series or collect and publish a series, the result is the same: once you have one of them, you'll be tempted to get the rest.

Of course, you as the marketer take advantage of this by collecting their emails and moving them along the route with timely special offers and added value along the way. But this gets a bit ahead of ourselves.

Where the spreadsheet starts for real.

(Hold onto your boots - this stuff we're wading in can get thick quickly.)

The beginning part of that spreadsheet:

BOOK TITLE

Landing Page

Versions
    PDF,   epub,   mobi
Lulu
    epub,   PDF,   tradepb,   GlobalReach
Distributors
    Sellfy,   Payhip,   Google,   iTunes,   Nook,   Kobo,   Espresso BM, Scribd,   Doc-Stoc,  
Amazon Edition

We now pick up our to-do list/spreadsheet with a list of books selected. Your book list (itemized under "book title") is your deep backbench. Whether you've written them yourself, or collected a set - it's the same deal.

We put the landing page at the beginning as its actually actually part of the editing process. Your ebook and print book (and PDF-version, even video's and powerpoints) actually point to a specific landing page where people can go. This is the base where you want your link-love pointing. So it's first.

What you name this blog and how you set it up is really back at your market research, as we covered in the first of this Case Study series.

Here you simply make a landing page which has the title of the book you are publishing. When you port the book to distributors, you'll get links to add here - but we're not there yet.

Multiple Eyeballs begin to sprout

The next step begins the Multiple Eyeballs stage. There are actually several parts of the spreadsheet which cover that one stage.

The overall theory to this is that everyone is different. They want their data in different formats. They also look to different distributors to get their books. No two distributors have the same audience.

• So we create three versions of the book to fit any ebook reader, any platform. These you can sell directly or post to the appropriate distributors.

• On Lulu, you post the epub and PDF for sale, then use the PDF to create at least the paperback version. Then you put that book into their Global Reach program to get it to Ingram, etc. You then continue publishing the ebook versions while you wait for the proof. (Once you approve the paperback proof, then you can create a hardback version - saving cost on proofs.)

• More multiple eyeballs are found in the distributors. Sellfy and Payhip are for local sales, which have the highest royalties. Then the main four ebook distributors. Espresso BM can get your paperback discovered.

• You post your  PDF (original content only) to Scribd and Doc-Stoc to complete the porting.

• On it's own column, you do an Amazon Kindle version. This is as you have to do more research for Kindle to make sure it's something they will accept and will sell well. You already have your main version everywhere else, so you come back at this point to tweak a special version for Amazon, much like you'd do Smashwords, Blurb, or Leanpub.

While I put Scribd and Doc-Stoc later again, this when you are using these for promotion - posting special excerpts to these sites to aid discovery.

Using your original content for promotion

Once your book is published, your original content can then be ported to multiple formats: text, audio, presentations, video. Then they really start fanning out and covering a wide amount of territory - this is the promotional part of book publishing. These formats can also be bundled. Tim Ferriss did this with his 4-hour chef on BitTorrent - but you can (and should) take that concept further. Bundles can be sold as well - something you see with Leanpub and Sellfy, where the value is in multiple versions available from a single purchase point.

Where you post this varied content can cross-link and add link-love to each other. Some of these can be syndicated, which automates and speeds the process somewhat. Also, most of these nexux points are on social networks - which will eventually get us to Social Sharing. But we aren't there yet.

The key type of nexus point that search engines love has always been blogs. What blogs give is regularly updated content. And this is your strong suit - since you are working on your bliss. Remember this point of being able to talk to any avid listener about this subject endlessly? That's your bliss speaking through you. This strategy simply helps you put these talents to work, to use.

This is why landing pages are first. They go onto a blog as content. Each of your books has a landing page, and they "hard-link" to all the distributors you are using. This means you put the exact link onto that page, not some script which the search engines can't read. 

Once you've published everywhere in all possible ebook and book formats the next step is to update and finalize your landing page with links. We'll come back to embed video and PDF onto that page later, another form of social sharing.

What's next?

You've seen how marketing gets integrated with book publishing from the beginning. It's not something you add on later. You build your book so that the search engines can make sense of it and help people find it in the version they like and on the distributor of choice. 

