The Four Whys and Four Hows of Successful Self-Publishing

The Four Whys and Four Hows of Successful Self-Publishing

After now over a decade of self-publishing, I thought to give you some hints about what you’re up against. It isn’t all that pretty, but it can be made to work.

The first point is to quit taking anything seriously which is going around about this area. The pundits are wrong on both how much you can earn and how easy it is to do it.

“Wrong” is anything you haven’t tested for yourself.

(The trick is that most people don’t know how to study things. So they can’t figure things out. Don’t worry, it’s a problem with our schools and our culture.)

The Four Reasons to Self Publish

While there may be more than this, these seem to be the four key reasons anyone would ever want to publish their own or anyone else’s books.

1. There’s a voice in your head that won’t quit. It shouts at you and nags you and just won’t shut up. Publishing gives that voice it’s own life so it will leave you alone. (Now the cousins it has are another subject for another time…)

2. To pump up your own self-esteem. Nothing like a nice book in your hand with your name on it. Does the soul wonders.

3. An investment in your career. This is the “5-pound business card” people talk of. Drop it on someone’s desk and they think you know what you’re talking about. Such books are lead generators. They bring you people who want to hear speeches or be consulted with. And they pay you money for talking, not writing.

4. To earn money enough to make a living. This is the over-pumped part. While there are a few people who pull down six figures, it’s only a handful of people who do. There’s more people who sell writers and publishers courses and books and webinars on how to write and self-publish. After all, more money was made in the gold fields by selling pans and picks and jeans and tents to miners than probably was ever extracted from the ground or streams. There are ways to make income in publishing. They are fairly well known. But you have to study a lot of back-trails to figure out what they all do in common. Can be done.

Some of what you are listening to or reading here approaches that last one. The books I’ve already written tell a lot of the nuts and bolts about it (and yes the buy links are in the show notes, thanks for asking.)

What’s related to this is how to get it all done. That leads us from the why to the how

Four models for book publishing

I was reading an article recently where thought they had it figured out. You see they said there were two camps of publishers. They had it half-right.

The Two Black Hole Publishing Systems for Authors

1. Amazon and their ebook pushers are one camp. For Amazon, its encouraging authors to race to the bottom with their prices and become a commodity along with their books. By their own stats, there are only 100K of their books which sell at least 1 per day. Since this data is hard to come by (Amazon won’t release it) a report covering the average cost of a book in 2013 said they tended to be between $1-2, this gives you a 35% royalty of about .52 per book, or around $190 per year. That same report says that what people like to pay is closer to $10 – and that is where the highest income is.

Smashwords’ Mark Coker has been doing his annual surveys in the reverse, found that the most books sold and the highest income was earned from the $3.99 books. Meaning an author would earn just over $1,000 per year off such a book. To make 6-figures, you’d need a hundred of those books. Hope you were born prolific and talented.

But Amazon won’t pay decent commissions above 9.99. Even then, they are still pulling down 30% from each sale, which is a thousand bucks off that 9.99 book. (As a comparison, $9 is the sweet spot for self-published POD print books. But that will give you only a $2.00 royalty from CreateSpace, slightly more if you sell direct from Lulu.)

Amazon apparently wants the indie authors to compete with each other and give them the best deal by selling a lot for very little. People can then buy more ebooks from more authors. (This is also the probable reason Amazon gave away so many public domain books for free, to gut that market and popularize it’s Kindle reader.)

This is just a race to the bottom by making both authors and their books compete on pricing as commodities.

Think about that the next time someone is trying to convince you to do your book publishing exclusively on Amazon Kindle.

2. The traditional publishing model uses ebooks as incentives to buy their fairly expensive print versions. They tried to prove this last year when they raised ebook prices and tried to spread the rumor that ebook sales were dwindling.

Their model has been deeply flawed for years, ever since POD publishing caught on – which was before ebooks by several years. When people began to step around all the vanity publishers and that monolithic agent-publisher system, they started to get some control over their own destiny. Traditional publishers are tied to long print runs which decrease the cost of each book – and that means finding and keeping authors who can sell a lot of copies. So these monoliths are very picky about what authors they sign up.

Needless to say, they are in trouble and won’t be getting out any time soon. Slow death by self-strangulation.

The Two Break-through Models You Should Know

3. The Hybrid System. The authors I’ve chased up (Steve Scott, J. K. Rowlings, Amanda Hocking, and others) didn’t do just ebooks or just print books. They also included audio books and foreign publishing rights. They pushed their books into every version they could anywhere that would possibly buy them.

In all cases, they had at least 5 books out there before things started to take off. Most started breaking six figures when they had 10 in production. By then, they had already started cross-publishing their ebooks or print books into other versions.

But the main point is to cross-container your content – not just thinking about it as a “book” but thinking in terms of re-purposing your content as many ways as you can figure out. The Harry Potter movies takes essentially the same content as the bestsellers and made millions. Different format, but same basic plots, characters, story-line.

