Selling Your Books Online

How to Publish Public Domain Books and Profit Nearly Forever – Part 3 By now, as you’ve followed my articles, blogs, books, and podcasts, you’ve seen a remarkable evolution in public domain publishing. All of this was built on the point that you have to add value to public domain works to profit from them. [...]

Hello again,I actually had a rant ready to spring on you, but decided against it. This is the holidays after all. And it goes against my grain to simply diss someone for acting stupid and selfishly.So, we’ll leave that for another day.I did find a great nugget for you. Unfortunately, I don’t have a transcript.But you’ll want to hear this anyway. Joe Pilizzi of Content Marketing Institute was on Chris Ducker’s show at Youpreneur.fm. They are discussing his new book and lay out the 6 steps all the multi-million-dollar companies have been using to achieve their success.Because if you want to be successful, you need to find what the successful people are doing.That’s why I spent a solid week analyzing Steve Scott’s six-figure success and several days working on Mark Dawson and the half-million he’s pulling in – both are doing nothing but books, building on the sands of Amazon. Well, not entirely – and Joe’s 6 steps tell more about how these authors made their success. They both used the same 6 steps, although they actually did go through them in less than a year before they were able to branch out into other things.I’m getting ahead of myself here.Have a listen, and I’ll meet you on the other side…– – – –Always like listening to Joe. He comes highly recommended from Bruce Clark, so I try to catch Joe’s weekly “This Old Marketing” podcast when I can. Always interesting.Our approach is to apply content marketing to book publishing – which is the business we are in, after all.What’s the takeaway from this?0. Follow your bliss and get into a very narrow niche with fits with your particular expertise. Double-down, as Scott found.1. Get your list started today. Now is the second best time to start, best would have been 6 months ago.2. Get your own site, whether it’s blog or podcast or whatever. Have a place you can build on which isn’t someone else’s. You have to be prepared for changes like Facebook has made, or Amazon nuking all your books (I just read about it again today.)3. Get regular content out consistently and have your list popularize it on Amazon. Yes, that can be your own books, which is what both Scott and Dawson did.4. Keep doing this consistently. Keep showing up consistently.5. Then monetize by diversifying. Dawson started his FB ads course. Scott started a podcast and focused more on his site.It’s just that simple. Six steps.And that’s how we’ll leave it with you.Here’s wishing you a great Thanksgiving and holiday season.Here some links:I had to cut out the Youpreneur host’s interruptions from the audio you heard, but the whole podcast is at Episode 138 (http://www.chrisducker.com/podcast/content-marketing-entrepreneurs-joe-pulizzi/)Content Marketing Institute with “This Old Marketing” podcast. http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/pnr-with-this-old-marketing-podcast/Content Inc. – Joe Pulizzi’s new book.Steve Scott’s analysis of his last book launch. http://www.authority.pub/podcast/book-launch-strategy/Mark Dawson’s Self Publishing Formula. http://www.selfpublishingformula.com/Originally published on http://livesensical.com/podcast/selling-books-online/6-simple-steps-guarantee-publishing-success/

If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file here I can hear my Art Teachers "tut-tutting" in my head now. They were all very good at being constructive in their criticism. You knew you hit the high-level of their approval when they asked if they could keep your class assignment. (Rare.) Otherwise, it was either technical points or some comment along the line of "Nicely Done!" And when most students around you were getting that same comment and no one got below a "C" if they turned in the homework at all - you kinda noticed that anything except an "A" was merely an "attaboy" Once you start working for yourself, and publishing just exactly what you want, the world changes. Then you start hearing those voices again. Until you finally shut them up with something so excellent, so beyond comparison - you know that criticism can't touch you. Art books give you that problem, and those voices in your head. You can't do real justice to these books in trying to get them re-published. Well, you could, but you'll never get a decent return for the extreme amount of time you'd have to invest. Time vs. Money - the perpetual prize-fight.Publishing (especially public domain re-publishing) always has that fight: Time vs. Money. A very prolific, high-speed author can crank out maybe 6 books a year. Some more, most less. If they invest all their time writing, they do very little marketing. And that is why they value a traditional contract with one of the Big 5 publishing companies - so someone else can take that work off their hands. (Dream on - it's a percentage of 1 percent of all authors who get these - and who can count on having such a contract renewed.) I know of some authors who write a single book and then do nothing but market that book for the following two years. Usually non-fiction, their income comes more from coaching and consulting, rather than writing. (Look up John Jantsch and his "Duct-Tape Marketing") This case study may seem out of sequence, but has been being worked on for some time, so the numbering itself is right. (See my last post on handling the "Evil of Distraction" for why it's only coming out now.) Art books and their curse I had these two books which couldn't be published without a lot more work. I finally got one of them finished today, and have another nearly complete - just some niggly, nit-picky editing to finish. In both cases, the problem has been images. They are both illustrated within an inch of their book-lives. But the images don't just down-size to epubs and then re-upsize when you want them to.  You have to start with good images to begin with - full-size images which make an ebook a huge size.  Unless you are OCRing a print book, you won't have that quality of image (and usually, not even then.) Ebooks (epubs, mobi's, even some PDF's) don't rise to that level of quality. Having a 10MB file on your ereader will often make them choke. The current crop of smartphones have the chips and memories to deal with them - just in time. The tradition is to make these ebooks small and easy-to-download. That has traditionally meant: text only. Since I'm often trying to work backwards from an existing epub, this gives quality issues on all those originally wonderful diagrams and photos. (So maybe the curse of artbooks is mostly a public domain problem? No. Why do you think art books have always been high-priced? The cost of printing in any decent quality.) Neither of the books I've been working on will be distributed as print books through the major distributors - because  I simply don't have the time to invest in re-creating the wonderful line drawings by carefully doing scans and editing on every photo and diagram in the book. So the images rely on someone else having done that in their epub file - which is the source for the print versions. (You can hear that "tut-tut" starting now...) The solution to quality problems.Lulu gave this to me recently. They have a very nice (if m