That's the leverage which search engines bring to your marketing. The world of the print-only published author has been gone for around a decade - the rumors of its death haven't been exaggerated, but haven't been believed, either.

The publishing scene now is "all of the above." Ebooks sell paperbacks, sell hardbacks, sell videos, sell courses, sell any way and every way people want to get your valuable content.

No one approach to this will work - only enabling all-in-one tools like search engines to provide the exact route of discovery which people want.

Your job as a self-publisher is to put your target in front of where people are already aiming. And so, a deep backbench ported to multiple eyeballs.

Follow me so far?

Tomorrow (or soon) tells the future.

If the Gods smile on me, I'll have your next installment about this journey soon - hopefully tomorrow.

We've just run a bit long today on explaining the why's to this list.

Review this for yourself - and leave any questions you have in the comments. This will pick up speed pretty quick as I catch everyone up with this long laundry list of self-publishing to-do's.

Then, I'll get back to the real work of getting this list done - and will give you the blow-by-blows as I acid test this system.


- - - -

And be sure otherwise to subscribe  to this blog by email or RSS feed (whatever works best for you) - so you don't miss a beat of this...

Related articles

• Rambling Prose and Lack of Focus Explain Why Tradition Publishing Fails
• Getting Your Book Discovered, Finding More Sales, Having More Fun
• How to Use Common Sense (and Search Engines) to Market Your Self-Published Book
• How to SEO for Authors - What an Indie Writer Needs to Know...
• Why Web 2.0 sites are good for traffic (and backlinks)
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The Book Income Sales Web You Build

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

(photo: Josef A. Stuefer)

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

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

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

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

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

Let's look at another image of this model:

(Photo: Mike Liu)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How you build your book-selling web

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

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

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

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

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

The real center of your web.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone gets more bliss that way. Nice, huh?

- - - -

Does this make more sense now?

Leave a comment either way.

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Getting Your Book Discovered, Finding More Sales, Having More Fun

Writing and publishing Your Book isn't even half your job - the rest is getting it discovered so it sells and pays you back.

(photo: Jayp0d)

The third leg of the stool every author sits on is Discovery. (The first two being Writing, and Publishing.)

Some people call this Marketing.

The point is that people have to find your book in order to buy it, so they have to discover it. There are a few steps to this, some of which you've already done.

When you write your book (or select it, if you're publishing someone else's) - you do so with a certain public in mind. Some call this your avatar, a person who idealizes the type of person who would like to find and read your book. It's a person who will be so enthused by that book, they'll want to find your next, buy that, read it, and so on.

Knowing who you are writing for is known as market research. Crafting a book they want is called product development. Publishing, selling, and delivering that book is called Fulfillment.

After Writing and Publishing comes Discovery

If you've published it, a lot of discovery comes from the distributors themselves. They will over up your book to viewers as "also bought" or "readers who liked this also liked" or "also by this author" or "als in this series", etc.

The trick is that not all people find books by just the distributor. And if you're waiting for people to find your book when they search on an online bookstore, then you may be waiting a long time.

So you search out and find other avenues which will recommend your book, giving the link on the distributor where they can buy it.

Review of basics

There are a few guides or rules to follow writing, publishing, and marketing (and how I got financial freedom by writing and publishing):

• Your publishing empire should cost you next to nothing. DIY if you can - use sweat-equity to pay for things.
• You should be able to contact everyone you need without having to walk out of your own (home-office) workspace.
• Leverage everything, always. Work smart, not hard.
• "Keep your own counsel... by reaching your own decisions and following them." (Napoleon Hill)
• Frugality is a way of life, and a way to fortune.

Most of the "great" advice I've seen completely violate these.

The whole point to this is that you can succeed based on the resources you have at your fingertips. Don't buy more tools with your day job. Make the tools you already have invested in pay for themselves.

Someone wants you to buy a course - skip it. Maybe one of their books - after they've already proven that they know what they are talking about.

The same for most of the marketing they recommend.

Remember this: Far more people made money selling tools and supplies to gold miners than the miners did themselves. You can make more money selling services to writers than you can by writing books.

