If I break even on 507 e-books, is self-publishing worth the investment for a business owner like...

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed Show. I'm back in sunny UK after my week away in Spain. And while I was away, I was very fortunate in that work was still carrying on with the book. Now the book then was sent to me as a proof copy. And I wanted on this episode just to share with you some of the costs and the process that I have used in order to write the Unnoticed book. Because actually, by doing the production and the editing and the layout and the publishing the way that I'm doing it, it really creates an opportunity for any company or any business owner to write a book. So I want to just dive in and share with you how I am creating the Unnoticed Entrepreneur A collection of 50 articles for any business owner on how to get noticed. First of all, the idea for the book is really around the need for authority. Now, this is not just for me, but companies themselves as well can gain a position of authority in an industry if they have published a book. I've been wondering why that is, and I think it's just because it shows a breadth and a continuity of thought about a particular topic that enables you to, if you like, manage the conversation through several different parts so that you actually create an overall narrative around something. So as we know, the word authority comes from the word author, and for those of us that are running companies, demonstrating that we have more than just a tactical knowledge is really of value. As we know, some big companies like IBM have their corporate stories and their methodologies written up. The same with Kaizen, for example, and many other big companies have actually had books written about them, and it validates the culture and the processes within the business. But in the past, we've always thought that big publishing projects were the preserve of big companies or well-known authors, and that The rest of us might have a great manuscript somewhere tucked away, but actually completely unable to create that. Well, I want to just dispel that for you, because me as a single business owner working out of a garden shed here in the UK have managed to put together a book of 242 pages. It's some 82,000 words. It's a 7 by 10 inch book with a front cover, back cover in full color, and an inside layout in black and white and two-tone. And it's a perfect bound paperback, and it's a matte finish, and the overall weight comes in at 429 grams, just underneath half a kilo. So as one person operating independently, I wanted to share with you what you could do. But also, if you are managing a company and you're, for example, the owner of a bigger company, you could commission a book to be written by a member of your own team or by one of the many freelancers out there. And this is really the key, I think, to creating a book— the use of the different components and the different people that are out there available through the internet to create books. And I'm going to tell you that in the end, my book will have a break-even point of some 507 ebooks or 346 print books. I'm going to take you through the costs of the book and how we've worked out the revenue royalty matrix for these books as well. First of all, I'd like to share with you the, the approach. So what I've been doing with this podcast is to interview entrepreneurs and experts and technologists around the different aspects of getting noticed. Now I've created over 340 episodes and I've interviewed some 80 people. What I've looked to do with these interviews is to have people talk about one of what I call the 5 areas of my Speak PR program. So I've had at the beginning of the interviews an idea of how I want to structure the output, the information that I've got from those interviews, into the 5 sections. So the first thing to look at is if you're going to write a book and you're going to start to create content, what's the structure of the book going to look like? And I guess if you were an architect, you would be looking at the framework and the structure Of the house before you started any building and any quantity surveying, for example. So laying out the framework was the first thing that I did, and I wanted to have a book that was about 80,000 words. The view is 60,000 to 100,000 is necessary to be a sort of a serious book. 80,000, I feel, is enough. So I then broke down my work In order to get the book written, because for many people the obstacle is actually the writing. This is where I cheated a little bit. Actually, I didn't write 80,000 words. I worked with 50 guests to prepare some 70,000 words, and 10,000 are my own in the different introductions and section introductions and conclusions. I have created the Unnoticed podcast through a series of 20-minute interviews. The way I've done this is because 20 minutes will render about 900 to 1,500 words, and that is a nice 1.5 to 2-page article. And because I'm making a series of interviews and a series of articles, if I have about 1,000 words per interview, then I have the beginnings of a nice sort of building block for each chapter. I decided to have 5 chapters for Speak PR, so Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and To Know. And then I look for people that I could interview for 20 minutes that might give me an insight into one of these 5 areas that I wanted to cover in the book. By interviewing people and taking 20 minutes, I've then been able to take that transcript