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Self Publishing

5 Steps To Making Your First $1,000 As An Author

August 27, 2021 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Every author aspires to make the first $100 from their books. It’s a milestone to celebrate as any progress is good progress. However, once you reach your first $1,000 as an author, you’ll start to see more possibilities.

All of a sudden, self publishing will appear as a viable path to a full-time income. You’ll start setting further out milestones such as your first $1,500 and your first $2,000. Each milestone you pass will fuel you towards significant earnings in the future.

But it all starts with the first $1,000 in earnings. That’s when we cross the bridge from hobbyist to a potential full-time author.

The authors I interviewed on The Wealthy Author Summit each surpassed $1,000 in book royalties. Some of these same authors make $1,000 every week from their books. You can get lifetime access to the Wealthy Author Summit here.

Identify Your Monetization Path

Almost no full-time author exclusively relies on their book royalties for income. An author’s monetization path features multiple assets combining together. The book is a pathway to begin the conversation and enable the reader to explore those assets. 

Books aren’t sales letters. No one reading dozens of pages explaining why you should buy something else. Books built trust, and by occasionally incorporating offer(s), you can substantially increase your average revenue per reader.

The end of a book presents the best opportunity to promote multiple products and services. Authors often use the final pages in their books to promote a book series, service connected to the book, training course, merchandise, and affiliate offers. These monetization paths require more creativity if you are a fiction author. A podcast can be a great choice for fiction and nonfiction authors alike.

Consider your available assets and what assets you’ll have by the time you publish your book. Some Podcast Domination readers end up becoming clients. Readers will recognize your expertise as they read your content and prefer you to guide them along the process rather than take the DIY approach.

Publish Multiple Books

If you want to make $1,000 from a single book, that book must generate $1,000 in royalties and backend deals. That sounds simple enough.

However, if you want to make $1,000 from two books, those books must average $500 in royalties and backend deals. A second book cuts the averages by half. Many full-time self published authors reached that status with dozens of books under their belts. Some authors rely on easy-to-create journals and workbooks while others publish traditional content focused books.

Either way, the self published authors with many books to their name end up reaching the $1,000 milestone sooner. Some of these same authors end up making more than $1,000/mo from the book royalties alone.

Writing books doesn’t guarantee you’ll make money. Publisher Rocket helps you conduct research so you can discover profitable book topics and keywords in your niche. Some of your books will earn more than others, but prior research gives each new title a better chance to outperform your catalog.

Most authors with dozens of books get carried by 1-5 books. A small percentage of their books make up a large percentage of their income. 

Writing routines will make or break your ability to produce several books. Write content at your peak hours and set reminders throughout the day with motivational messages to stay on track.

Grow Your Email List

Social media helps a little bit with book sales. So does running ads (we’ll talk about those later). Amongst the different strategies to generate sales, nothing works as well as your email list. 

Some authors use the first page of their book to promote a free opt-in. This free opt-in ranges from a bonus guidebook to a free chapter of another book you wrote. Fiction and nonfiction authors can both incorporate this strategy to grow their email lists. 

Writing multiple books puts your 1-page call-to-action in front of more potential readers. The upside to promoting your opt-in on the first page of your book is that previewers can join your email list even if they don’t buy your book.

Some authors go as far as offering the entire audio version of their books for free if you join their list. Considering the costs of acquiring an email subscriber through Facebook or Google Ads, some authors will forgo the royalty in exchange for a new email subscriber. I personally do not follow this approach, but it works for some authors.

You can use social media to grow your email list and create content to build your brand. Both measures will grow your email list, but all strategies pale in comparison to collaborations. Co-authoring a book, cross promoting existing books with other authors, and running events (i.e., virtual summits, book giveaways, etc.) will accelerate your email list growth in a way the other strategies can’t. 

Growing your email list (and engaging with your subscribers) is the most important step of reaching $1,000 from your books and making sustainable income from your work. 

Get Initial Reviews

Social proof impacts every stage of the customer journey. A potential reader may turn away from your book if it has bad reviews or not enough reviews in general. Getting initial reviews for your books is a critical part of demonstrating robust social proof.

Getting reviews boils down to asking enough people. You can reach out to some friends and encourage them to leave reviews. You can refine this starting point by checking who reviews your competitors’ books. Reach out to those reviewers and offer a free copy of your book in exchange for an honest review.

It’s important to ask specifically for an honest review. Asking for a 5-star review or a positive rating is sketchy and not allowed by Amazon. If you deviate from Amazon’s rules and a reviewer calls you out on it, you could find yourself in trouble. I’m not sure what ‘trouble’ looks like, but it’s best to avoid it. Asking for an honest review rather than a positive review will put you in good standings with Amazon and the reviewer.