4. The Services Publishing Model. We’ve already covered some of this as people are using a book to establish authority and then bank on this investment to bring them speaking and consulting gigs. This is the most profitable scenario per book that there is. It makes trying to make a living by publishing multiple bestsellers look really pale in comparison.

What isn’t covered much is how authors are using email lists, memberships, and build their audience to accomplish this. It’s a radically different model than the others, because you build it backwards from the audience, rather than assuming the audience is there. The GRQ people tell you to crank out ebooks based on what you can see from the demographics already there on Kindle. This is what Steve Scott did with his habits scene. But he comes from an Affiliate Marketing background, which tends to push “the next greatest thing.”

Actually, these models are all just an evolution. Starting out with either ebooks or print books, you’ll merge into a hybrid scene and build your list. That list will then tell you what they want more of as your audience.

They will tell you what services they want. Of course you get inspired along the way, and they help you with that.

Content is King, Content Marketing is the Empire.

We’re back to that point that content has no fixed container these days. If you record an ebook, you get an audio book, and maybe a series of podcasts. Put that with some slides and you have a video. Print out that transcript and you have a paperback or hardback. Give a talk about it and you have a lecture series, or a webinar. Put the slides, audio, and video together in sequence and you have a course.

There is no one model for content. Non-fiction writers have this easier, perhaps, than fiction writers. Either way, it’s how creative you want to get and how imaginative. There are no limits either way. Like any memoir, it all depends on how factually you want to approach the subject.

The best thought leaders in this area right now seem to be Pulizzi and Rose of Content Marketing Institute. Follow them to get a quick education. Even though they mostly work in the enterprise arena, Pulizzi’s book Content Inc. has all the quick study you need to do as a writer and self-publisher to create your own publishing empire. Because you are sitting on Acres of Diamonds in your own content. It’s just how effective you want to be in getting it all out there.

Build It and They Will Come – and Pay to Get In

All of these models also point to having your own platform to send people to. If you build on someone else’s platform, you’re just building as a sharecropper. You can get kicked off at any time. Even Jeff Bezo’s said that Amazon will ultimately get disrupted. Facebook has proved that you can’t rely on anyone else’s platform to continue to run by the same rules. Meanwhile, the FB users have become older and more “lurkish,” participating less and being great fodder for FB ads – which are quite effective.

Platforms on top of platforms are even more unstable. I had an account with Sellfy and put a few books up there – all public domain books – that created a nice little bookstore on a Facebook tab.  Yesterday, I went to check out how it was doing and found it was gone. Turns out some wimp at Sellfy is afraid of public domain books, and canceled my account. No more bookstore.

Any author, every self-publisher has to have their own platform where people can find and buy their stuff. It’s a simple as you build a page for each book and put the buy links on it. Meanwhile, you find something like Ganxy, or Payhip, or Zaxaa to sell your digital products directly.

Next book, next buying page. Rinse, repeat.

You do this so that people can interact with you and give you something in return for all you’ve given them. It can be money, but it can also be feedback, or sharing your content with their friends.

The point is that you own it and you can keep it going as long as you want. You can change it, and you can shut it down. But you aren’t waiting for the whims of the tech titans to change it for you, and then you have to scramble to figure it all out again, and replace that income stream.

The ideal scene for this seems to be a membership, where you can keep the Amazon-Kindle bots out and sell your books for whatever you want. Members always get the best deals. They buy from you and you’re both happy about it.

It’s just that simple.

Let’s recap exactly what your publishing model should consist of:

1. Deep backbench. Lots of titles on a given subject or area, tuned into a specific niche where people like to spend their money.

2. Multiple eyeballs. Every title is published in as many formats to as many platforms as possible.

3. Velvet rope. Build an audience, keep a list growing, bring them to your membership and give them even greater value than they’d find anywhere else.

4. Caring sharing. Syndicate your content everywhere you can, so you can auto-magically keep the world informed about everything you create as it rolls off the line. You use something like If This Then That to syndicate everything as far as possible through all the various social networks. Keep everyone up on your actions by broadcast.

5. Mountaintop Antennas. Eventually, you turn viewers into members, members into fans, fans into raving fans, and raving fans into evangelists. As you do, you’ll create an affiliate system to keep those evangelists rewarded. I haven’t gone there personally yet, but most of the tools I use have that capability. (Look up Zaxaa if you want to see how this could be done.)

Those five simple points seem to cover everything a self-publishing author needs to know. Of course, if you have different research, do let me know. This stuff changes all the time, and the more people who look at a problem, the better the solutions can become.

– – – –

Well, that about wraps it for this week.

Again, I’m just so happy to be able to have you listening and supporting this podcast and site.

If you’re not already signed up, then do so. This all continues to get better and better as I improve and add and tweak everything.

This week, we added “Classics You Should Know” podcast with episodes for each book, all complete with buying links. Of course that member-only book page still has a lot of downloads waiting for you – so sign up today if you haven’t.

Do leave a comment on the show notes if you have something to say. Or, if you’re getting this by email, just hit reply.  I answer all my emails.

Hope to talk with you again soon.

Until next time, then.