If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file hereThe guide to reverse book marketing exists.I found this great talk between Robert Bruce and Brian Clark which has a reverse take on how authors should start out. Of course, there's no transcript, only a podcasted MP3. And we don't know the original date of this, other than a single comment which dates this as before July 2, 2013. What this podcast is about is answering submitted questions. One question was simply along the lines of "if you were to start a book today with no audience, how would you start out?" Clark's interesting response (about 19:20): "I would create in essence a video-book trailer. I'd write a script about the most fascinating elements in that book - if it's fiction, it would be the story, if it were a Malcolm-Gladwell-type book, it would be about the most fascinating elements I could display. I would make that [video]. "I'd promote it to try to get it to go viral to a certain degree. I would have an opt-in that says, 'Get the next installment in this video series' - I wouldn't even mention the book. "It wouldn't be a typical trailer as the trailer sells the book. It would be an extended video serial, where there would be installments where people would want to see the next of. It's an art form in itself. Maybe have 5 episodes and then sell the book. "The other strategy is to do the hard work of finding [and curating other's] great videos with emotional appeal... "One way or another you've got to get them to opt-in and follow you, whether your making these videos or curating the videos that tell a story about the ultimate book you're going to sell. "You've got to get an audience. They've got to look forward to hearing from you each time. When you do announce that book, if you do it correctly, it's a no-brainer - they're buying it. "...It's all wide open. Just don't do what everyone else is doing - do something fantastic, and get people to sign up to get the next fantastic thing. That's content marketing - right there. ...If you do that, you're just getting started with the book. The book sales are a foundation for an entire brand. Of course, it depends on what the topic is - whether it's fiction or non-fiction. I always think very big from the beginning, and if all you end up doing is selling the book - hey, 'mission accomplished' - that was your goal. But if you do it the right way, you'll often find there are boundless other opportunities from what you've done - because you were doing something incredibly remarkable while building a direct audience."This tosses out ALL conventional wisdomYou can see that this is logical and a very lean, kickstarter approach to bootstrapping your scene together. Brian Clark built Copyblogger into a multi-million-dollar business and brand with just that same audience-first approach. Of course, our problem is that this means you digress from your writing in order to script, edit, and polish a video series. This also changes your job-description into something greater - an authorpreneur. The book is no longer anything except a container for ideas that need to be said, need to be given voice, that need to see the light of day (and quit shouting in your head so much...) But the formats the book comes out in is no longer limited to print, or even an ebook. It now spreads to every format you can find and publish into. This is again, that multiple-eyeballs theorem: Write once - publish as many ways, to as many formats, through as many distribution points as possible. You aren't dependent on traditional publishing to get your selling job done. (They've always required the author to do their marketing, anyway - which just cuts into your writing/production time.) As an authorpreneur, you're no longer limiting yourself to someone else's suit-tailor and their ideas of style and fit. You cut your own suit from your own whole cloth and it can be Elvis Presley wild, or perhaps something that looks like a Hobbit

