Is the Content Inc. Model a Good Fit for Author-Publishers?

Short answer is “yes.”

Long answer is “depends.”

Depends if you get what he’s saying, understand it, and put it to work.

The bottom line is that author-publishers are content merchants. They deal in content, no matter what form it’s in. Like screenwriters and song writers, authors put out content as a steady diet and a profession.

This also includes those who write a single book and then do consulting and speaking gigs for the rest of their lives. Their content just changes form, it doesn’t change the action of producing it. This isn’t new: Genevieve Behrend wrote three bestsellers about the Law of Attraction in the 1920’s and made a nice living from speeches and consulting.

Now, to figure this out, I went and bought the book Content Inc. to get the model by Joe Pulizzi. (Maybe you should, too.) In the talks he gives, he usually lists just 6 points when he talks about this model, but there are actually 7. Pulizzi didn’t omit it in his book, he just put it at the very front. Let’s call it Step 0.

Even then, this steps are not just sequential, they overlap. (See image.)

0. Set your goal and stick to getting it achieved.

“Begin with the end in mind.” Decide what you want to accomplish and then burn your bridges so you have to.

Next:

1. Find the Sweet Spot.

This is where your personal knowledge and your bliss/passion intersect. What you like to do best and what you know how to do have to agree, and then you can start living large at what you can and want to do best.

Writers love to write, producers live to produce. Creative thought alone has it’s own rewards – but it doesn’t necessarily pay the bills. So, follow your bliss – but only if you have prepared by learning what you need to know in order to pull it off.

2. Find your Content Tilt.

This essentially is to “…find a problem area that no one else is solving and exploit that area with content.“

For writers, it’s a specific approach to a very specific sub-genre which they know best – and then execute it with style and originality. Like the Harry Potter books. Like the James Bond series. Like the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Each genre already existed long before these authors were even born. But the authors brought in their own specific style of playing that game.

Songwriters do this scene as well. Elton John sings songs about the same subject as John Lennon and Paul McCartney did, as well have thousands of others through our modern age. But they don’t just do what everyone else did, they did it uniquely. This is their own personal tilt.

3. Building the Base, and 4. Harvesting Audience

Successful authors do this. They have a fan base that they relate to and even get story ideas and critiques from. They serve this base by writing stories that their fans actually want to read. Modernly, this means having an email list they can subscribe to, and then keep building the relationships with them.

Here’s where you need to study Pulizzi’s book closely. Because “books” are no longer the only format you can write toward. Content can be poured into multiple formats. Right off the bat, there are at least four types of “books” which all sell differently: ebooks, audiobooks, paperbacks, hardbacks. Each has their own audience-preferences, and sell differently.

So you have to work smart with this. Yes, the 6-figure authors usually have at least one series of 10 books going for them. Most have several series. And the books aren’t all just digital versions, they are also audio and print versions. And they are in foreign translations. And there could be movie deals… See where this is going? Lots of content everywhere at once. One book series, and lots of versions.

Pulizzi gives the caveat here for beginning author-publishers who need to build their base are these:

“1. Focus on one content type.

“2. Publish on one platform.

“3. Deliver consistently.

“4. Continue to deliver over time.”

The formula for a beginning success is to: publish in one narrow sub-genre, just on Amazon, and get your series coming out regularly. This is how to start. Once you have your base, then you start expanding into multiple versions and multiple platforms.

There’s far more to this in the book. Like most authors have their own website, for instance. You can’t count on any one distributor being able to do everything for you, no matter what their promises are.

So while theoretically, you are publishing books, actually you are using that platform to get subscribers you can talk to through your email. Every single book you publish, every single format, should have an invitation in it for your fans to join your club.

Yes, you get those books out there, but do it smart and build your subscriber base as you do. No, it doesn’t have to take a long time. But it does have to get done. Otherwise, that one-shot wonder you produced will dry up and blow away. Ask some of the Motown and other recording-label artists that did just that – where are they now?

(Hint: not headlining on the Vegas Strip.)

And when you get those subscribers, you have to keep them engaged.

Again, there are tons more ideas of how to do these two steps in Pulizzi’s book.

6. Diversification

Once you have a single platform (publishing books) worked out, then it’s time to diversify and expand your audience. While Pulizzi recommends book, blogs, and speaking, this may not be the most efficient. Writers write. Blogs would be a simple extension, but elsewhere, I’ve recommended getting into audio. Those 6-figure authors I’ve followed have found that appearing as guests on podcasts have worked wonders to promote their upcoming book and existing series.