But we're here (mostly) to write and publish, not sell writing and publishing services. 

If you look up all the services they are offering, and are willing to spend the sweat-equity researching, you can train yourself. (Just start at the beginning of this blog and read every post in sequence, test everything for yourself, and then you'll have free training on just about everything you need to become a successful writer and self-publisher.)

Sure, that's lots of work. Know that the only people who "get rich quick" have already spent years training themselves to succeed. For every story of someone suddenly getting rich over night, you'll find they started years earlier and had a long string of disappointments before they learned enough to put it all together.

Same with book publishing. John Locke, Amanda Hocking, all the greats spent years writing after their day job was over before they finally figured out how to write great stories and get them selling routinely. And maybe some years after that before they made a fortune. Look them up. See for yourself. There is no "get rich quick" in book publishing. Anyone CAN make their own fortune in a few years of hard work, study, testing, and perseverance.

Your overall strategy:

a) Recognize your joy in life is writing, your business in life is book publishing.
b) Get your part-time book publishing business covering all your costs so you can quit your day job.
c) Work full time on your fortune after that.

Basic financial freedom and fortune maker: your own email list.

This is one of the most overlooked strategies of all. So I'm listing it first. It's not easy to do, but takes less effort than a lot of other efforts.

Every successful author of ebooks that I've been able to track down has used this. You let people give you their email address so you can contact them directly when you have more information or a new book coming out.

This means you have a form on every page of your site/blog where  a person can leave their email address.

And that means you need an autoresponder service, like Mail Chimp (free for the first few hundred subscribers) or AWeber, which has a lot of training materials on setting up and using an autoresponder to build your list. There are others (GetResponse, SimplyCast). The short take on this is to not try to do it yourself, but use a service.

Search Engines

Key datum: Search engines can recommend your books.

When  people look for something they use search engines. Your job is to help the search engines recommend your book as a solution for what that person is looking for.

I  have spent a great part of the last decade studying and even making income from search engine optimization (SEO).  My last day job was freelance SEO, actually. This mostly consisted of following all the tricks and gimmicks, and watching them evaporate as Google and the others found out and changed their algorithms.

SEO got more and more expensive as it became more dependent on regularly providing original and relevant content.

Which lead me to writing and self-publishing books. (Which paid and pays better than doing SEO for others ever did.)

Authors create content on a regular basis, because they like to. The trick is in getting people to discover (and pay you for) your content. That is what most authors have problems with (self included) and the reason for this article.

Authors create content as part of the job description. When they learn SEO, they can get downright profitable in everything they write about online.

You can learn the basics of SEO in an afternoon. You don't have to buy anyone's services to help you with this.

First, you download, print off, dog-ear, and highlight this: Google Search Engine Optimization Guide. Seriously. Do that. Once you understand this guide, you have all the basics you know.

There are a couple of articles on this site (here, and here) which lay out some basics about what works these days for authors and SEO. Again, test these all for yourself. Take no one's word for it - especially mine.

(I did write a book based on what I figured out, some of it is dated. It has a free website where most of the surviving lessons are located. One day, I'll be back to update this and re-release it, as well as update a few old websites...)

What SEO has to do with authors

It's the simplest way to get book discovery happening. It's cheap, simple, and you can do it yourself. So, it fits our rules.

Steps to SEO:

1) You do have a blog, don't you? Good. Search engines love blogs.
2) You've created a landing page for each of your books with all the various distributors linked? Good. This helps your books rank better with the distributors.


A big part of most website traffic currently is the search engine bots.

3) Ensure your content are optimized on every page. This means that

• The keywords which describe your book (the words people are looking for to find what you are offering) are in the page title, the post title, the major headings, and the descriptions of the images. Search engines think in words. Use the words that describe your book which people are looking for. Everywhere. 
• Write naturally. Give great value with your words on every page.
• Use images (and make sure the description of the image has your keywords in a sensible sentence, or at least nearby on the page.
• Link to your distributors and everywhere which defines what your book is about, like Wikipedia, OpenLibrary, Goodreads, etc.
• Avoid scripts other than your opt-in form. Search engines can't read them.
• Avoid Flash like the Plague - use HTML5 alternatives always. Search engines can't read Flash.