If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file here Brian Clark's two-year old podcast (see last post) set a high bar. But it makes more sense than all the advice I've run across so far - from anyone, anywhere. Let's recap:You take the most fascinating points of the story you're writing.You create a series of video's which build excitement and invite them on their buyer's journey.The closing video is the sale Videos are nothing new. I watched them on Mike Dillard's corny "bootcamp" videos, which were opt-in. These will need a restudy. They were before he bought into Walker's Launch Formula, where he brought in the "sideways sales letter." They both have one flaw: they use the sales letter format. Good old Internet Marketing crap we all have learned to hate. The testimonials, the odd "exact" amounts, the claims that you can make all sorts of insane income from what they are offering. What's missing is the buyer's journey. These guys haven't studied the 1920's classics of marketing like Clark did. They've instead swallowed the dope which has run through IM for so many years. Not too oddly, I've been planning to dissect Dillard's videos for years, just needed the time and reason to do so. A series of fascinations in video format. That's what we are looking for. Copyblogger has some podcasts on fascinations - Sonia Simone, I think. So that's on the list to study. Also, it's collecting up and extracting the trailers for movies. Back to all those DVD's I've collected. Of course, I'm telling a non-fiction story - so that will be examining and extracting the fascinations which my material covers. List them out, put them in a sensible order. I have my work cut out for me. What about the membership researchThis actually forwards it. Sure, I have a lot of material to extract and put into the free version. The paid membership (and courses) will wait until I build the audience. Extracting that material and copying it over will be a way to review all those posts and ebooks. As I do these, I'll also be looking to how I can utilize these - and more importantly, the value they can give. These core desires (see Breakthrough Advertising) are what have to be channeled into this material. The research will be how these benefits integrate into the unique solution I'm offering. When the video's are ready, most of the membership will as well. So the opt-in will give them a first look at the membership and my first feedback loop. From there, I'll be able to audience-build and find what they actually want. I need this, as the book isn't written. Practically, it will be that book and several series - all published with the feedback of this new audience. After those books, there will be courses to train on what those series provide. The point is to give these people a way to evaluate their lives and improve them as much as they want. Because after all these decades of research, I have tons of value to give away. A membership is the best way to contain all this value and offer it up. My to-do list:Dig out my copies of Dillard's bootcamp. Study.Dig out the sideways sales letter Jeff Walker himself used for his package. Study.Scrape out the better movie trailers from my DVD collection. Study.Start extracting all my materials for transfer. Adjust these as I enter them in.Review which ebooks should be part of the free membership - and which books should be offered as a low-priced print edition.Script based on the fascinations I've found during all this.Assemble the videos.Perfect the opt-in landing page.Do some serious promotion using IFTTT and Synnd campaigns on social signals. - - - - Make sure you're opted-in so you don't miss any white-knuckled adventures and cliff-hanger endings! See you next time. (photo: Håkan Dahlström) Related articlesWhy It's Great to Be An Indie Publisher Now - Profit ForeverIs there any Real Money in public domain (self-)publishing?The Bottom Line to Mike Dillard's Success with Evolution Group and

If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file here In the days before lighthouses, bonfires would be lit on the heights near a port to guide merchant ships safely to the harbor. If you stood on a high cliff with a flame in your hand, you couldn't be seen - and ships would stay away from your port, no matter how great it was built. Our job became building a series of bonfires instead of single series Of course, we started out this case study with the greatest intentions: This series was a personal, bliss-evoking set of books which forwards a later income production model.I have always been fascinated with this subject, as it's personally rewarding.There are a great series of books in this area which are still popular, yet are poorly marketed. This meant it made sense to do this - that it was emotionally and rationally the best thing to do. I was sold - and I acted. On the face of it, we were faced with two obstacles: The spreadsheet developed into a very long sequence of actions. The total list of books kept growing and is now a total of fourteen - mission creep is always a factor, as there are just so many great books out there which cry out for decent marketing. So those two factors might have been the final straw. Each could have been overcome independently or together (I've done bigger batches than this, but never with the intention of fully marketing them) - but that wasn't it. We are again stopping just short of fully marketing per the "Multiple Eyeballs" theorem - because I've found something which is so vital, it makes everything else seem irrelevant. I've found a way to beat back the darkness by building bonfires rather than starting up a handful of matches. The Shadow over Self-PublishingIt's a shadow that has grown longer as ebooks became more popular, and as the idea of a digital "book" became less defined as we ported it to more and more platforms and formats. That shadow is actually over the whole of the book publishing industry, and is forcing them to evolve rapidly. For the traditional publisher, my news sources tell me that this is really hitting them in the pocketbook, but they have been shifting their losses to the individual author who has gotten hurt most. Authors, however, are evolving as well. Smart ones are only giving up their print rights to the publishers - and for shorter time periods. They are keeping the ebook rights. Authors are also realizing that merchandising and peripheral products can be more valuable than a book in print or any single media. You've seen hints of this where I say that your book-as-a-content-envelope can be ported to audio, video, PDF, and various combinations of digital files in a bundle. You can sell print versions in hardback or paperback. You can create CD's or DVD's with your audio, video, or combinations of the two. Even add in other digital material in those discs. There are at least three major Print-on-Demand publishing firms out there which can get your book distributed internationally for no additional cost to you beyond buying a proof copy. Your CD or DVD can be POD as well, through Kunaki. Meanwhile, you can sell these books directly from your own site and keep 90% of the royalties or more - while not having to keep up the backend. Even embed Kunaki's sales link on your site and have them ship directly to that customer. As a writer, you are freed to do only the amount of marketing you want to - and have all the backend sales, production, and delivery done on your behalf for between five and ten percent of your self-determined price. (And many of these offer a pay-what-you-want choice - so the client can give you a tip...) The Audience Shadow EmergesI started out with the very old-school approach that quality books, with good covers and descriptions sold the books. And that worked out to be true. I got financial freedom by jumping on the public domain bandwagon (a bit late, it's true) but also unseated several others who went before me