Also, as part of proofing, you read the book aloud and correct errors as you go. Why not create a podcast of your upcoming book? Even though the final proof will do other corrections to it, if you were to read chapters each week, or every other week, of the raw version, this would be something readers could enjoy as an audio book. Meanwhile, you can get sponsors and also run your own ads for your earlier books in that series – right in the same feed.

Blogging is logical, as you already have the text and can link to the podcast in that article. Fans would love to get the text as it comes off the line and then buy the finished book as well.

Again, as a note, these steps aren’t sequential, they overlap. So you can be working on several steps while you’re just getting a single book out in several formats, on several platforms.

You’ll see examples of this by following various authors. Steve Scott and Mark Dawson were interviewed on podcasts long before they started their own. Amanda Hocking got chums with the book bloggers to start her own rise. You don’t have to do public speaking as Pulizzi did and does. That is also very useful for John Jentsch and others. In these, your follow-up books extend your brand while adding even more value.

7. Monetization

The classic author-publisher model is built from the beginning on book sales. Monetization is built in – if you can get your book discovered. Again, most authors don’t start to get real traction until their 5th book. To do this, you need to be collecting subscribers from day one. Just update all the books you already have out there.

Your list and those relationships prime all pumps. Mine your content and re-purpose it. Bundles, podcasts, any other services you want to provide. Check your knowledge base for inspiration.

The point is to expand and diversify your number of formats, types of formats, number of platforms, and types of platforms. Monetize each and every one of these as you go.

Then you are on the route to real success as an author-publisher-entrepreneur. The real point is to decide from the beginning that you are creating and running a successful business, and align your goals to that.

So?

The Content Inc. model is an outline you can use to build it all from. You just have to know anduse it.

The sky’s the limit.

Time to get started…

---

If you want more information on entrepreneurial book publishing, sign up for the no-charge library of writing and publishing books at http://livesensical.com/go/writingbooks

Originally published at: http://livesensical.com/podcast/selling-books-online/content-inc-model-good-fit-author-publishers/

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

(Photo: daniel julià lundgren)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of these were:

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

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

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

What?!?

Read that last one again.

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

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

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

Thanks a lot, guys.

Where real book discovery happens.

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

Now we can get somewhere with this.

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

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

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

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

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

How to SEO your book and not kill yourself off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The common points to these common strategies:

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

It's all part of lean publishing.

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

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

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

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

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

The Common Sense Marketing Plan is almost ready.

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

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

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

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Why You Don't Have to Be a Bestselling Author to Get Financially Free

(Photo: Alfred Cunningham)

To Make a Living as a Writer, You Only Have to Publish Books Well.

Why keep beating your head against a perfectly good brick wall?

Look over some facts:

• Some bad books sell well.
• Some great books sell poorly.
• Less than 1 percent of all books ever attain bestseller status.
• Most authors make less than $500 per year from their book.

The logical conclusion:

If you want to make a living writing, you have to increase your book sales - by becoming a better publisher.

Seriously.

Here's the old mantra again (repeat after me):

Writing feeds the soul, Publishing pays the bills.

This I found by my own struggles.

My own story began after I left a suffocating corporate cult in late 2000 and returned to the family farm in Missouri. While operating the farm part time, and researching/writing part time, and holding down a part time day job (or going to school for some degrees) - my life was pretty full.

From then until 2013, I published all my books and several public domain works (as related references).  And even now, my own books don't sell well.

But I changed my perspective in 2013 when I started researching why my books don't sell. My tests in publishing made me financially independent, and I ditched any day job because my book sales started paying all my bills.

In about 18 months, I went from having a day job to not needing one.

It just took me over a dozen years to figure out how, then only a few months to make it happen. Yes, that's a happy coincidence. But happen it did.

This blog (among many) chronicles that adventure. So you can look it up, if you dare.

You don't have to be a bestselling writer, you only have to be a good-selling publisher

I'll repeat that as many times as necessary to help you understand it.

What did I change in 2013 that made my life so much easier, that allowed me to "turn pro"?

I looked up what bestselling authors did to make their income.

• They published in series.
• They published a lot.
• They published new works regularly.

It's that simple.

I published several lots, in series, to see what would happen.

The money started coming in. Somewhere between 1-3% of my published books started selling well. (My unpublished works, of course, never sold.)

I don't expect you to do what I did.

Look up the most famous authors if you want - you'll find in our modern age, it takes about five years after their first book is published (providing they publish at least one book a year in a series following the first) they start making a living at it. Enough to quit any day job they had to have up to that point.