Run Amazon Ads

Amazon Ads allow you to scale your book’s success. You can reach 100,000s of potential readers on a relatively low ad spend. Granted, some of those potential readers will scroll past your book and not click, but some of those potential readers will click on your ad and learn more about your book.

Your Amazon Ads will perform better if you first get initial reviews for your book. Many Amazon Ad experts recommend getting at least 10 reviews for your book before investing in advertising. You can use authors’ names and books as keywords in your ads. This strategy will help your books appear when someone searches for another author’s name or book. Publisher Rocket makes it easy to find these keywords, but you can create Amazon Ads yourself as well.

One of the Wealthy Author Summit speakers discussed how he uses Amazon Ads to generate thousands of dollars from his books each week. He’s truly mastered the system and gave us the full break down during our session. You can get a lifetime All-Access Pass to the Wealthy Author Summit here.

In Conclusion

Reaching your first $1,000 in book earnings is a big milestone. When you cross this milestone, you’ll see it’s possible to make a full-time income as an author. Then, it’s a matter of refining your process, writing more content, and marketing your way to success.

Filed Under: Self Publishing

3 Ways To Self Publish Your Next Book Sooner

March 28, 2021 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Most full-time self published authors have dozens of books published under their names and pen names. It’s no secret that you have to keep cranking them out in order to build your income and influence.

However, writing these books is easier said than done. Each one is a big project that will require weeks of your time in the best case scenario. It’s considerable time to pour into a product that may flop. 

That’s why it’s important for you to conduct some research before you start writing your next book. That way, you give yourself a better chance of writing a book that will perform well on the Amazon algorithm. Publisher Rocket is by far the best resource to do keyword research to ensure your book topic is a potential winner.

But if you don’t find the time to write your potential winner, then what’s the point? You have a bunch of great topics but no books to show for your research. To publish books at a faster pace, incorporate these three strategies into your work routine.

#1: Repurpose Your Existing Content

For nonfiction authors, it makes sense to repurpose your existing content into your book. Most people will forget about your blog post days after they’ve read it. And if you’ve published many blog posts over the years, most of your readers will never get the chance to read those older blog posts.

You can breathe new life into those blog posts by incorporating them into your book. Why write about a bunch of strategies to boost happiness when you can copy and paste a prior blog post of yours on the same topic. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

This will allow you quickly move forward with your book. Some authors write articles with the intention of adding them to their upcoming books. If you can think that far ahead, each blog post will help you grow your author platform while providing additional content for one of your books.

#2: Establish A Daily Writing Routine

If you want to see a goal to completion, work on it every day. That’s how you see continuous progress. My daily writing routine involves 1 Medium article, 1 blog post, and some words for my book. 

I write at least 2,000 words each day which is enough to further build out my writing career without it taking up my entire day. I start writing first thing in the morning and continue writing when opportunities present themselves in the afternoon and evening. 

You can’t only write content because you have to build out your platform. This is how you actually sell books rather than just being the world’s greatest secret. Writing 1K-2K words per day is enough to make considerable progress with your book but also enough to address the other parts of your brand.

#3: Set A Word Count Target

For each book you write, set a word count target. The word count target helps you stay focused rather than hit on tangents and make your book longer than it should be. The quicker you complete your current the book, the quicker you can start your next book.

I go for 15k-20k words per book. Your word count goal may look different, especially if you’re writing novels. However, a word count goal gives you an idea of when you’re approaching the end of your book.

You can go a little under or above your word count range depending on how you feel about your book. However, this range will give you a target to shoot for which is essential for transitioning from one book to the next.

The name of the game is publishing as many high quality books as you can. Growing your platform will help you get the initial sales and then the Amazon algorithm will take over from there. You can also run Amazon Ads to stimulate the Amazon algorithm to give your books a higher sales rank (i.e. the ads drive sales which helps in those areas).

Write each day, keep the long-term in mind, and someday you may get the results you seek. 

Learn how to become a full-time writer here

Filed Under: Self Publishing

3 Self Publishing Strategies To Reach More Readers During The Coronavirus

April 1, 2020 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

The coronavirus has altered business, the economy, and life in general as we know it.

With many people on lockdown, now is the time to build your online business and reach more people with your books.

I’m a believer in taking action rather than let the panic set in and do nothing.

I’ve shared videos in the past sharing how business owners and authors can adapt to the times and present themselves to their audiences in a more valuable way.