– – – –

Books about self-publishing:

Just Publish! Ebook Creation for Indie Authors

ebook: Amazon | Lulu

Publish. Profit. Independence.

ebook: Amazon | Lulupaperback: Lulu

J’APE: Just Another Publicity Excuse

free ebook: Amazon | Lulu – Lulu PDF

Originally published at http://livesensical.com/podcast/selling-books-online/four-whys-four-hows-successful-self-publishing/

Trolls and Bullies, in the Kindle Author Graveyard

Would you believe me if I said I had proof of Amazon KDP being a bully? How about that they are trolls as well?

Well, it happened to me like this: I had a book up which got a DMCA complaint that wouldn't resolve. You see, you can use DMCA to complain about someone else's content and never have to give that person a copy of your complaint - so they have to take their content down, or in Amazon's case, they block it and you can't do anything about it.

The long and short is that someone at Kindle got a hair up and went to suspend my account over it. I answered right away and pointed out that it was because they left the book in question on their site and it could still be found by the DMCA trolls.

But I got the dirty end of that stick.

The next day, someone else at Kindle reversed it, but I was still guilty as accused. So, as usual, they put their boilerplate threats at the bottom of the email.

Why does Kindle put threats at the bottom of every email?

The answer - they are bullies. KDP has around 60% of the market and they don't have to take your book if they don't want to. And if you try to publish public domain works, they can be downright hateful about it.

Sidebar: What made Kindle into troll-bullies? Their own "success." Yes, there's the corporate cult in place, which comes down from the top. It's that take-no-prisoners, scorched-earth policy they have. Besides that, it makes them a great target. I've published that one complained-about book everywhere else. But who got the one and only DMCA complaint? Amazon-Kindle. Because it's an easy target and Google searches will pull up that title there first rather than anywhere else. So the DMCA internet trolls simply have to fire off an automated request to Kindle, and the book is shut down. If it doesn't disappear entirely, they complain again until that title is removed. (That is the actual strategy: to eliminate the "competition" for a specific book title, which isn't trademarked.) It's the mutual troll society. Amazon-Kindle doesn't have to care. They've got 1.6 million books out there, and yours is just one tiny drop in their ocean.

The bottom line is that I've finally had enough with these guys. It set me to thinking about what I was actually getting out of my dealings with them. Frankly, I have one book that sells decently, and a lot of other books (about 70, maybe) that don't. Some have never sold. Which brings up the fact that...

Amazon Kindle is correctly the "Graveyard of Indie Authors"

Out of over 1.6 million titles on their Kindle site, less than 100,000 sell more than one per day. That's 16 percent. (See http://www.theresaragan.com/salesrankingchart.html)

And the more people publish to Kindle, the bigger that graveyard grows.

Now if you had a book that sold one a day, and you were getting a royalty of maybe $2 per book, what kind of income will that give you?

Yup - $720 a year, more or less.

So you can figure what I'm getting with my book whose sales rank says it's turning over maybe 5-10 per day. Nice pin money, but won't support any family by itself. And that is my Kindle star player.

Then when I have to put up with Kindle's nastygrams in order to do these submissions, it doesn't really seem worth it.

Here's the surprise: I make more money on paperbacks and hardbacks.

Meanwhile, neither CreateSpace nor Lulu give me any grief at all about my books, as long as they are technically able to be printed. They trust me from the start. (They don't accuse me right off the bat of doing something illegal, like the Kindle trolls.)

iTunes, Nook, and Kobo similarly don't care what I publish there. And they also just accept the stuff I give them. On each publisher, my books sell differently. But only Kindle has that weird review hang-up. (OK, it does affect CS sales, I imagine.)

The point here is that I can help you best with all these books I'm finding if I'm not hassled and stressed every single time I submit a book or revise it.

The Kindle Trolls just made up my mind for me with their last round of bullying. I'm really through with having to fight for the "privilege" of getting books up there.

So if I do find a great PD book, it's going everywhere except Kindle. It will wind up on Amazon as a paperback and maybe a hardback as well. I'm just not going to fight over measly profits from their Kindle version. (I'm sure there's no love lost on either side.) What I will do is to offer that ebook to you directly with it's Kindle-ready version, and pocket something like 97% of the royalties. Members only, of course.

Where I come out with an original work, Lulu is going to distribute it to Kindle for me. So I lose some royalties out of it, at least I'm not losing sleep.

I think that if authors wised up, they'd see how they are getting screwed and would quit their Kindle addiction. There are 1.5 million, 9 hundred thousand Kindle ebooks out there that sell less than one copy per day.

It then makes sense that the average income of most indie authors by survey is about $500 per year. Because most of these have published a single book which never sells, especially on Amazon-Kindle. And people can't find your ebook because it isn't recommended because it never sold to begin with. That's the way Amazon works.

Amazon Kindle is the ebook author graveyard. Cue the funeral dirge, please.

What Turns a "BestSeller" into "Makes a Living?"

You'll find that all these "bestselling" authors have built up an audience of rabid fans who buy everything they come out with. Takes some time, and some good writing, but it can be done.

Like Amanda Hocking, they don't just write a bunch of good books. They also borrow other's audiences until they can get enough of them to join theirs.