Those few points are pretty much the bulk of what you need to know about on-page SEO. Once you figure out the details to what I just said, then you can get all this done yourself, as you create each blog post.

4) Properly use backlinks
This is mostly over done, but is still key. The approach you use is to port your content into different formats and then post those formats where they can give you links back to your site and to your distributors.

• Blog posts  (original content as text.)
• PDF's - Slideshare and doc-sharing sites.
• Videos - use long descriptions and include appropriate links there. YouTube, DailyMotion, Flickr.
• Images - Pinterest, Flickr, Google+.
• Audio - Archive.org (free hosting) and your own blog as a podcast.
• Presentations (PDFs) - Slideshare and doc-sharing sites.(Note: Presentations as images and audio files can be married to produce videos - all at home on your own computer.)

Here are exceptions to what I just said. They involve embedding content into your blog post: Videos, Podcasts, and PDF's can - and should - be embedded into your blog posts. Yes, these are scripts - but they hard link to the content you put out there which links to your distributors. Search engines will see the hard link.

The reason you link out to related content such as descriptions or reviews of other author's works, or authoritative sites such as (Wikipedia, or  OpenLibrary) is to build authority/trust of your post by giving search engines something to compare it with. Search engines recommend pages that seem to know what they are talking about.

Social Networks

This is a pure dead-end for authors - and one of the biggest sets of misdirection out there. It's also mostly why I quite online groups about writing and publishing in favor of simply getting more books written and published. Here, you want to use these not to burn all your time, but to leave bait where search engines can find it and recommend your books.

Look:

• If you spend a lot of time commenting and plussing and liking various comments - did it sell you a lot of books meanwhile? Probably not. 
• If you spend the same amount of time getting the search engines to send people to your book distributors, did you sell books meanwhile? Probably so. 

That's the difference between working at your job and just talking about your job.

The Lie of "Building a Platform"

There's a lot of silly recommendations to spend a certain percentage of your time interacting on social sites to "build your platform." If someone tells you that your "platform" is the most important thing you should have attention on in your book marketing - click off that page and get back to writing or publishing. They don't know what they are talking about. Period. (IMHO.)

Frankly, this isn't how most authors make a living. The most successful writers spend the bulk of their time writing.  Find the Taleist survey. Look up successful authors.

Take Stephen King. In his "On Writing" he lays it out: one-third writing (morning), one-third answering emails and other business communication (afternoon),  one third reading (evening).

There's your social interaction - emails. Same for the infamous John Locke. Similar for Amanda Hocking, who found and interacted with book bloggers first, and does spend some time on forums - but also emails. Fan mail has long been a key part of being an author. Review what I said about email up above.

What you are looking for for social network sites:

• You want to use Content-driven sites, which are loved by the Search Engines because they can be indexed easily.
• You want to use sites which are friendly to Google and don't shut them out. 
• You want to use sites which leave their content up for search engines to find and recommend forever.

For those three reasons, I don't spend time on Facebook. (They don't keep their content after a few months, they kicked Google out, and can't be searched easily by the 'bots.)

Twitter just recently changed their agreement with Google, so are now being indexed again.

What you are not looking for on social network sites:

• Followers, likes, pluses, attaboy's.
• Approval
• Suck-ups

That's a bit harsh. And if you amuse yourself with social network sites, have fun. The time spent that way won't get your next book written or your earlier books sold.

Action steps:

• You do create a nice profile which  of course has links to your book distributors and other profiles.
• You do "like" or "plus" or "follow" anyone who follows you - up to the limit you are allowed. That is simple courtesy.
• You do use social networks to collect data for you which adds to content you need to promote your book - and become posts on your blog. Flipbook is one I've started using recently as it kills too birds with one stone. 
• As you find great data which backs up what you said in your book, then you simply post updates to content-driven networks like LinkedIn and Google+. You can also configure IFTTT to auto-post from your Blogger blog to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. (Leverage, again.)
•  

Some notes on what social networking sites to use as part of SEO:

Content-driven social sites (current list)

• Tumblr
• LinkedIn
• Google+
• Twitter (recently let Google back in - not key.)

