BitTorrent Bundles Becomes the Ultimate Book Distributor
I’ve spent some time discussing (and dissing) Tim Ferris for having to promote his work on BitTorrent because he published through CreateSpace instead of Lulu. But you can’t fault the results. As a note, we don’t know how much he spent on promotion to get that. Which means the jury is still out for indie author-publishers.
Meanwhile I had an update:
A couple of years ago, I created a bundle with an email gate (submit your email to get the downloads.) Then I moved on to other areas.
I went back to the bundle I created and found a few things. Now, during the time I had this, I didn’t recieve any emails or notifications from BitTorrent. In fact, the promotion link I had went down, so I assumed something bad might have happened. But it was the reverse. Over two years, I had accumulated an email list of 122 emails. I had a lead generator and wasn’t using it.
With no way to integrate this with any other system directly, you have to download your CSV file regularly (daily?) and stay on top of this to make sure you harvest the interest in that bundle.
As well, the smart move is to have Lead Magnets inside any digital file you upload so that they can then opt-in directly.
So the trick is in 1) using this as promotion for an active promotion campaign and 2) staying on top of it.
I still don’t know why the promotion link went down. It’s simply greyed out on the site, and nothing on the bundle anymore, so the first assumption is that it a) somehow is too much of a drag on their technical resources, or b) is time-limited to avoid that.
Just recently, I bought a pay-what-you-want package that covers Pay What You Want. At first glance, this guy is a typical money-promises-in-your-face Internet Marketer. (I don’t particularly care for those approaches. “I made [X] dollars in [Y] days/weeks, by/with [click-bait action]. Or – “I made $23,456.78 in only 12 days by just eating Twinkees.” See? Scammy.)
However, this book is well researched with real examples that can be verified.
There are ways to do Pay What You Want (PWYW):
Gumroad (a bit difficult to integrate on several platforms)
Payhip
BitTorrent Bundles.
LeanPub (for orginal books.)
All of these have to be integrated into your site, or you have to go outside to get access. Since a site will generally send a buyer outside to Amazon or wherever to buy, that’s not a particular problem.
How does Pay What You Want Work?
It’s best when you have pre-established relationships.
Failing that, or for new customers, it relies on the strength of your book (product) description and offer.
Another tactic is to offer tiered models or anchor your price in some way.
I would do something like –
Here is the price on Kindle: xx
Here is the paperback on Amazon: xxxx
Here is the hardback on Amazon: xxxxx
Here is link to all versions on Lulu with as much as 50% discounts: xxx
And the bundle I’m offering for PDF, epub, and mobi files you can pay what you want: ___
PS. Meanwhile, if you do buy the hardcopy version, email me the invoice and I’ll send you the download for free.
The point is to give them a choice to buy through Amazon’s shipping, which is really convenient, versus paying the author what you think it’s worth to you.
This can also act as a tip jar, saying that they can always come back and buy it again if they didn’t think they paid enough.
The point is offering choice.
Those companies I’ve read about have either saved their product from a marketing disaster, or made quite more than was expected.
It seems to work because you give the buyer more choice and more opportunity to contribute. You involve them in the purchase more.
Check this out, study it for yourself.
How BitTorrent Becomes Your Next Distributor
This takes a bit of planning, but not so much more than the others. Perhaps it will work better on a whole series than an individual book – like book collections.
You have two levels on BitTorrent Bundles – the free samples, and the pay what you want.
Obviously, a simple preview PDF and cover download, then buying the package of all the digital files would not be much of a scene. And this can be done with all the books individually in that series or collection.
For the entire collection, maybe you give away the first book in full as PDF, plus samples in PDF format of the other books in that series – cover, TOC, first chapter. Then they PWYW offer has all digital versions of all books, and their covers, and any additional items, such as book trailers.
The plan becomes:
0) Build your book with all versions with Calibre keeping track of everything.
1) Post your book to Kindle, iTunes, Nook, Kobo.
2) (optional, but recommended) Post to Hummingbird DM, e-Sentral, Espresso Book Network, plus your own site. Add any other distributors here, depending on your book-version.
3) Repeat for all books in that collection. Go through the usual pricing strategies of pre-launch, low price, higher price, next book for all of them.
4) Launch the bundle this way as well.
5) Then launch the book bundle on BitTorrent with all the extra’s.
Note: if your own site is integrated with Gumroad or Payhip, you can offer PWYW all along. Sending emails to subscribers about every book you publish there would be a good marketing scene. Also, making a podcast of the description (which can become a short book trailer and embedded) would reach people through that additional media.
In short, you start to wean yourself off Amazon, and your customers as well. Then you are using Amazon for what they are good for – paying lead generators.
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Do let me know how this works for you, or what you think about it. Leave a comment below the show notes or email me. Obviously, I haven’t covered all possible angles to this. I simply wanted to get this data out to you fastest.
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.
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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.
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.
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 3rd 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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Would you like related books in this series?