This is the lightbulb moment most authors are missing.

And frankly, it's a point of visiting podcasts as a guest. In Content Marketing, it's called guest blogging. Hocking got the book bloggers to take up her cause. Steve Scott and Mark Dawson visited the book podcasters. Same approach in all cases. Enough of these visits, with your own opt-in's and list in place, and you have your own audience.

At that point, you can do the Kindle Review Dance. You know the steps:

a) Give your audience advance review copies,
b) get some of them to put reviews out on the first days,
c) get some to buy it right off.
d) Then tell the rest of them so they can get it during the first opening week, and
e) then raise the price and get some more to keep buying it.
f) So then Amazon starts pushing it and drives the sales even higher.

That's all it takes to make a "bestseller" on Kindle. Yes, the reviews are all contrived. (Normally, about 1% leave reviews there or anywhere. But this strategy is legal and accepted.)

But what does it take to make a living there?

Well, the honest truth is that you can't get there from here.

No author I've studied makes their income strictly and only from Kindle. No one. Not any. Lots of "conventional wisdom" guru's say to just get your books on Kindle exclusively and - voila - instant 6 figures.

Nope. Doesn't happen. Except for the 1% - usually those with lists of rabid, buying fans. Like celebrities. (Cue the zombie march.)

It takes a couple of years to build up your audience to even start approaching 6 figures from book sales. It's a real grind, but necessary. Learn by doing, not by hoping for lucky breaks.

Let's crunch some numbers. Smashwords' Coker  has done surveys say ebooks sell the most at $2.99, but produce the most income at $3.99. We don't know how many 6 figure authors are using those numbers. Mark Dawson won't run Facebook ads for anything under $4.99. He's pulling down $500K per year, spending over $100K on FB ads - and making twice that back.

Let's figure you want to make $100K in a year. In New York and other high-tax districts, $50K won't even get you out of the poverty zone.

You need $2K per week. Let's take Dawson's book price - that's about $3.50 royalty per book. Just over 570 units sold per week. Or around 82 units per day. Your sales rank needs to be between 1500 to 3000 - meaning that you have that many books which sell better than yours in all of Kindle-land. The air is thin up there, for sure.

That's just one book to do all the heavy lifting. Most of these guys have an average of 10 before they get any decent income. That makes more sense, as then your average sales only need to be around 8 per day, meaning your sales rank for these are between 10K to 50K.

Now you can see why 84% of all Kindle authors make diddly-squat.

But crunch the numbers for yourself. Come to your own conclusions.

What the guys making real income from booksales are doing.

Their money is made with multiple versions on all possible platforms. By my last notes, Scott was sticking to KDP Unlimited with his ebooks and had given up around $100k per year. But around a third of the rest of his money was coming in from other versions. Print books, audio books, foreign rights. It was only when Scott moved into these additional versions that jumped him into the $300K range.

That's the model. Get all your books available everywhere possible in all versions possible.

If you're publishing original books and have a decent audience built up, you can very probably keep making 6 figures indefinitely - as long as you keep producing books they can consume.

If you're trying this with Public Domain books, figure that you're going to have to publish a few hundred to do this. The problem is that PD has been commoditized on Kindle so that the bulk of them are either free or very low price of 99 cents.

However, in print, it's a different story - with the proper approach, one can make those few hundred crank out 6 figures. And those sales are more regular, if "weak" compared to the topsellers.

Having a couple hundred PD books out there, giving you about $2 royalties, you only need them averaging about a sale every other day.

The trade off is about the same. It can take years to build up a backbench using either method.

What most starting publishers don't know is that to submit PD books to Kindle gets you a nastygram almost every time you do. (Of course they quickly find out.)

Hardcopy versions on CreateSpace and Lulu don't get that bizarre treatment. These two are only concerned with your technical accuracy so the book reproduces well. They aren't concerned with what the content is, but expect you to hold up your own end.

Quite a different scene entirely. You aren't threatened with account closure every single submission.

Meanwhile, as I've covered before, print books can bring you in twice or more income for the same text.

For my business model, the current work is converting all my ebooks that sell at all over to print versions. And meanwhile, look for additional PD books which are poorly marketed by their publishers and sell well in paperback despite of it. Adding these to my existing backbench then should take my income up to those six-figures, and perhaps beyond.

While PD publishing requires no audience (it actually works based on the legacy audience of those long-dead authors) I'll be also investing in audience-building to accelerate that process. That audience will tell me what books they want, giving us both a virtuous feedback loop for the marketing cycle.

All of this is based on those two points from our last episode:

1. Deep backbench - lots of titles selling well.
2. Multiple eyeballs - all possible versions on all possible platforms.

Add to this:

3. Velvet Rope Members

That's where you get your own audience on board, and give them a membership so you can talk freely with them and give them what they want.

There's only a few more key points to this system, but I've talked at you long enough for today.

This episode should give you the paradigm-shift you need to consider your own marketing plans. The days of the Kindle trolls and bullies can reach their end. But only if enough of us get people to examine the conventional wisdom Kool-Aid they've been swallowing.