If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file here And this happens more than I care to admit. I was wrong, wrong, wrong. Again, it's conventional wisdom that I swallowed years ago and has been an unshakeable, concrete, locked-down, Gospel truth in book publishing. And it was wrong, wrong, wrong. What was that wrong datum?You write the book from your inspiration, edit an hone it, get a fantastic cover done up, write and hone a fascinating description - and then either get a publisher to print it and distribute it, or self-publish and self-distribute it. And hope for the best. Meanwhile, then just get back to your writing until you have the next 3-5 books in that series ready - and run them through. Once you have a series of books on sale (the first one perennially at .99 or free) then they all start taking off. (Then you start the next series.) What is the correct datum?While you're researching your bliss to see how you can help people improve their lives with the value you know you can provide, you build your audience and get their input on what should be in that book. You write some of it and get a few trusted individuals to weigh in on it. Then you correct that section or part, get their and other's feedback, correct it, rinse, repeat. Then you write the next chapter, section or part and do that whole sequence again. Finally, you self-publish it and self-distribute it - announcing pre-release and low first week pricing, etc. to that audience.Then you start the next book and run it through as above. What's the difference?The second wins because you are asking the audience about their concerns and they are helping you write the book. They are vested in that book and every book after that point. And every following book continues to build your audience.The first idea loses, because you remain anonymous to your audience and have to hope you got it right as far as what they want. Do you get this?I hope so. You build your audience first and get them into a membership (doesn't have to be paid.) This allows you to interact with them and get them to help you write that book, and the next, and the next, and so on. That first, wrong approach is built on statistics. Those statistics are built on the 97/3 rule - which states most people (97%) would rather lemming their way through life instead of finding what really works. 3% will question everything that comes across their plate until they find the underlying system which makes the whole scene make sense. Then they act on what they find. That workable system they just found might be such a paradigm shift that they then change huge parts of their lives - or, if they've been frugal and lean, they've been putting the smaller changes in place as they find them and it won't be such a major shift. What I'm saying here......is that the entire publishing world-view is upside down. Books are not print-only, and they aren't print-plus-ebook, plus-maybe-audiobook. Books are simply containers for a set of ideas. Those ideas might be best communicated as movies (some books wind up on the big screen or straight to DVD.) Some books are best verbally produced and wind up podcast. Some books are sung in multiple tracks on a Long-Play album, or as short singles. Some books are never more than presentations and live speeches. Many books can and should be all of the above. But all books start out with an audience. In fact, the audience-experience inspires the books, nurtures the book, and finally brings the book to life. In some instances, such as religious or inspirational/philosophical texts - people actually live the book. And we all use stories to understand our lives, by finding other's stories and comparing our own life story through theirs. That is how marketing works, and actually is the only effective way to market that doesn't leave money on the table (and piss off about 80-90 percent of everyone who didn't buy.) Your book is a performance. It's a story that people s

If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file here Thought I could get away from this for awhile while I move to Rainmaker, but moving makes dust - and dust makes you sneeze. Here's some sneezes I've been supressing: Why digital sharecropping is dying and will take you with it. Got a comment on one of my other blogs about how he was going along publishing public domain books on Google Play and suddenly got kicked off. So that income line is permanently down for him, from what I gather. I imagine that his problem is in not having already built his audience. You build your audience, find out what they are interested in and then produce the books in the format they want. Along the way, you also publish the distributors like Google Play, Amason, iTunes, etc. This is a lesson I'm only just learning - probably just in time. An old (March 18, 2013) podcast from Entreproducer with Eric Reis pointed out that many times, when you are trying to fit into Amazon's mold, you're actually throwing away income. Think about it - where does Amazon want you to price your book? $2.99 to $9.99. That gets you into their Kindle program, which is a walled garden. Reis sold his as a PDF with lifetime updates, for around $20 - and is still making income off it (at the time of this recording.) He didn't like Amazon because they were forcing him to put his book up against similar titles priced at $4.99. In short, Amazon is trying to make a commodity out of your books. The original ones. (Amazon's weird policies on public domain books is odd, in that they are already commodities and given away for free on the Internet elsewhere. You'd think they'd want to encourage people to add value and submit truly higher-quality versions and then let the market decide. Control freaks? Possibly.) The bottom line is that like most of the "free" blogging sites, they are just using you as a sharecropper while they own the field you farm. At any time, they can capriciously kick you off and quit paying you anything. (And they remind you of this every single time you submit a public domain book - one of the reasons I haven't published to them since.) For those of you who have never farmed: Sharecropping is doing the work and getting a small split of the profit. The land owner pays for the seed and fertilizer. If you also live on the property, that rental is usually taken out of your profit. In the post-Civil-War South, this was a solution that turned out to be just above slavery, since it still kept you on the plantation and too broke to save up and own your own place. It was security, and a living - after a fashion... Wordpress, Tumblr, Weebly - all these tend to be tenant farmers for sharecroppers, as they need your content, but they don't need you. (In fact, several of my Wordpress blogs became orphans because they suspended my account, but not the blog - hint: set up several accounts under different emails and cross-connect the authors to the  blogs.) What they constantly push at you is to pay them monthly for the privilege of publishing there - and over-charge you for getting that domain you want (which they own, not you). Once a tenant, always a tenant. Wordpress has been particularly bad about shutting you down when you put affiliate links into your content. But they run their own ads on the site. Blogger is at the other end of the scale, since you have to enable Adsense ads to run and Blogger doesn't care what you link to. And they encourage you to get your own domain name while they host your blog for you. That's why I've been using them, until just recently... You want to have someone else host your blog and take care of the backend, while you then build your audience. Blogger does this pretty well, but it's quite limited to what it can do. If you integrate Gumroad, you can get membership options and email capture while you sell your own digital products that they deliver for you. And if you're just starting out, that's probably the best

