by Chris O'Byrne on June 3, 2013
The world of self-publishing can be like swimming in a tank of hungry sharks. The author is the drowning victim and the publishers are the sharks. These sharks include not only vanity presses, but traditional publishers as well.
The term “vanity press” was coined because the author paid to have their book published. This used to be considered crass and beneath the sensibilities of a true author, but that was just nonsense spun by traditional publishers to convince you to go with them. Traditional publishers are the ultimate vanity presses, and what’s worse, they steal your book rights so they can experiment with your work and pay you as little as possible.
Many vanity presses charge several thousand dollars to prepare and print one book. This is shamelessly taking advantage of self-publishing authors. Vanity presses are mostly concerned with their own needs and wants, not the self-publishing author’s needs. Professional design services for print books and ebooks should never cost several thousand dollars. The most anyone should pay is $1,200 and that’s for a complete book package that including ebook conversion, cover design, and print book design. Once the price starts climbing into the $2,000 and $3,000 range, the quality of the service actually goes down. You won’t receive quality service from a company focused on milking as much money as possible from authors.
Many self-publishing companies try to extract as much money as possible from you. Many will even take a percentage of your royalties. If you’re already paying to have your book published, why should you have to pay part of your royalties on top of it? The business plan that most of these publishers take is that they charge as much as possible, take as much as possible, and then do as little as possible.
My advice? Pay a reasonable amount for quality service from a company that focuses on what is best for the self-publishing author, not their bottom line.
by Chris O'Byrne on May 28, 2013
If you want to sell more books, more than just a few here and there to your family and friends, you need to ignore what the traditionalists tell you and embrace what really works. The Book Marketing Series is about teaching you how to sell your books based on experience learned in the trenches—running this company, plus my own publishing company, and learning by trial and error.
What doesn’t work?
- Press releases
- Book signings
- Amazon best seller launches
- Pushing people to buy your books
What really works?
- Content marketing
- A platform based on your personal brand
- Social media marketing
- SEO (search engine optimization)
Get Out There and Connect With People
Think about what works not just for selling more books, but selling anything at all. To sell, you have to really connect with people. Successful salespeople don’t stay hidden in their offices working on reports, they get out there and connect with people. Successful politicians don’t hide away, they talk with as many people as they can. No matter what you’re selling—products, services, or ideas—you have to get out there and connect with people. Be proactive. Look for opportunities to connect. In fact, create opportunities. The real foundation of your entire online presence isn’t a website, your blog, or your Facebook page. The real foundation of your online presence is the relationship you form with each person you come in contact with. One of the best ways you can meet people online is by offering them something they can use, and one of the most effective ways to do that is with content marketing.
Content marketing is creating and distributing
relevant and valuable content.
So What Is Content Marketing Really?
Content marketing, unlike many other forms of marketing, is not about manipulating people or trying to get them to do something. Content marketing is about showing people—directly—that you have something useful and beneficial for them. It’s about giving instead of taking. Many content marketers don’t ever ask for something in return; all they want is to share what they know. Others have a product or service available, but they don’t want to be obnoxiously pushy about it. They figure it’s enough to show you how good they are and let you make the decision yourself. Over the past couple of years I’ve done extensive research and experimenting. What works best for long-term results is content marketing, and the heart of your content marketing is a blog that provides useful posts on a consistent basis. These posts have one overall task to accomplish and that is to create a relationship with your readers by proving you can provide what they’re looking for.
8 Steps to Sell More Books
Here are the basic 8 steps to building your own platform and to sell more books:
- Determine your personal brand and target reader
- Do thorough keyword research
- Build a website with a blog and write amazingly useful posts using your long-tail keywords
- Optimize your website and blog posts for SEO
- Build relationships with bloggers in similar niches and guest blog
- Use social media to engage in conversation
- Build your mailing list
- Optimize your Amazon pages
Each one of those steps could provide enough information to fill a book or give a workshop on, so expect at least another blog post or even a series of blog posts for each step. For more reading in the meantime, check out the book Platform by Michael Hyatt or the tribalauthor blog by Jonathan Fields.
Learn more about JETLAUNCH’s recommended book marketing training..