Bullies get to keep bullying until they are stood up to.

Then they reform, or run.

Takeaway Steps

Of course, this is my trademark end to this episode - steps you can take today to fix things.

For original works:

0. Get an email provider, plus your own domain and web site. I use AWeber and Rainmaker, respectively.
1. Use an aggregator for your ebooks, either Lulu or Smashwords. Make sure they have a Lead Magnet that works to build your audience through the LookInside/Preview.
2. Publish paperbacks through CS and Lulu and get their extended reach options (cost you nothing but proofs.) Ensure they also have Lead Magnets for their own Look Inside/Preview.
3. Publish hardbacks through Lulu to their extended reach.
4. Record your own books into audio and post them to Audible and CDBaby. Also use them as podcasts to attract your audience.
5. Make the podcast interview rounds for your books. And tell people how to opt-in to your membership.
6. Build relationships with your list through give-aways and pre-release offers. (Several good workouts exist on this, such as Dawson's.)
7. Write more books. Publish. Repeat.

For PD/PLR works:

0. Mainly, these steps are the same, they just take longer. Probably twice as long or more. (Just how fast did you want to get financially independent.)
1. Aggregators won't ship PD or PLR anywhere, so you have to submit all your books manually.
2. My personal advice is to skip Amazon - it's way too crowded to be worth anything. Instead, use them to show you where the best prospects are. They publish sales rank data, which gives you clues (see my last episode for this.)
3. Publish all books to as many places as you can, especially hardcopy versions.
4. You might be able to use PD audiobooks (if you choose the right originals) for your podcasts. Otherwise, use the example of mine where I take the 4000 character description and podcast these.
5. The rest is no different. Build your audience and give them what they want.
6. Then find more books, publish them, rinse, repeat.

That's it for now.

See you next time.

PS. I'm working up the real marketing campaign that any self-publisher can use, so stay tuned.

How to Write Less and Publish More - A Rich Adventure

Can you actually write less and profit more?

Introduction

Deep in the heart of the ever-growing Amazon Kindle jungle, there's a profitable under-served market which is not easily discovered. It sits in a clearing by itself, much like a massive stone temple rising above the forest. A temple with some gold-filled rooms.

Just my kind of area to explore. I've long been in favor of "find where everyone is going and go the opposite way." So this makes a lot of sense. And any adventure is always welcome.

We saw this expedition hinted at by Steve Scott with his non-fiction habits books. But he never really explored the opportunities this area has. In re-tracing Scott's own path, it showed me the turns he didn't take.

That inspired me to start my own journey around two months ago. I'm currently publishing an average of one short read ebook per week. And the results are promising, as the Christmas sales influence fades.

This path struck my fancy, as it told more about how to really use short reads as a business strategy. How to cement those 6-figures that Scott started having. What I've discovered accelerates that progress, perhaps even creating your 7-figure income.

(BTW, in Scott's recent videos, he points out that his income is still dwindling, down from a high of around $400K annually to an average of "just" $250K per year. While this is still great, it also shows that he's left tons of money on the table.)

One of the more profitable avenues is content writing as part of business publishing. A lot of businesses are getting into content marketing these days, but don't have a lot of thick texts sitting around waiting to be turned into Kindle ebooks.

What they do have is lots of shorter material which would be perfect how-to non fiction books about their particular industry. If these could also be quickly turned into small books to hand out at trade shows and by their sales people, a business could get a real marketing advantage over any competition.

And such production can be fast. The book you are reading (although more work could have been done in editing, to be sure) was created and published into four widely-distributed formats in only three days, at a cost of sweat-equity only. Imagine what could be done for your next product release...

This isn't just for fiction writers. It's for everyone with a message to get out.

So let's get started...

The Secret Map to Short Read Riches

Here's the secret map - How to Succeed with Kindle Short Reads, by Geoff Shaw.

There's a growing group of readers which Amazon has been catering to with their Kindle Short Reads. Shaw describes them like this:

"Introducing Coffee Break Readers

"There’s a new generation of readers.

"People who will download and read lots of books. They only have so much time and they want their fill of excitement in that limited time.

"We call them the CBR’s - the coffee break readers.

They’re not just people who have never read longer books before... They’re anyone who has limited time to read for whatever reason.

"These people aren't stuck into a certain author, it's more like the certain type of entertainment they want: short stories which they can read in their available time."

That idea opened my eyes quite a bit.

The price range for these CBR books is the same as Scott's .99 and 2.99, plus the 3.99 or 4.99 boxed sets.

But the trick is that you're having to write a lot less and profiting more from each bit you do write.

When we last left our hero, Scott seemed to be getting into longer and longer books as he went, but this is the reverse of where you want to go. You'll see shortly that this is more of a pioneer territory with a lot less competition and few tools to use to find your way. What Scott should have been doing is to figure out how to multiply his success in related genres, and stick to the short reads and box sets.

It's really all the "deep backbench" principle again. The more books you have up there, the more they can be recommended, the more chances you have to uncovered your room of gold.