If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file here I've been quiet too long. And I apologize. It's not that I don't have stuff for you - I do. About 5 podcasts which have to be recorded and posted so you can be alerted by email or RSS feed/podcatcher/iTunes, etc. (You are subscribed, aren't you? Good.) Because I do this all for you. What's happened that I don't want you to fall into.I went back to my hard-drives and pulled every backup I had. Of course, because I didn't always have this habit, they only went back to 2005. I look around old files and found that I'd been blogging since at least 2003, but they were on platforms which have since gone extinct. Anyway, this gave me nearly 5,000 (yes, five thousand) blog posts to sort through. Taking out obvious duplicates narrowed it down to under 4,000. When I simply trashed or turned to draft anything you wouldn't be interested in (like the details of getting a refund from a scammer company that finally went under last year) - this pulled it down below 3,000. Finally, I had to go through everything which wasn't assigned a category and put these where they belonged. Moving back to Wordpress off BloggerI've always liked Wordpress, but had a love/hate relationship with the free blog-hosting sites that used it. All free blog hosting sites have trouble with spammers. Some have taken fairly draconian (harsh) measures to protect their servers and financial backend. Wordpress.com was one of these. I've had more blogs and profiles turned off on that site than I can easily count. They simply won't tolerate obvioius affiliate links. And will ban you at the drop of a hat. (While meanwhile labeling you a spammer - hope you're not using your real name...) Since I need to make an online living by offering products (my books) - I had to get onto a platform that would not just tolerate this, but encourage it. So I went to Blogger. And I was happy, overall. I knew it was more limited than Wordpress, but the minimalist simplicity of it didn't keep you from feeding your muse and working to get paid for it. Blogger has one major drawback - it doesn't have categories, so exporting and then re-importing to a Wordpress platform leaves you with a huge stack of stuff which is "uncategorized." Then the fun begins. (I did see, after a couple of days at this, that it's possible to turn tags ["labels" on Blogger] into categories. And then within Wordpress, to move from one category to another, or combine them.) Since "uncategorized" is a default on Wordpress, I had to move all these over into a new temp category, sort them, to where they needed to go, and then delete that temp one. It took days, close to a week of my part-time schedule working at this (the farm chores and other duties still take their fair share.) And Just When I Thought I Was Done......I found out how deep this rabbit hole goes. Rainmaker is an amazing platform. Amazing. As I don't use that word often, it means a lot. I was down to about 1200 posts (with at least that many as draft or trash to revive as needed.) Unfortunately, it isn't really like Blogger or Wordpress, where you can pick out a nice template and just start in. It's way more powerful with built-in memberships, podcasting networks, online courses, and of course - the ability to directly sell digital products. I'm getting this podcast out to you on the old system to let you know what's coming up. Because I've got a lot of work to do - still - just to help you get the data you want the way you want it. The problem is that it's going to take some time before I can get a nice base set up and turn on stuff bit-by-bit. There's no reason to have to have everything ready at once, but let me lay out what looks to be possible at this point. The Grand Design Revealed...drumroll, please. You should really go over to livesensical.com to sign up. That's my new site. Nice video there that starts to explain it. This site will really be in four parts, which is how I've or