If you want to get your books in the hands of more readers and grow your author platform, use these three strategies to grow…

#1: Do More Free KDP Book Promotions

Kindle Direct Publishing, otherwise known as KDP, is the place to self publish your books on Amazon. One option they let you utilize is a 5 day window where you can make your book free during that window. You get a new 5 day window every 90 days based on the KDP Select Renewal.

A free KDP promo isn’t for every book, but it will make sense for some of your books. Making one of your books free for a few days allows you to get more readers for your content and get more traction for your existing books.

The great thing about Kindle books is that because of their price points, it’s easy for readers to buy multiple books.

 

#2: Grow Your YouTube Channel

YouTube is a discoverability platform where your content can reach people who have never heard of you before.

These types of platforms are getting flooded with more traffic because people on lockdown spend more time on YouTube and other places.

This increased traffic gives your content a better chance of standing out and gaining traction on the YouTube Algorithm.

YouTube is also a very effective platform for selling your books. I recently put up a video on my channel about strategies you can use to sell more books via YouTube.

YouTube has always been a great platform for self published authors to reach more readers, but the opportunity now is greater than ever. I’m publishing daily videos over on my channel.

 

#3: Host A Virtual Summit

With in-person events cancelled around the world, more people are turning to virtual events for a sense of connection.

A virtual summit can massively grow your email list and introduce engaged readers to your brand. I’m doing two virtual summits each month starting in May, but they’re not what most people think.

When most people think of a virtual summit, they think of an event with 20-50 speakers. While that definitely qualifies as some of my virtual summits, other virtual summits have just 5-10 speakers. Smaller 1-day events are far more reasonable to conduct.

 

In Conclusion

The world has changed a lot, but people still need to make money to pay their expenses. Now is a great time to self publish books and pursue online ventures.

If you want to stay informed on the different strategies you can use to sell more books and build your author platform, make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Filed Under: Self Publishing, virtual summits

How To Self-Publish A New Book Every Month

December 28, 2019 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Does it even make sense to self-publish a new book each month? Let’s start with that question.

For some people, it makes sense. For other people, it doesn’t.

If you want a signature book that becomes a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, or New York Times bestseller, don’t publish a new book every month.

If you want a bunch of books that each earn you a steady stream of income, publish a new book every month.

It’s that simple, and when considering this logic, it’s understandable that some self-published authors publish a new book each month while authors with traditional publishers only publish a new book every 1-2 years.

Some self-published authors even operate under various pen names and publish 100s of books each year with the help of ghostwriters.

In my video The Math Behind Making $100,000/yr From Self-Publishing books, I explain how having more books will make it easier for you to make 6-figures through self-publishing.

To put it simply, if you have one book, that one book needs to make $100,000 each year for you to make 6-figures from your books.

If you have 10 books, then each book only needs to bring in $10,000 each year for you to make 6-figures from your books.

If you have 100 books, then each book only needs to bring in $1,000 each year for you to make 6-figures from your books.

If you have 1,000 books, then each book only needs to bring in $100 each year for you to make 6-figures from your books.

While 1,000 books is usually reserved for authors with a team of ghostwriters or authors who produce no-content books (i.e. journals, coloring books, etc.), the math is obvious.

More books makes it easier to hit certain income goals.

The only problem is that we have a limited amount of time, and publishing that many books is no easy feat. And there’s also that marketing part. Just because you have 100 books doesn’t mean all of them are going to make $1,000 each year to help you reach your 6-figure goal.

There are a bunch of different ways to promote your books and get more exposure. When you self-publish at least a book each month, the strategies change. Instead of a massive build up, you only send out a few emails and social media posts about your new book.

The strategy isn’t to get a surge of sales. The strategy is to get enough reviews to make your book look attractive to a potential buyer and run Amazon Ads to generate consistent sales and income.

This is how you write books that bring in a consistent $100+ each month instead of a book that gets a ton of sales during the first quarter of its release only for those sales to follow a downward trend.

Once you master the system, the more books you write, the more money you make. This is why some self-published authors advocate for publishing a new book each month (or much more than that under different pen names).

So now the question boils down to how can we find time to make this work? I managed to self-publish 25 books while in college and will be doubling that number to 50 books by the end of 2020 since I’m now done with college and have a ton of extra time.

The most important goal for self-publishing is to have a daily word goal. I set the goal to write at least 1,000 words for my books per day. I frequently hit 2,000 and 3,000 words on some days and that’s more than enough to write at least one book per month.

The thing with my books is I aim for concise knowledge. If you desperately want a 300+ page book with filler, don’t look at my catalog. I’ve only written two books that were over 200 pages, and each of those took me almost a year to write because I’m committed to not add any filler.