It doesn't take into account how long it took to write that book, it only says that when they published consistently for five years, at least once a year, they got financially independent, if not downright wealthy.

In my case, I ended up publishing more than a hundred books by other authors - but it only took about 18 months.

The punchline is this: I did no marketing beyond cover, title, description, price.

Meaning - I did what any publisher would do. Publishers leave the promotion up to the author. Always have. Since (except for my own books) everyone I published was either dead or anonymous, that meant these books got no marketing.

Here's another interesting point: Only about a dozen were on Amazon. I was paying my bills with books published everywhere else. When one of my books got a bestseller status on Amazon, the money came in better - but that same book was already selling well everywhere else.

Cover, Title, Price, Description. Nothing else.

This means: Financial Freedom.

Which meant I had time to do more research and writing (which was funneled into blog posts that became more books.)

Weird, huh?

I'm right now working out exactly what marketing needs to be for books - and it hardly resembles what authors are being told to do these days.

It does give a program that publishers should be following to actually market their books.

Once I have it polished a bit more, I'll give it to you for free. Even the spreadsheet it sits on.

Because your financial freedom (and freedom in general) is important to me. The Golden Rule says (loosely) that you have to give before you can get (or that you only receive as well as you give - same thing). If you want more freedom, you have to help others get it - first.

The point of this is that you can get your financial freedom as a writer if you become more effective as a publisher.

• Books don't sell unless you publish. 
• Books sell best if published in a series for a specific genre. 
• They also sell best if you sell everywhere possible at once.

Test it for yourself:

1. (Self)publish everything you already have. Edit into shape, get some great covers, write some enticing descriptions, price them to sell, publish them everywhere. 
2. Now write some more related books in that series and publish them.
3. Keep this up until you have at least five books out there. At least.

Contact me once your fifth book is published and we'll compare notes. Just don't talk to me unless you have killer covers, decent prices, and fascinating descriptions.

I'm not saying you'll get rich (or any guarantee, really). The point is that if you work this hard for your dreams, then you have a much better chance at getting enough income to cover your bills - maybe enough to quit your day job.

Up to you.

The question is not how well can you write - it's how well can you publish? That is what pegs your book income.

Writing feeds the soul. Publishing pays your bills.

- - - -

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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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Perfecting Passive Income Publishing for Profit

How to Make More Than Just a Living With Profitable Passive Income Publishing.

(Image: WishIKnew...)

It all started out by wanting to learn how to get books I'd written published and making enough to allow me to quit my day job.

It hasn't ended - but has accomplished that goal well over a year ago.

What's next, then?

Jim Rohn gave me that in an old MP3 being passed around. You work full time at your J.O.B. and part time at your fortune - until you make your fortune earning more than your day job so you can work full time at your fortune.

The trick is not just chasing after money, but following your bliss - your truest interests and consuming passion. With that worked up, you then have that "Burning Desire" which Napoleon Hill talks about in his Think and Grow Rich.

I went the public domain publishing route and it made more than I needed to quit my day job. In fact, it has pulled in enough on a good month to exceed what I've ever made at an hourly job doing 40 hours a week.

The trick to this is that I spend a few hours on each book, and the profits simply roll in after that. Some books don't sell, some sell infrequently, some sell regularly. And a small handful will sell very well for a short or longer period.

You can then leverage these bestsellers with more editions and supporting promotion.

But public domain publishing has proved that it's not the fortune-maker I was looking for. (Mainly because Amazon doesn't want more of those-type books on their site - and that is the most obvious place for a publishing business to sell books.)

OK, so what's next, then?

Glad you asked.

My bliss is not publishing. It's illustrating and writing. (Explains why my blog posts are so long...)

Publishing has been a means to an end. It's rewarding and interesting, but the leap to be taken has to be toward original fiction - in particular, children's books.

I'd done this research years ago, to know that it was a good market. And recent look for public domain books after 1923 just confirmed this:
1) Only bestselling/topselling book copyrights were ever renewed. (About 1% on average.)
2) Every single children's book from that era that I checked out had been renewed. Every single one.
3) Conclusion: lots of money to be made/ value to add with children's books.

How do you get started publishing children's books?

I worked out the training lineup and posted it here. It's a natural function. The trick to it is to publish those public domain books as you study them. This means your training will pay for itself.

That's a natural extension of what you've already been doing. All you really are doing is concentrating on a single niche instead of a broad shoot.