Less Competition, More Profits

The great part is that this is still mostly virgin wilderness. Go look over Amazon short reads and you'll see there is a lot less competition, as the books are split up by length as well as genre. People can have 15, 30, 45, 60, and 90-minute reads. Your book still shows up in the regular categories. but the CBR's will specifically hunt up your books according to the time they have to read. So it's easier for them to find your books.

Basically, Amazon counts every 250 words as a page. Except for special instances, they generally only accept 2500-word books these days. So Shaw's chart shows the reading time category you'll fall into with your short reads, depending on word count.

Let's look at that competition you won't have:

For instance:

Literature & Fiction -

Kindle Books: 1,352,061
Kindle Short Reads (30 min): 48,093

Business & Money -

Kindle Books: 249,574
Kindle Short Reads (30 min): 15,937

Which arena would you like to compete in?

Another point is that there's higher turnover. People are basically consuming books like tasty snacks. This then leverages your writing far beyond anything we've seen before. They aren't looking for books they can read a bit of each day (munching all week long) but rather 5-10 books they can finish each week.

For the money they'd spend buying a traditionally-published big name author's ebook, they can buy just as much reading material for less than half - and it's all designed to be read in those tiny snippets of time they have available.

Shaw says that the bulk of the reads in this category are actually indie authors, so this means the Big 5 publishing houses won't compete with their big promotion budgets in this arena.

Shaw points out, as I did earlier, that you can publish a single 80,000-word book and take a month writing it. (And another month editing and proofing it.)

Or – write eight 10,000-word books and publish every two weeks. (One for writing at 2,000 per day - 10,000 words - and the next week for editing/proofing.)

In two months, the first author has one book, which will sell for 4.99 or so.

The second author has 8 books that can sell at 2.99.

The second author has roughly twice the royalties coming in, plus:

• the ability to get readers as email subscribers also from each additional book (with a Lead Magnet at both beginning and end)
• the ability to be searched for 56 keywords and in 16 categories, instead of just 7 keywords and 2 categories.
• the greater number of his books and his more frequent releases prompt Amazon to recommend these other titles.
• and you're making income while you are writing.
• then creating a box set of these (or even a couple) just adds to the above.

In this hypothetical match-up, you have the same amount of words for each author, a tiny bit more overhead in producing covers and descriptions for short reads each ebook, plus building that box set. But then the box set allows a longer-read customer to consume the full novel.

As a sidebar, the box set looks to be a better bargain than the 80,000-word single book. Would you rather buy a collection of 8 books for 4.99 or a single book for 4.99?

This starts to point out the factors in Steve Scott's system that he was missing.

What you've also done is to create 9 books (8 singles, plus the box set) in the same amount of time as the other author, but on your author page, you've got 9 books they can check out (and buy). And that's two months' work. The audience then doesn't question if you're a one-shot wonder, but will know by the end of just two months that you're a serious contender.

The other successes I've studied spent an entire year or more creating their bigger novels in order to have 5 or 6 books available (which was Scott's average, by the way, and he was doing short books.)

Again, you can have 9 books published in just two months. Instant legitimacy, with less competition.

Setting the first ebook as perma-free is an even better option. Plus, you can give it away from your site (and also from your box set look-inside) to get their email address. You aren't giving away your first 80,000-word book (which freaks most beginning authors out) but only 1/8th of your total work.

(One tip here is to tell them in the first line of each single book's description that a box set is also available.)

Shaw talks quite a bit about Kindle Unlimited here, but I still hold that you're throwing away income if you're not offering your works for sale everywhere possible (see Addendum.) The places you should publish in my opinion are Amazon, Itunes, and Lulu (both as an aggregator and hardcopy publisher.) This gives you the minimal interfaces to deal with.

Hook, Line, Sinker and the Lead Magnet

This is a tip Shaw gives which I've seen nowhere else: Inside your first book, it says: "Get the next book in this series!" and has a link which goes to a landing page opt-in. When they sign up, they go to a thank you page, which lists all the rest of the books in that series, as well as your other series - and they can buy each of the books through that page, directly from Amazon. That "thank you page" also has the free samples linked.

To my mind, this would be where you also give a link to sell a bundle for each ebook. It would include the PDF, epub, and mobi files as a download from your own site.

(Shaw does give a way you can help them side-load it with their Kindle email link. This builds relationship.)

Now, note that you will be building your ARC (Advance Review Copy) subscribers with your email. This segments part of them into a special list so you can sent preview copies in exchange for a review on Amazon. This is the key way to make "bestsellers" on Amazon. I did find a slightly better take on this from Mark Dawson, who has:

a) Tell your ARC about the release date.

b) Tell the rest of your list the day after, letting them know the price is going up.

c) Tell your entire list the day the price is going up.

d) Then (my addition) post to your blog/podcast with the release data and use IFTTT to syndicate it everywhere.

e) You'd then run Facebook ads about the book, particularly if it were a boxed set, where the increased book income would pay for those ads. ($4.99 or so.)

What that does, per Dawson, is to give you immediate reviews and sales, then gets continuing sales afterwards, as Amazon will promote books which are new and continuing to sell well.