Most of my newer releases are around 80-100 pages which adds up to around 16,000 to 20,000 words. Let’s take 18,000 words as the middle ground to run some numbers.

  • At 1,000 words per day, it only takes me 18 days to complete a book.
  • At 2,000 words per day, it only takes me 9 days to complete a book.
  • At 3,000 words per day, it only takes me 6 days to complete a book.

And we are not including no-content books. I could probably write at least 3 of those books from start to finish per day because many of the journals are copy and paste the same page a bunch of times and maybe add a different quote on each page. This is how some authors end up with 100s or even 1,000s of books without a team of ghostwriters.

Word search books are also in the no-content category and take some extra time to create but not as much as a typical book. If you want to see me write a word search book, let me know in the comments.

But for the purposes of this post we’re talking about writing your typical book rather than a fill-in-the-blanks type of book.

As I just demonstrated through the numbers, you can very reasonably complete a new book every 18 days. 1,000 words per day is not a big ask. It’s perhaps 30 minutes of your day assuming you can type at 33 words per minute which is lower than the average pace of 40 words per minute.

If you manage to write 2,000 and 3,000 words on some days, you can trim that number down even more.

 

Post Production

The last things left are looking over your book and publishing it in its different formats.

I prefer to eyeball my book once and just publish it. This method takes a lot of time off from the post-production process and allows me to more quickly move onto the next book.

The more books you write, the easier it is to spot mistakes in your work. I will be honest and say that I don’t spot all of the mistakes. I’ll do the audiobook version of the original book a few weeks later and find some small Grammar mistakes. These don’t bother me because I can correct them as readers bring them up and simply re-upload the file.

For my recent book Build Your Authority Platform, a reader mentioned how much he loved the book and shared two small typos that were in the book. You could still read through the book and understand what was being said. You could still get a ton of value from that book.

I could have handed the book to a proofreader to address those issues but…

  • A proofreader won’t take your book as seriously as you do
  • A proofreader can still miss typos
  • If it costs $0.03 per word which is standard, it will cost you $540 to hire a proofreader to proofread 18,000 words

Less than 1% of people who buy my books ask for a refund. To me, that indicates as long as you provide value in your book, you can get away with a typo here and there.

And if someone doesn’t like my book only because of a few typos even if they like the value from the book, I don’t want that person as a client. Those are usually the types of people who get on top of you and micro manage everything that you do.

That’s really all you need to do to write a new book every month. It doesn’t take too much extra time to turn that into two new books each month. I go into more detail in the YouTube videos above and frequently talk about self-publishing on my YouTube channel, but this the basic framework.

Just find 30 minutes each day to write 1,000 words. Repeat that for 18 days and you’ve got a new book. 12 days is more than enough to eyeball 18,000 words and create paperback and eBook editions of your book for Amazon. An audiobook takes more time but is definitely worth it. I do hire someone on Fiverr to edit the audio files. You can find someone to edit audio files for ACX at around $15 per hour which only comes down to around $30.

Not bad considering it would cost $540 or more to have someone proofread that same book word for word.

If you want to accelerate your self-publishing brand and get more book sales, schedule a complimentary call with me to discover if we are a good fit.

Filed Under: Self Publishing

Revealed: This Is How Books Make Money

March 19, 2019 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Books can make you a lot of money, but not in the way that most people think.

Most people believe authors get their main source of income from their book royalties.

While some authors make full-time incomes just from those royalties, book royalties are just the tip of the iceberg.

There are three core ways for making money with your book:

  1. Book royalties (we knew this already)

  2. Leveraging your book to become an authority in your niche. This allows you to charge premium prices, offer more services, and get on more stages

  3. Using the words inside your book to make more revenue

I go into greater detail about this system in my book The Wealthy Author. If you’re interested, you can grab your copy here.

I hope you enjoy the video.

Get my entire Free + Shipping Book Funnel For Free: https://marcguberti.com/bookfunnel

Filed Under: Self Publishing Tagged With: book marketing

How To Turn Content Creation Into Content Marketing

July 29, 2017 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

 

content creationNo one questions the importance of content for a content brand. Without content, content brands wouldn’t exist. The critical question surrounding content revolves around how much time we should spend on content creation versus content marketing.

As the theory goes, every minute you spend creating content you’ll lose on content marketing. But what if I told you that theory was completely wrong?

You can engage in content creation and content marketing all within the same minute. No, that doesn’t mean allocating 30 seconds for each task. Certain tasks fulfill both the creation and marketing components of successful content brands.