The Steps
(do all of these for each and every book from here on out):

1. Study the area and find what people are buying. There are sure to be some sub-genre's which are more profitable than others.
2. As part of this, keep track of keywords. Do a fuller study with Market Samurai to see what the conversations are around these keywords, which are more advertised for (monetize-able, etc.)
3. Get a blog on a new domain, or subdomain on an existing one (like the one you are reading, for an example.) Make sure IFTTT is cross-promoting your blog posts to Tumblr, Twiter, Wordpress (as applicable.) If possible, have your blog post auto-posted to a Google+ page.
4. Work up an ethical bribe and build your opt-in. Do Not Skip This Step (it's cost me greatly to ignore this one.)
5. As you find and create ebooks out of classic (PD) children's books, port these to the ebook distributors. Create a POD hardcopy version (paperback) for Lulu, and sell the PDF of that book there as well. Go ahead and order a proof of your paperback - it will do you good to have a copy in your hands, and you can always give this away to a relative or local library.
6. Put up a landing page for each title with buy links to all available versions. 
7. Set up Ganxy direct-sales links as part of this. Set up Ganxy bundles as you build your book numbers.
8. Pin (Pinterest) and Flip (Flipboard) your blog post.
9. Announce special offers to your list, particularly if you can get them on Amazon. This includes print versions on Lulu, which can be discounted ahead of a broad release. Also let them know about your Ganxy bundles.
10. Create review PDFs and post them to doc-sharing sites. Create video's and post them to video sites. Embed these on your landing page.
11. Create BitTorrent bundles as part of your book promotion as well - include video and any images, PDF's, etc.
12. Run Synnd campaigns on your new book release (also - do this religiously. It takes time for the bookmarking and social news to prime the pump.
13. Start your next book, rinse, repeat.
    
    Later:
14. As any particular book starts to sell, release the proofed hardcopy into Global Reach via Lulu. Especially if its on Amazon - which will match the two.
15. Consider getting any topselling book you have converted to audiobook via ACX (Audible) for even more leverage. It's also possible to sell audio via Google Play, ITunes, and iAmplify - if you are non-exclusively on Audible.
16. Upgrade the audio in that video from this and sell via iAmplify and/or as a DVD from Kunaki. Update your landing page links for these new products.
17. You can create bundles of digital goods and host on JVZoo or similar so your fans can become your evangelists and get paid for it. 
18. Expand into a full-fledged membership (both free and paid) to reward your list participants, as well as leverage additional income from your hard-core fans.

More detail here.

Complete list of distributors:

• Lulu, 
• GooglePlay, 
• iTunes, 
• Nook, 
• Kobo, 
• Amazon, 
• Espresso Network. 
• (Scribd and Doc-Stoc might be additional ones.) Lulu won't distribute non-original books for you, but will sell all versions of your book. 
• Leanpub will take your original book and create the .mobi, epub, and PDF versions for you.
• Smashwords will distribute original books to all the above, as well as OverDrive (not Espresso that I know of) - Smashwords and Lulu save you time, but cost you income from royalties you'll never get back. (But you don't get time back, either.)
• For your video, you can port to iAmplify and give a pdf book away as part of this. While Kunaki can sell your DVD,  they aren't a distributor and have no audience for this.

The future - what about original books?

Once you know you have your chops down, then edit your own book into shape and run it through as above. Since you can get any original book onto Amazon, get your list to buy and vote for your book. (Intro price at .99)

That will jumpstart your sales for any original book, and whatever PD books you have managed to get ported into Amazon (if they are by the same author or part of the same series.) If your book is really good, then those sales will continue. Once your initial offering is up, then raise the prices higher on all platforms (Amazon won't let you use them as a loss-leader, but must be the lowest of everywhere else you have your book. Only on Amazon.)

You sales on other distributors will depend on your cover, description, author, series. The more books you create, the better chance of them selling.

A nice production plan would be to create at least one book a week, and run it through that sequence. If you pace yourself, and pay attention to details, you could possibly have 50 books published

What else to expect?

I'm pretty well wrapped up here on what you need to do to market your books. What I will promise is some case studies where I do this exact market strategy on some upcoming children's books - forcing myself to do this disciplined route and streamline it as I go.

My new work will be on training people how to write and illustrate children's books - while I build my own deep backbench of these at the same time.

Just had the idea to convert the other two sections above just to cover these other two areas - writing and artwork. That would save me immense time on building yet another website...

Later, then.

Update: Reconsidering my efforts. This blog has capacity to cover what I want with publishing. There are actually two other blogs connected to this (although they all look pretty much the same - on purpose.) http://topsellingbooks.midwestjournalpress.com will be the landing pages for these new books. http://selfpublishingnewsreviews.midwestjournalpress.com/ will start aggregating short links to stuff I find daily about book (self)publishing.