Free ebooks (as well as links to paid versions) available in the no-charge membership.
Once he had his bestselling book (and made as much as $61K per month off of it and a few others) he went on to writing books on habits in general rather than doubling down on his cornerstone work.
In his blog posts, you see that he complains how the book isn't well written, he needs to do a revision, he was shredded in the reviews, etc.
Practically, no. These are just excuses for lack of foresight (which we are fixing here by studying his back trail.)
The reviews are fine. He's got much better than average. You do want some pissy reviews, as that means it's a real book. Errors in the book are just an opportunity.
The main lesson from this is to trademark your hook right off. What actually happened is that a dozen or so other authors now have "habit stacking" in the front of their book title, as it's become a generic term.
(Note: a search on the U.S. Trademark office shows that the current publisher of Scott's original Habit Stacking book [Oldtown Publishing LLC] did trademark "Habit Stacking" - on Nov 24, 2014. The horse was well out of the barn by then. And I don't see that there was some effort to have those existing books by that name gotten into line - I do see nearly a half-dozen published in 2015 with that in the title on the first page of search results from Amazon. What good is a trademark if you won't enforce it?)
If you search on Google for that term just prior to his book being published (Sep 5, 2012) you'll find that the only mention of it is in a blog post that mentions "Stacking Habits". Nothing on Amazon is returned by Google prior to this book.
His hook was that term - and he didn't trademark it right off. That would have kept the competition at bay by setting up a simple daily Google automated search to bring any of these to him - then a notice to Amazon that they were infringing on his rights would take down their book. Simple.
Once that book took off, he should have dropped any other project and immediately gotten out several small books on related areas, similar to "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series. ("Habit Stacking for Runners" "Habit Stacking for Writers" "Habit Stacking for Husbands" "Habit Stacking for Children") See how this could have taken off? All of these were areas Scott was familiar with and could have written short books about.
(Note: the cheap way to claim a copyright is simply put a small "TM" as
superscript in the title, and then also note it under your copyright
notice on your title page. Lawyers also have other tips - and I'm not one. Consult a professional. This blog is about marketing strategy.)
So, these steps:
1. Trademark your hook when you publish, (research it first, though) and file when you need to. Oh - and go get that domain name so others can't. Even if it just points to another site of yours. (Like habitstacking.com now points to Scott's orignal book, but was only registered Feb 2, 2014. In this case, better late than never. But... habitstacking.org and lots of others are still available.)
Sidebar: While habitstacking.com points to his book, it would be just as simple to set up a landing page which would link to all the Amazon properties, and could also sell bundles and collections based on the book right there. You can't get the sale you don't ask for - or offer.
As well, If you look up "Duct Tape Marketing" by John Jantsch, you'll see another approach, which is to set up other services based on this book. More services would mean more income.
3. Come out with sequels quickly. As he knew about errors in his book, he would then come out with "Habit Stacking(TM) 2.0" and leave the original up there. Alert everyone on his site (and also update the Amazon description) that they need to get the updated version - "...while the original and now classic 'Habit Stacking' is perfectly valid, further research has found additional studies confirming it's effectiveness - and also another 54 simple habits you can stack additionally. So get 'Habit Stacking 2.0' today!" (And very definitely, do a quick update and put it into the front of the book so that link shows up on the "Look Inside.")
Since he's working in this industry writing more books, each one would be part of the "Habit Stacking" series and so be recommended by Amazon as well.
4. I've covered this elsewhere in this blog, but it bears repeating: publish your book everywhere else as well. It only takes maybe a half-hour if you already have the accounts set up. And may bring you another quarter of what you're already making in income. Bestsellers usually do well on all platforms, from my experience.
5. Publish in all other possible formats.(Which Scott eventually did.)
6. Set up a landing page on your site to promote the book, and use something like Ganxy to enable you to sell bundles of material along with the book. Like audio chapters (which promote the Audible version) and even custom-made dust-cover hardbacks which they can buy from Lulu.
7. Another smart move would be to claim the brand on the key social media. A search of knowem.com shows only Blogger and Myspace have been taken - out of the top 25, including Facebook. (Both "stevescott" and "sjscott" are all mostly taken.) You can do this yourself in an afternoon, or have Knowem do it for you. That Facebook scene is wide open for someone else to grab it, trademark or not... (And if you do it yourself, you won't have to pay a lawyer to do wrestle it back for you later.)
Then keep these updated as much as possible with IFTTT to automate your status updates on social platforms.
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OK? Makes sense?
I'm deep in the middle of my marketing research for my next 50 books, publishing one a week for a year. But my muse kept shouting this in my ear (among other things) and so I had to blog this and get it out to you.
Sorry no podcast on this one. I don't have the couple of hours it would take to record and edit it into shape.
When I last left you, I was involved in an over-excited discovery about how to create an online empire from a single year's worth of concentrated effort.
Then I kept going for three more days, sorting out all the questions I had.