If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file here You are who I do all this work for.  Really. So this blog post and podcast is a thank you note. What did you do to deserve this?It all started long ago - or maybe a few minutes for some of you. You decided to click on a link with led you here, or bought one of my books, or otherwise set yourself up to hear from me. My story started over 50 years ago, when I started wanting to figure things out around me. Those two paths converged at some point. And I've been working to deserve you ever since. OK, let's break that down a bit further. There's this thing called a Golden Rule. You know: "treat others like you'd like to be treated." All those variations. Every religion and philosophy mentions that as a truth somewhere in it's texts or scriptures. The funny thing is that this works as "As you give, so you get." or as Napoleon Hill had it: "You can't get without giving." My bottom line is that to the degree I'd like to be successful, rich, and all that - I have to help you achieve these too. What does all that have to do with book publishing?Good question - I'm getting there. (Sometimes I can get long-winded.) You know, if you've looked up my back trail, that I've been talking to you about how to make a success of it with book publishing. Nice passive income, financial freedom, take the day off to go fishing and still earn income while you've sat in the shade all day and drank your tea (or equivalent beverage.) That type of lifestyle. Great, huh? I did it with an assortment of books, but saw that if I wanted to take it to the next level, I was going to have to ask for your help. So, thanks. You're here, you're listening to this, you're aboard. Where are we going, then?Boy, are you right on the money with your questions today... If you want to make a really decent income (like into the "getting rich" category) you have to open up and help others get rich on their own. Looking around found that the best tool to do this was to form a membership where you could help people more directly than just anonymously selling them a book.  I mean to really help them. Actually, that research found the model for all online passive income. It's true for spammers, it's true for their brothers, the Internet Marketers. It's even true for pure rip-off schemes like the Government and their cronies. Advertisers use this plan, as does Facebook and any social media. Even our book distributors use this. They are all memberships after a fashion. Anyone who gets your email and sends you stuff uses this. My approach is to find out why this works and tell everyone I can how to do this for themselves. Of course, what I researched before this tells a great deal about how the universe works beyond this - and the tools which help you earn income online are the same which help you improve your health, lose weight, enjoy your life every day, live with no cares and a calm, cheerful expectancy that everything you want to be and have is coming your way. That's a bit thick, you might be saying.And you're right. Let's just stick to book publishing. This new site I'm building is taking a bit of time. And while I have some other blog posts describing what I'm going through - this one is a filler for now just to keep you posted in general. That's because the sawdust is still flying and you can still hear the distant noise of hammering and screwguns as all that construction happens. We're standing over here to avoid all the trucks delivering material and the concrete being poured. Go visit livesensical.com and you'll get a preview. No big deal. Your choice. What I'm still going to give you - no strings attached.Yes, we were right in the middle of a Case Study. And we'll get back to it - promise. That case study led us to the brick-wall-solid fact that an author or publisher of any type needs to build their audience from square one - even before they create their first book. And that's why I had

If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file here With all the false "conventional wisdom" out there, it's surprising that you'd be reading something like this. I mean, all that stuff is supposed to work, isn't it? Well, not too surprising, since most self-publishing authors still can't quit their day job - because their books simply don't sell. And "most" is about 97% or so. So the smart ones like you are still looking. So - Welcome. There's a reason some authors sell and some don't - it's audience. Not "platform" - Audience. Your actual audience will buy your current books, your earlier books, and tell you want they want you to write next - setting that up for an "instant bestseller." Audiences buy things. Platforms just sit there. The term "platform" has been used to include all the things you do to market you book which take you away from anything that actually gets the earlier ones sold and the next ones written. It comes from traditional publishers, who want to make you feel good about all those things you do which are supposedly marketing, but are mostly time-wasters.  Big numbers of Twitter Followers and Facebook Friends doesn't equate to sold books. Tweeting or liking someone's cat pictures doesn't get your books promoted. Real promotion means building your audience. Anything that doesn't do that isn't worth your time. Might as well go off and perfect your horseshoe game. After the decade of study I've done to narrow down and isolate the basics which actually do help you sell your books online - this is the bottom line. Everyone talked about it, or around it, but no one would say exactly how to get it. Meanwhile, there was a lot of justification for doing all sorts of things which never wound up as sales or building a verifiable audience. I was talking to a couple of self-published authors recently, and they had the same exact problem - no audience and no clue how to get one. But it brought up that they missed the point: Build Your Audience First. This post is how to build a foundation to your continuing online book sales, not just a "platform" where you maybe, might just possibly get someone to think about buying one. How to Get an Audience (not a platform.)The bogus term is to call it a platform - it isn't. Social media isn't something you build on - it's just a time suck. That is, unless you are actually using it to get people to join your audience. Since you already have a book published, we are going to fill in the missing steps: 0. Get an autoresponder.  Do nothing else until you get this done. Don't make my mistake. If you don't have an autoresponder, you aren't building any audience, and your book sales are poor (if not non-existent) without one. Every single multiple-hit author I've researched had one of these. Every one. When others put in the time to set one of these up, their continuing sales took off - not just a spike from a "one-shot wonder". A recommended autoresponder to start with is Mail Chimp as it's free for the first few hundred emails you collect. (There are other autoresponders with free plans as well. Mail Chimp is just really easy to get started.) Go directly to your autoresponder and sign up. Like I said, it's free. And will take you maybe 15 minutes. Do not pass "Go". Do nothing else. Get this done first. (No, it's not particularly logical, but it is the single one thing which separates profitable winners from starve-in-the-garret wannabe's.  Get This Done First before anything else.  I'm not kidding.) 1. Get a domain. This can be anything. Your name is fine, your pen-name is fine, your dog's middle name is fine. Just get something that's fairly easy to spell and remember. Maybe you want to start a publishing company - it just doesn't matter. Pick something. Really. Your blog will get no respect if you've got ".blogger.com" or ".wordpress.com" or ".anyotherbloghost.com" after it. They'll know you're an amateur - and so will the search engines. Ge