That saves me building a new site completely - since I already have Google grooved into this one...

Related articles

• The Expresso Network - the 7th Book Distributor.
• Focus on Value Instead of Delivery
• The new and streamlined assembly line for book publishing online.
• Rambling Prose and Lack of Focus Explain Why Tradition Publishing Fails
• Another distributor for self-published authors - Feedbooks
• How to Publish a Dozen Books in an Afternoon.

The Espresso Network - the 7th Book Distributor.

Found a new place for Indie Authors to Publish their books - the Espresso Network.

(Photo: Illinois.edu)

This was an interesting find - and wound up with another way for you to self-publish books. Yes, of course it's free.

The catch - only print, and only 25% royalty/commission.

But the upside - you can get sales you'd have missed otherwise.

Did I mention you can do it for free?!? (Sweat equity, I mean.)

Espresso has a nice network of machines internationally. They have a database for all these machines with somewhere more than  6 million books in it.

These machines are at colleges and bigger bookstores where there's enough traffic to support the cost. Meaning, you have a way to get books sold and more people looking for your book in new places.

The trick is to get into that database.

Now it's not an easy find. They've set up a self-publishing scene which will run you $59 per book setup to have your own copy of that masterpiece you've been slaving over - and anyone can order your book via EBM Network after that.

Or, you can publish to Lightning Source for $75 per setup - which gets you entered into the Espresso database as well as into their Global Reach.

Or, you can figure out how to do it for free.

Here's the shortcuts you've been waiting for.

Getting published via Espresso EBM network.

The root page is OnDemandBooks.com - but that's not how you get your book published for free.

You have to wade through all these pages where they want you to pay to set up your book, as I've covered.

The trick is to recognize that you're your own publisher.

There's a link which says Publishers with less than 100 titles U.S. only. (And another link for everywhere else.)  If you go there, you'll have a nice little application to fill out.

And they'll ask you to send them a file which passes their standards.

Here's the trick: submit interior and cover PDFs from one of the books you published on Lulu.  That's all it took for me. That should get your application approved, and then you'll get a login - from there,  you upload as many books as you have ready.

Means you can simply re-publish your books which you've already published as a hardcopy on Lulu. 

Too simple.

That then makes yet another free distributor you can use to get your book out to the world.

The list of no-cost-to-you distributors:

eBooks:

Lulu, iTunes, Nook, Kobo, Amazon, GooglePlay, Overdrive (for prolific self-publishing authors, or indie publishers), Leanpub (for original books only.)

Print versions:

Lulu (ships everywhere else, including Amazon), Espresso Book Machine Network (recommended after you've already published with Lulu).

PDF's:

Lulu, Scribd (original works, or anything they don't already have), Doc-Stoc (limits unknown.)

Aggregators:

Lulu, Smashwords (both will only distribute original works.)

Assembly line for indie book (self)publishing is now:

1) Set up your book (LibreOffice, Calibre) and proof it as best you can. Build your cover with GIMP. Write a fascinating description, collect the meta-data, and store it in Calibre. Epubcheck your book with Calibre's editor (sidecheck with Sigil if it won't pass Lulu.)

2) Publish the ebook and print version via Lulu, getting the free ISBN's. Publish your PDF there was well. Order the hardcopy proof to get into their Global Reach. While you wait for your copy to get mailed...

3) If original, publish through Leanpub, and have Lulu distribute for you. (You can also do this with Smashwords, but Lulu pretty much goes everywhere Smashwords does now, and has an easier input line - if you submit a epubcheck-passed ebook, and a font-embedded PDF (LibreOffice does great at that - by default.)

3a) For public domain or PLR, submit ebooks on your own to GooglePlay, iTunes, Nook, Kobo,  Amazon (in roughly that order.)

4) When you approve your proof, Lulu distributes your print version pretty much everywhere. Take those PDF files and submit to Espresso Network.

5) Publish via Ganxy from your own blog as ebook (all formats, including PDF's)

5a) Bundle your Ganxy books for additional direct sales.

6) Research Scribd and Doc-Stoc to see if you can port your PDF ebook there.

OK? As usual - have fun with this...

Related articles

• Cracking the Lulu ebook Reject Problem
• How to most easily convert a PDF to epub - which is a money-maker
• Becoming A Writer - Dorothea Brande
• Breaking through into a new world of ebook marketing - you can, too!
• Market Your Company Using This Mystic Secret Guide
• Screw Leanpub - original works only.