Additional Short Read Marketing Tactics

Shaw comes up with some marvelous tactics with short reads, which are just as applicable to bigger books, but not as quickly or easily done.

1) Collaborations with pen names

This tactic can be used for testing other genres, but is also essentially brand-extension. Your first pen name is known for a certain sub-genre, then you write a book in a related sub-genre adding a co-author that is actually just another pen name. It's not hard to see the cross-selling aspects of this. You can now can have several authors with their own list segment, for each sub-genre you want to write in. Shaw explains this in more detail in his course.

Your emails then come from an embracive source (like your publishing house or an "imprint" of it) which then lists the books by each author for each sub-genre. Each author could have their own special offer going.

As you segment off your hotter audience (more opens, clickthroughs) then you can give them polls, in order to narrow down what they like most and so create a better experience for them.

2) Collaborations with other (real) authors

If you have a box set with books by several of your pen names, you can then offer other authors in those sub-genres a chance to get into that box set. Since you have several "authors" already, it's a no-brainer. And that new author then emails his list about that box set. This is an old standby of affiliate marketing. It builds both your lists.

3) Cloning

For fiction short reads this is a viable option. Taking your book outline (Shaw has a course on this as well on Udemy) you then get some ghostwriters to produce another book with the same basic plot. You then publish this under that pen name. Similar cover, similar title, cloned. It works because people want more of what they love.

4) Reverse Launch

You can also release the box set first, and then offer them your first book in that series as a sample - and put that in your "Look Inside". Then you can go ahead and release the other books on a schedule, getting people to opt-in to your list to get the "early bird discount" as each new single is released.

Non-Fiction and Public Domain Publishing

Amazon is seeming to do all they can to discourage any more PD from showing up there. I got reminded this last week as I had a special report (quick read) that wound up in their very slow PD queue because of its title alone. My other books were getting approved in about 12 hours, so having to spend 5 days getting a book out of that queue back into draft was really annoying.

So I will definitely avoid this route just because it slows the speed of publishing. This also points out that they are primarily working with a database of titles (and maybe authors) as opposed to any search of submitted content (which might occur later, once it gets kicked into human hands, but that's doubtful.)

Another cross-over point is improving your writing. Writing a good non-fiction book has a great deal to do with how they write good fiction. Mainly things like having a good hook, and using emotional descriptions.

Plus, fiction is more profitable in general than non-fiction. People like to be entertained and to escape. If you can bring these same writing styles into non-fiction, then you have a popular hit.

All short-reads do is to make your books more consumable, which is the same point of learning fiction-writing techniques.

The benefit of this strategy is to enable you to get more leverage out of the same amount of content that you're going to create anyway.

Pen names to fill space in a magazine is nothing new. Prolific authors have often resorted to these for any number of reasons. Being able to cross-connect these authors and their readers gives you new opportunities for income.

I just wanted to tell you all about these, as this is a breakthrough down this line of short reads.

And authors with existing books - depending on how they are written - can break up their books into a serial format and do this same thing. The first short-read excerpt becomes a sample, then release the other chapters along this same line. Gladwell's Tipping Point could have been released like this, if that were a publishing option at the time. Remember, it has to read like a serial to be successful along this line.

Leveraging Your Resources

Further, I still recommend coming out with both paperback and hardback editions to get the most out of your title. And don't forget your audio book.

Some tips came to light this last Christmas season. It turns out that Amazon will stop ordering books for certain titles if they come from Lulu or other publishers, but not their own CreateSpace (CS). You can see how this makes sense from a shipping point, but you'll also see that you just lost sales for the couple of weeks just before Chrismas. That means all the last-minute shoppers can't get your books if you don't publish to CS.

CS doesn't do hardbacks. Period. They do a lot of different cut sizes in paperback that Lulu doesn't, however. So you can make a pocketbook paperback version on CS, and a trade paperback version on Lulu, as well as a trade hardback version (both casewrap and dust-jacketed.)

Note, Amazon will show your CS version on the front page, and your Lulu version will have to be searched for. Having your expanded reach on Lulu gets your book into the other distributors with higher royalties and no Amazon stigma attached.

The general theory is this:

• You have titles which are selling as ebooks and long enough to make at least a 32-page book in print, or about 8,000 words.)
• Paperback version on CS, just to Amazon.
• Paperback version from Lulu with their expanded reach. - Casewrap hardback from Lulu with expanded reach.
• "Deluxe" dust jacketed version at a much higher price.

Work your books backwards in order of sales so that improved title sales pays for the proofing costs of the hardcopies.

Editing itself can give you an audio book.

You have four drafts of your book. First is your rough draft. Second is cleaning up your errors and inserting links, plus general formatting. Third is reading the book out-loud and correcting anything you find. At this point, you record everything you read out loud, with attention to reading the final version into your recording. You then send off that 3^rd draft to a proofer. Meanwhile, you edit your recording into shape as an audio book (or as a podcast.)