If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file hereHow to Self-Publish from India: A Case StudyIt started when this reader from Chennai, India emailed me about one of my books being ripped off. He was just being honest about finding some books being given away for free. So I thanked him and gave him some more. Over a few years, we've been exchanging comments and books, helping each other out as we could. Recently, he told me he wanted to write and publish books - along the line of self-help and personal development.  The trick to this was that he had no computer or home Internet. He was going out to an Internet kiosk So I made him a deal - I'd help set him up and he'd then help some others get set up. The main point is this: If a writer in India with only borrowed Internet access can get himself successfully self-published, then anyone can. I did the usual, which has streamlined even more as time goes on. Here's the short-hand notes on how to get started:  How to Self-Publish in India (For only sweat equity.)Payment: Paypal + PAN card Book creation: LibreOffice + Gimp, Calibre Book publishing and sales: Lulu + Flipkart, Blogger + domain-name + Ganxy (later, + Gumroad), Facebook + Sellfy. Book Promotion: Podcasting = archive.org + iTunes + Stitcher, Social = IFTTT, LinkedIn YouTube. Let's take these apart - Payment:Paypal has become pretty conventional these days. In India, you have to have a PAN card as well, so that they can collect their taxes. That's the way it goes there. Book creation:LibreOffice is accepted and converted everywhere. It's now simplest to upload your native .odt file to Lulu and they'll create the ebook for you. LibreOffice also generates a upload-ready PDF, but you can get Lulu to do this as part of your hardcopy version. Then simply download the epub and PDF versions (as well as selling that PDF version directly on Lulu) - so you can upload these other places. GIMP is used to make your covers, if you don't get these made elsewhere. Calibre is used to store the meta-data (descriptions and tags) as well as keep all your versions of the book in one central location. It will also convert your epub to mobi so Kindle users can upload it. (Most people are now using their smartphones or tablets these days, so will use the epub or PDF file.) Book publishing and Sales:Lulu will publish your needed versions in both ebook and hardcopy versions. Flipkart is for India and the surrounding area. Blogger enables you to get sales directly, when you put a Ganxy script on your site. This also allows you to capture emails, which makes even MailChimp unnecessary to start with. You can email your customers directly. As well, it's possible to make a widget that only does email, and put this anywhere.  You get blogger with a domain-name of it's own in order to get more respect. Blogger doesn't care how much money you make from it and takes care of all the backend support work. Yes, you're limited like anywhere else, but you can concentrate soley on creating more books, not on security updates, plug-in conflicts, etc. Ganxy allows you to import and export email lists (just follow their terms of service closely.) So you don't have to have an email client to start with. Ganxy also sells directly to your other distributors without having a person have to leave your blog.  As you get experienced with this, you can then do the needed homework on Gumroad - which has some great tutorials and short courses you can take. Gumroad has extra features such as memberships and subscriptions so you can get more recurring income by selling courses, etc. Sellfy works with Facebook on a tab - so you can sell all your books in a bookstore setup. You'll need to upload your books to each of these (Ganxy, Gumroad, Sellfy) in order to enable direct sales. Book Promotion:Podcasting is hands down the fastest way for you to get traffic to your blog. Use archive.org for hosting, and generate the RSS feed with

If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file here Spying is probably the oldest profession (well, excepting maybe one other). The most widely reprinted book on warfare (Sun Tzu's Art of War) has a whole chapter on spies and spying. Spying is really just gathering intelligence. That's why embassies are constantly found out and "embarrassed" when it's "discovered" they've been doing this - over and over and over. For governments, it's just part of doing business. For corporations, it's big business, and a big part of their budget. For marketers, it's called "market research" and "demographics". If you are a self-published author (and don't have a huge marketing budget) you can still have spies working for you. Like embassies, you can have emissaries - in every book you publish. The problem for so long has been that books were considered the end product. Once you sold them, you were done. Or so conventional wisdom said. Your books are actually emissaries because they spread the word about you. They can also gather intelligence for you. Any brick-and-mortar shop owner knows that their local repeat traffic comes from word-of-mouth - and this is gotten by providing incredible service to everyone who comes into their store, regardless of whether they buy anything or not. Local shop owners learn all sorts of things from their customers. That fact is lost on the traditional publishers. They have been so long in the business of having books as a final product that they miss the fact which our modern "native commerce" model exposed. Your book is no longer a finite printed work. It's in many formats, delivered through multiple platforms. It can be updated at any time (although print versions are harder). You book is no longer an end point of your production - factually, it's just the beginning. Books now are your emissaries. They tell everyone about what you think, how you act, what you think of them, how you can help them - even how much you respect them (or don't.) Intelligence your distributors don't want you to knowBooks-as-emissaries are also spies. The best ones have embedded links which bring potential buyers back to your site. And those embedded links can tell you more about that customer than they want to tell you. Well, mostly, anyway. Right now, there are no really good tools to find out what your readers want - except what they actually buy. And that is limited, unless they are buying directly from you. When you publish your books via distributors, they pay you royalties - but they don't tell you all the intelligence they are gathering from getting people to buy through them. All of them have various algorithms which give you "also bought" and "related books" to get you to spend more money with them. As you spend, they keep records of everything you bought - just business. Your books are probably on at least a half-dozen distributors now, and each of these have different audiences. Google seems to sell more nerdy books, not surprisingly. Amazon sales are filtered through their algorithms, so they are basically bargain hunters and fans. iTunes has artistic types, but also business people and early adopters. Nook could be described as hard-core anti-Amazon. Kobo is international in scope, so purchases here range across a wide field of cultural differences. From the little data the distributors reveal, the author up to this point could only say - hey, I got more/less book sales this month! Because that's all the data you're given (other than maybe what continent they came from, which is hardly better data. "10 from the U.S., 2 from Italy, and 1 from France - cheers.") If your business was a local book shop, one of your spies would whisper when that person came into your shop: ((Psst - this guy is basically a nerd. He came from Google.)) or: ((Psst - this is a gal looking for a deal, she came from Amazon.)) And you, being a good spy-master, can arrange your shop to offer that new potential customer just wh