These were all laid out as blog posts - and then I realized they were too wonky to podcast (would make a poor listen) and also, I resolved my own plan even more tightly as I went. So I pulled them together (along with the last post) to make a single PDF. This is available below for download as a free gift for you.
Today, I found "The Story Grid" which is a method to improve my non-fiction writing. I suppose that I'll never stop studying this area. (See my Flipboard magazine to keep up with what I find daily.)
Because I am going to be producing 50 books over the next year, one per week. (Wish me luck.) And that will include 10 collections of 5, 5 collections of 10, and an online course which anyone can sign up for - which sells all these books. Count those up and you'll get 65 books. Doesn't include peripherals like podcasts.
This is all a plan to promote livesensical.com - so people start learning to live and act better, and improve their lives meanwhile.
I'll be podcasting these books as I go, so that should keep you amused. Sign up there (or above, right) and I'll let you know when they're ready. (You get free access to my library when you do.)
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How to Sum Up Steve Scott's Success
My actions resulted in these:
I figured out how to get more done faster, resulting in 76 books in a single year.
I worked out how to earn more income from books by getting out of Amazon's walled garden.
I did a complete statistical analysis of Scott's finances – charts and everything.
And then a few dozen pages of text which really got into how this could be done and how it would wreck your life without the many vacations Scott took (and other distractions he felt were necessary.)
The final point is working out a realistic approach and backing off the concrete schedule in favor of giving the best value to your readers and list.
The two conflicting ideals in this were my earlier tests of simply pushing PD and PLR books up to everywhere I could. The odd success of these tended to reward that behavior, instead of the ideal of building an audience and then finding what that audience really needed and wanted in books and study material.
Scott started out from Affiliate Marketing and carried more than a few of these bad habits over into his book writing and publishing. I pointed out some of the errors with this review, which he mostly covered in his blog post comments – as I finally got to them.
By the end of this basically 26 months of publishing, he stepped back and started becoming a real author with longer, quality books. Of course by now, he could afford to. Owed mainly to Matt Stone of Archangel Ink, plus his own efforts in getting foreign translations, he now had doubled his properties from the 21 Kindle books he did complete, and has stabilized out at about $31K per month.
He could raise that by another third if he would just start publishing outside of Amazon as well, and get off their merry-go-round of declining author royalties. (KDP Select, and their Unlimited slow-motion train wreck.) As well, his audiobooks are all seem locked into ACX/Audible, so he's not able to get them published anywhere else.
My interest in this is working out how to leverage Amazon.
My resources are all the PD books I've already published, even if not all on Amazon.
The approach I would use is in creating special reports which align this to my specific clients, which would be business people in search of motivational and inspirational materials. These special reports all link to the Amazon version of the book (except for those published on other platforms, which link to that book's landing page.)
Then I start to promote these books within the Amazon forest to encourage cross-sells.
Otherwise, I start up promotions via LinkedIn, Slideshare, YouTube, and my own podcast(s) to drive traffic to Amazon and so increase their recommending my books.
The bottom-line idea is to, again, use ebooks as emissaries. The main object is to get list subscribers so that I can enroll them in a membership and give them more of what they want. Part of what will be required of them is to “juice” Amazon for the new book releases so that these books then become “overnight” bestsellers.
Those books then raise the sales of all books I have there, and income is leveraged remarkably.
Now, as I start this, my list is puny – and I haven't been maintaining it.
So the first actions are then to create (even before the first ebook is released) a useful standalone report they can use to improve their lives with. That link takes them to a landing page on my site where I track what they do – and I can A/B test.
I'll also send out a broadcast to all my list members, letting them know what's up and what's coming.
Once they are in the membership, the dance continues as I give them more material and see what's interesting for them. Also, I then keep checking what they click on and give them more of that type of thing. Free ecourses are followed by paid full courses. Eventually, I also have a paid membership where I can pay closer attention to what they want and get some really valuable feedback – so I can again find and deliver the material they want.
Overall lessons learned
When you can afford it (once you are making more than you need to live on) then invest most or all the excess into building a virtual team to help you with your workload.
Always diversify as soon as possible. Of course, this is publishing everywhere at all times, but also into different formats and all possible distribution points.
Leverage every product through re-purposing – and getting these all to either give you subscribers or income or both.
Keep learning as you go – and this is by keeping your humility higher than your pride. Be transparent.
I'm going to keep this short – as we both have a lot to get back to.
My whole study is linked below as a PDF and also included as an enclosure for the podcast.
Do leave a comment on my blog or a rating on iTunes.
I also answer all my email personally, so feel free to sign up.
Oh – that includes going to livesensical.com and joining the membership there to get access to my complimentary library of goodies waiting for you there. (I'll be posting these new ebooks there and including special bundles of extras left on the "cutting room floor" as each book is created.)
So: get this download, sign up for my free library access, and have fun with all this.
Hope to see you all soon with this next installment.