This is what Andy Crestodina referred to as the ‘gray area’ during my Content Marketing Success Summit. Andy explained that certain tasks fit both the creation and marketing parameters, tasks that we tend to separate as if they were oil and vinegar.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the gray area so your can create and market your content at a much faster pace.

Content Creation Gives You Marketing Ammo

You can’t market content unless you create it. But you can take the same piece of content and republish it on multiple platforms. It’s commonplace to see top content creators republishing their blog posts on LinkedIn, Medium, and elsewhere.

Each time someone in your preexisting audience shares your content – regardless of where they share it – it will lead to more people viewing that content.

If your blog posts, LinkedIn posts, and Medium posts each get 500 daily visitors, then you have a total of 1,500 visitors. And it only takes 5-10 minutes to republish already written blog posts on those platforms to see a big traffic increase.

As an added bonus, republishing your content on LinkedIn and Medium creates viral potential as more people engage with your content. This will put you content in front of a larger audience that you wouldn’t have reached on your own.

And when you publish on LinkedIn and Medium, you should include calls-to-action to drive people back to your blog.

At the start of one of these posts, use the anchor text, “This post was first published on [name of your blog].”

And at the end of your post, lead people to a relevant landing page (based on the topic of the content the visitor just read) that asks for the visitor’s email address.

You can also link to older blog posts throughout these posts to lead people back to your existing blog content. Just make sure these older blog posts are relevant to the topic your visitors are currently reading.

This model supports the idea of creating as much content as possible, assuming you have at least a decent sized audience on LinkedIn and Medium.

Influencer Outreach

Andy went into great detail about influencer outreach during our interview.

Basically, you contact several influencers and ask them for their opinions, recommendations, or a quote. This is content creation and marketing at its finest because you get thousands of words of content and influencers who will be happy to promote the post since they’re featured in it.

I leveraged this tactic for my blogging tools post. I asked dozens of influencers for their recommendations and 22 influencers came through. The post itself surpassed 4,000 words (and I added around 400 words at most).

Talk about an unfair advantage!

Other people basically wrote my content for me, and then more people marketed my content for me.

Granted, I did have to reach out to many people and copy and paste their content into the blog post. But many connections, combined with the power of HARO, made the mission easy to accomplish.

You don’t have to turn your entire post into other people’s opinions, quotes, and recommendations. But you can incorporate information from at least three influencers into your content.

Contact each influencer and see if they can provide 100-500 words. I typically ask for 100-250 words (unless it’s just a quote) because I want to make it as easy as possible for an influencer to provide me with free content (and share it with his or her audience).

If you can’t get the influencers to participate, you can hunt for quotes by reading their blog posts, watching their videos, listening to their podcasts, or reading interviews. You can then tell the influencer you mentioned him/her in your latest blog post and you may get a share, or at the very least some appreciation.

This strategy also allows you to build relationships with influencers so that in the future they might agree to be guests on your podcast, speakers at a virtual summit, etc.

For these relationships to work, you must get off the WIIFM Station (what’s in it for me). Only connect with influencers if you want to create a win-win atmosphere. My two favorite ways to build healthy relationships with influencers involve blog content and podcasts.

Incorporate Internal And External Links

Both internal and external links are important for SEO. Internal links lead people to your older blog posts. These links help keep people on your site longer as well as decrease your bounce rates, two metrics that are critical to your blog’s search ranking.

Internal links also drive LinkedIn and Medium readers directly to your blog, which allows you to keep these readers’ attention longer.

You can also connect certain blog posts together into a series. This requires readers to read all the posts in the series to get a complete overview of what you’re trying to achieve with your content.

External links to authority sites within your niche will allow you to piggyback on these sites’ search engine rankings. Search engines will recognize that you link to authority content. And the algorithms will assign more authority to your own site.

External linking is a long-term game. But you can immediately see the impact of internal links. And, if continued, they result in even sweeter results over the long-term.

In Conclusion

Content creation and marketing are both critical to the success of a content brand. While both involve a significant time investment, you can tap into the gray area of creation and marketing and feed two birds with one scone.

This time-effective route, combined with delegation, will make it much easier for you to grow and sustain your content brand.

What are your thoughts about the gray area? Do took have any other content creation and marketing hacks for us? Want to ask a question? Sound off in the comments section below.

Filed Under: Blogging, content, content marketing, growth hacking, Influencer marketing, Marketing, Self Publishing, Tips and Tricks Tagged With: content, content creation, content marketing, growth hacking, influencer marketing, influencers, self publishing

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