For instance. this podcast transcript is now over 4000 words in print. So it would qualify as a 30 minute quick read, but isn't big enough to print by itself. (I could add material to the end pulled from my other books, and also put in ads to buy my other books on Amazon.)

So we will probably use this as a test of this whole publishing scene

While your recording can become your audio book, it's also a podcast. Including that link into your ebook then gives you added value. I also include the link into the PDF version at the bottom as a footer. So when you submit the PDF to make your hardcopy version, they can always type that link into their browser and get the podcast.

Of course, that sends them to your podcast where they get your ads, and another way to get them into your membership/mailing list.

Quick Reads Other Than Amazon

Of course this strategy works everywhere else, too. Your ebook are the same. You don't have the "Look Inside" but all the ebook distributors enable previews - just make sure the PDF you upload has links to where you want readers to go. I'm also a fan of uploading the entire PDF, as it builds trust and encourages them to get a version they can read more easily on their smart phone. (But I do format my PDFs for 6"x9" as these are more readable on smaller screens.)

Podcasts and Keeping Updated

One final thought is to tell you to follow my Authorpreneur Flipboard magazine to keep up with all that I'm finding daily on book publishing and content creation.

I may work this up into publishing this as a weekly digest at some point, but don't know when. Let me know by return email or comment on this episode if you think that's something you could use.

This podcast was started as another self-publishing test, and it's succeeded far beyond what I expected. However, I have no need to simply work at finding more stuff to talk about just to have a podcast. I do like to share breakthroughs. But at this point, I've covered the bulk of the basics and have no reason to do like Steve Scott and others who are now trying to profit off selling courses to their list.

This is mainly as that market is so saturated, it's not funny. The ebook market is, frankly, glutted. The how-to books market for new authors is worse. Amazon is more the new-author graveyard than ever before. Most of this is because authors are following the followers rather than reaching for the top 5%. That's where the real creative energy is. Market leaders are constantly creating. And that's what makes them leaders. Everyone who tries to just copy what someone else is doing is just another also-ran.

Scott was onto something with his short reads. But he's another follower, even though well-paid. Essentially, he's always been an affiliate marketer. And that's always a follow-the-follower scene. It shows in his latest course in how to write and market books.

Any breakthrough in leveraging Amazon is in finding what are still niche areas, such as short-reads. Amazon is a complete pain to work with, as they nickel-and-dime your royalty income every chance they get. But they can be leveraged and they can be used to build your own list.

You do need your own site, and you should be able to sell your own books from your own site. I should finally have my own ecommerce site up later this month. You already see my membership site is up as a bare-bones operation, but I'm adding content to this each week. And my email lists are slowly building as I go.

Here's the minimum basics in sequence for a successful author, outside of their ability to write:

1) an autoresponder service

2) a domain of your own

3) a membership on that domain

4) your own hosted bookstore

Everything else is getting your books also offered by the main distributors so you can use those distributors to build your email subscriber lists.

If you don't have these four points above in, then you are just asking to be booted off Amazon at some point and left with no income, nothing.

The secret to profits from Amazon is to leverage their ebook sales into hardcopy sales, which are not subject to their money-grubbing policies on royalties. The real market for fiction and non-fiction, especially PD and PLR books, is in POD versions, not ebooks.

And those few comments above sum up my entire accumulated wisdom on selling books profitably. The rest is technical how-to which can be dug up just about anywhere (although the books I've already published in this area have been described as a Gold Mine with all those technical nuggets you can find inside.) My earlier books were to help anyone start with just the computer and Internet connection they already have, plus a common sense approach mostly lacking in the bulk of the other books in this area.

But I have no reason to revisit my own books. This scene is constantly shifting and evolving. I'd be forever just keeping these updated.

I'm not going to promise you that my podcast will continue. If I don't find anything really interesting, or a breakthrough, then it's just another day in the life. Frankly, these two Shaw courses on Udemy have inspired a completely new approach for me - but there's no reason to repeat what he's already written, other than this review.

I'm also studying Mark Dawson's course on Facebook advertising, but this is a back-up to having a lot of books out there already. Your sequence would be to study the two Shaw courses and then Dawson's free videos (until his pricey FB ad course opens up once again.) If you only have a couple of nickels to invest, then get my cheaper ebooks and work on building your backlist. Once the money starts dribbling in, then invest in the above - AFTER you have your own list, domain, membership, and ecommerce set up (which can be built with just Blogger, PayPal, and MailChimp - all free to start with.)

Again, before you start publishing your books (you should always be writing, every single day) get your basics in above. Then expand your training with Shaw and Dawson. If you go back through my blog posts, I've given you other downloads to study through. All free.

Your main focus is to thoroughly study and test everything for yourself, then throw away everything that doesn't work for you. Especially what I've told you. No prophet is sacrosanct, regardless of how many followers they have or how much money they make.

Your life is your own. Live it to the fullest you can. Enjoy every moment. Listen only to those who have escaped that bucket of crabs where everyone else lives.

While I'm way behind and underneath my production goals these days, I still work to see how I can help you with whatever you need. Your input helps and inspires me. Email me directly or leave a comment.

And, thanks for being there.

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