Book-related sites (author and book pages)

• Goodreads
• Wattpad
• OpenLibrary
• LibraryThing
• Author pages on the distributors (Amazon, Lulu storefront)
• "About the author" landing page on your own blog.
• Book landing pages on your own blog.
• Google+ profile/brand page (put badges on every landing page as part of the template)

Traffic-sending sites

• Slideshare - and any doc-sharing site
• Pinterest and image sites (Flickr, Google+)
• Stumbleupon (can be tricky - see Synnd below)
• YouTube and video sites

Your own blogging platform

• Blogger blog on your own domain
• Rainmaker (paid)

Additional Tools

• IFTTT - sends to twitter, tumbler, etc. Leverages your time.
• Flipboard - finds you data while you include your blog posts from your curation.
• Synnd (paid) service which does bookmarking and social signals for you.

How you line these up and not kill yourself by overwork

0. Write and publish your book. Use Calibre to track the metadata.
1. Using a spreadsheet, enter the ISBN's and ASIN to get the links for your books.
2. Create a landing page for that/each book (I use a Blogger blog with my own domain name - cheaper than Wordpress, which has a monthly fee.)
2) Create book pages on Goodreads, OpenLibrary.
3. G+ and Pinterest your landing page. Post your cover to Flickr with links, tags. Use Synnd to bookmark your landing everywhere, and run other campaigns like Reddit and Stumbleupon.
4. Create a PDF of that page (and every blog post of note) and post to Slideshare and major doc-sharing sites (scrape and paste into LibreOffice, export as PDF.)
Embed that PDF from Slideshare (or DocStoc) on the landing page itself.
5. G+, Pinterest, and Synnd the Slideshare page. (They rank the best.)
6. Create an ecourse based on your book. Every lesson is posted as a PDF as above. Use an opt-in to enable people to get these lessons based on your book - in exchange for their email.
7. Create a video book trailer and post to YouTube, DailyMotion, Flickr, etc. Embed one of these (YouTube) on your landing page, or a book review blog-post.
7a. Post the audio on archive.org and also as an enclosure link on your blog. Embed the archive.org script for that postcast on that book-review blog post.
7b. If you've made a presentation PDF for that trailer, then post it as above and embed it here.
7c. G+, Pinterest, and Synnd that book review page. Also use Synnd to distribute that video itself and bookmark it.
[The reason for posting the text, video, audio, and PDF on the same page is to give people options of how they want to get the data. Everone is different. If they can download your PDF with live links for later study, they'll still be able to get to your distributors and your blog.]
8. Excerpt a few chapters from the book and post them to your blog and as embedded PDF's above. If they are short enough, create a video as well (as above.)

Meanwhile, write your next book and make it discoverable through those 8 steps above. Rinse, repeat.

Note: Yes, it's a lot of work to sign up for and use all these sites above. Once you've done so, then the work gets a lot easier. Leverage everything - that's the key.

Takeaway:

1. Get your audience into your email list as your priority way of getting your books discovered.
2. Use social media/networks to enable search engines to recommend your books on the distributors.
3. Keep publishing more books

Anything else?

We haven't really covered memberships, paid ecourses (a form of membership, actually), or using bundles to increase opt-ins. More to do, for sure. Stay tuned...

PS. Why do I write this for you, and why all this detail? 1) to lay this all out for myself as I distill and streamline my own marketing/discovery path. 2) to make a record so I can later compile a book on it's own. 3) Most importantly, to help you anyway I can.

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Tips to Increase Direct Sales From Google Play/Books

An Idea Came Up to Increase Your Sales and Commissions from Lulu

I had last told you that I didn't get much sales from Lulu, but they had the highest commissions. That's if you use them to distribute your books (and is not a bad idea for most authors, who are writing their own books and should concentrate their time on this.)

But I'd dropped a big batch on Google and was busy cleaning up the missing details in the meta data.

Here's a shot of what I ran into:

 

You have a buy link, and a publisher's website link.