If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file hereThe Rainmaker Solution - a BFF which starts as an expensive date.Have you ever been in this situation? Having a significant other who is costing you a mint in maintenance - only to find out they are actually so priceless, that you could never let them go? The biggest problem is that I already know how to publish a book for little or nothing. And here I am with a very powerful tool which is costing me money every month and is just sitting there. I'm frugal by upbringing. If I'm paying for something it should be earning its keep. The easiest thing to do would be to cut my losses and go back to what I already know. But the old saying, "begin with the end in mind" tells me if I'm ever going to turn over this business, it has to be a great success, not just a very profitable hobby. Putting what I already have onto a system would leverage it into something that will take my income into a "comfortably well-off" range. The main problem is that Rainmaker comes off as just too damned complicated. Everything has multiple parts to it. It's incredibly powerful (like I said already) and can do just about everything except brush your teeth for you after it woke you up on time and has your coffee ready. I thought it was because I'm too used to Blogger, and not used enough to Wordpress. In my current model: I simply create a blog post, upload an image, tweak the text, add in the Ganxy script for that product, tweak the meta-data to fit - and then publish. But I can't do memberships. I can't do discounts (much less offer 50% off of everything I sell.) If I want to do discounts, I should put in a Sellfy link - which is essentially uploading a complete new set of ebook files and descriptions, etc. And while I dither, all the link-love I'm accumulating for livesensical.com is just piddling away - while I pay another monthly fee for a site which isn't ready. All that I've been building up for months would be for nothing at this point. Some things you have to see through, no matter what. It's the learning curve which is killing me. Because I needed all this done yesterday. Too many products as a problem.Right now on GooglePlay, I have about 215 books. On Lulu, I have over 400 various versions of books - in different formats. On Amazon, I have about 70 or so. Itunes, Kobo, and Nook are somewhere in between. Out of these, somewhere around 70 books sell regularly, so these are the ones I need to get up and running on my site - selling these directly in order to get higher royalties and also to build an audience. All of these have been extracted from sales data, and are on a spreadsheet. All the old pages have been transferred (uploaded from backups) and very few have to be created - all the data for these is already on Calibre, so that's really just copy/paste. And that's the rub - should I cut/paste to Ganxy to get these books posted on Rainmaker fastest - or figure out how to get it built using Rainmaker itself? Going with what is familiar would be faster - but it would cost me more. In the end, my frugal side won out. I need to make Rainmaker pay for itself - so I invested some more time figuring out how to get things done. Enter: Setup Wizards.Now, if you are happy with Ganxy, this isn't a section that may thrill you. On the other hand, it's how to get your stuff on a site which will enable you to scale your existing content into 7 or 8-digit income - by all reports. Because what we need to be doing is building an audience with the existing content we already have. At least, that's my problem - and has been for years. Getting sales through ebook distributors only disguised the problem by throwing money at me. Rainmaker has simply opened up paid hosting for a tool they are themselves using. And they are useing to make 8-figures currently. Set up wizards - these are for single products and also libraries. We'll do the single products to catch up with the existing (selling) page

If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file here Just an ad lib today. No real transcript this time. Just me talking to you. We've been around the pike and I'd like to hear what you need help with or have questions about. Next will be some very intensive work in Marketing ebooks and books in general, so I wanted to check with you before we moved forward. Visit livesensical.com and sign up, or simply opt-in on this site and we can be in touch. Once you get an email from signing up, then answer it with any question you have. I'll be in touch when you do. Simple? OK. Hope to hear from you soon. Robert Related articlesThe Marketing Books You've Always Wanted Are On Their Way...How Great Books Get ForgottenSome copyright notes - where to check for public domain issuesHow I Got My Financioal Freedom from Publishing BooksA Review of Secret of the Ages - by Robert CollierContempory Editions from Classic Bestseller Authors for Our Modern World Problems