Note: This is the buy link for the hardcopy edition:

Both are great for SEO, but wouldn't it be better to get sales? I was sending them to that book's landing page - which is great SEO, but not direct sales. (And yes, these days I'm making a hardcopy version of every book, whether I distribute that book to Ingram or not. This tweak means going back to ensure all my earlier ebooks are represented by Lulu in hardcopy...sigh.)

So I now have the Publisher Website with the landing page for that book (was formerly http://midwestjournalpress.com) and use the Buy Link to get real sales.

The real leverage on this is to get the person to go ahead click through. Lulu gives you a direct shopping cart address to use for sales. You don't go there, then click again to buy the book - it's a shopping cart. You next click to get delivery.


[Update: The plus side of this is that you get from 2-4 times or more royalty from your hardcopy book from Lulu than you do from anywhere else. Like comparing $10-14 there to $3-5 elsewhere. Nice Ka-ching when you can get it.]

The drawback on this is that Lulu isn't in as many countries as Google, Amazon, or Kobo. The plus is that the links can be to your own storefront with something like:

But it will probably get more sales if you send them directly to the shopping cart (the link is in their sales button code - but you have to know their proprietary content ID.)

 

They can't get back to your other books, but the next button is to checkout - which is one less than your site.

Why not send them to iTunes, Nook, Amazon, or Kobo? 

The model I use, and the one I recommend for indie publishers and self-publishing authors, is to get the free ISBN from Lulu first, and then port your content to all the rest. You don't have to get an ISBN, but it makes generating the sales codes quite easy, as you can search by ISBN on all the sites except Amazon (which has their own proprietary code.)

[Update: when you set up that book on Lulu, you'll be able to get that proprietary number they assign. Just note it on Calibre somewhere, along with the tradepaperback ISBN and the hardback ISBN (if you go that far) - plus the Amazon number when it's assigned. Then you can enter these all into your spreadsheet to generate the links for the buttons on your landing page. Sounds complicated, but it does speed things up.]

In other words, Lulu always has all your content. (You can even sell PDF versions there.)

Other reasons to use Lulu:

1) Amazon isn't popular with everyone, they give you lower royalties, insist on being the lowest price, and only give you back an ebook version you can only use on their ereaders. And there's that extra step of finding out what that special code is.

(ex: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NH9X8DM)

2) For iTunes, you need a MAC - or download their special program.

(ex: http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/isbn9781312821941)

3) Nook is OK, but I haven't ported all my books there.

(ex: http://barnesandnoble.com/s/9781312821941)

4. Kobo gives me the absolute worst royalties on PD books - 20%

(ex: http://kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q=9781312821941)

My landing page currently goes to Google Books, but should probably go to Google Play: (ex: https://play.google.com/store/search?c=books&q=9781304420114) Now, that will take extra clicks to get a sale from that search, but these links all show up as buttons on the landing page, so we expect that they prefer to have their books on Google Play (syncs between devices, you can download your books anytime you want for local viewing, as many times as you want.)

One other point: if you follow those links, you can see the relative approaches these sites have. Amazon and Nook give "also-bought" recommendations which aren't your books. iTunes and Google tend to show my books which are by the same author and in the same series. Kobo doesn't give recommendations (at least for that link I gave) - but with such poor royalties, it's a desperation play to eke out some sales I wouldn't get otherwise.

Other option is to set up your own site with a shopping cart. Disadvantages are

• EU VAT you have to pay to the buyer's country as the sales point - 20%.
• Lack of traffic compared to the big boys above. The sell for you - you just have to keep adding books and link to them with your marketing.

You can always sell digital products via iAmplify or JVZoo, etc. But this is actually in addition to selling through the major distributors - something you use with your mailing list. The distributors finance expanding your direct marketing.

Summary:

Lulu should be number one place to refer buyers to, as they give the best royalties and aren't auto-discounted like Amazon and Google. Nook would be second - and I'd also have to wait 60 days to get paid.

Your mileage may differ - leave a comment if you've a better approach.

The takeaway: Use Google for SEO to link to your site. Any sales should go to your Lulu storefront. You make more income on your hardcopy books by sending them straight to Lulu.

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