from the platform I'm using called Descript, which is where I'm interviewing and record— taking the audio in and making the text from the audio. I'm exporting the transcript from Descript, and then I'm sharing that with my virtual author in the Philippines. And for $20 US per 1,000 to 1,500 word article. She's fashioning that into something that could be read as, if you like, a Word document. If you look at it like that, you're making a recording, getting a transcript, getting someone else to do the polishing. Previously, I was making a recording in Hindenburg, and then I was using the export function of the audio and sending the audio file, the MP3, into otter.ai. And then I was giving concurrent access to my VA to otter.ai, and they were able to then listen to the audio and check the text at the same time and make the article that way. So a couple of different ways to do it. Either way is just fine. What I like about using Descript is that then I can takes the audio and checks the, the text at the same time. And because I'm able to import the Zoom video file, I'm able to actually edit a video through the text and also get an audio file at the end. So it's a very efficient way of editing and producing because I get from a 20-minute interview on Zoom, I'm getting a 20-minute video, I'm getting some short video, and then I'm also getting my 20-minute audio file, and I'm getting my transcript. So I like Descript a great deal. It's proven to be really a great hero platform for me for production. So then what I've done is I've taken these 50 interviews and sorted them. In fact, I've got to confess, I didn't sort them. I worked with my virtual assistant Alex in the Philippines Philippines, and there is a platform called Dabble Writer. And Dabble Writer enables you to share concurrently a project, so all of the Word authoring tools are online. Now, I was looking at some others. For example, I like Ulysses, is very nice. There's Scrivener, which is another one, but they are desktop-based. And as I wanted to collaborate or really share the work with my virtual assistant, those failed that test. They're more fully featured, and financially you pay for a license fee, whereas with Dabble Writer you pay a monthly premium if you want to have all the features that I wanted to have. It's only about $19 a month, but what it meant was that Alex in the Philippines could sort all of the interviews, which we've listed all on a Zoho spreadsheet in the sky, and cut and paste those articles that were written by my virtual author into DabbleWriter. And I was able to then edit those myself. When we finished with DabbleWriter, we were able to then compile that by exporting that as a Word document and sending that to a layout person called Katerina in the Ukraine who we found through Upwork. So for $200 US, and there were people that offered to do this for $100 US, Katerina set about taking our 230 to 240 pages in Descript, changing the font size, adding in the headers, making an index for the back, for which we use the Adobe InDesign software for auto-collating an index. And also creating a table of contents, because the Dabble Writer doesn't create an index, nor does it create a table of contents, both of which are required, of course, in a book of this length. So we've taken our Descript, we've taken it then to Dabble Writer, and then we've given it to someone in the Ukraine who uses Adobe InDesign to do all the formatting. Once we've got the different formats, we've got a print version, a PDF, and we've also got an EPUB version. And the difference is going to be in the readers themselves. And the EPUB format means that it will auto-resize depending on your own Kindle, if that's what you're using, for example. So different platforms have different interactivity and different capabilities within them. And so what we've done is to create 3 different versions of the book, each for slightly different functions. Now, when it comes to distribution, which of course is the next part of the publishing puzzle, I actually decided to contract a consultant because really people come to me to help them get noticed, and I thought I should probably learn how to get noticed in print. From a consultant. So I hired a lady called Sam from Swapbooks, and quite an investment because actually, probably along with the editing of the articles, the most expensive part of the process. But what Sam did was to open my eyes to the different opportunities. So I had known already about Kindle and have an Amazon account and had started down the path of creating a Kindle desktop publishing account and had gone to the Nielsen ISBN store to, to buy the ISBN number that I needed. What Sam showed me was a new platform which I hadn't heard of, which is called IngramSpark. As we know, Amazon goes to your Kindle, but IngramSpark goes to all of those other publishers that frankly I'd never heard of. They have global book distribution to over 40,000 retailers and libraries. So by working with IngramSpark, we're able to be on Amazon, but also Apple, Kobo, Barnes& Noble. And they have a very good package, either $49 for a print and an ebook, or just a print book $49, or just an ebook $25. And actually, it makes it extremely affordable because you take the manuscript as it is, as an EPUB or a PDF, And then you simply upload that. And what happens is that both IngramSpark and Amazon allow you to print off a copy to have a physical copy. So I got my copy on the Monday when I came back from my holiday in Spain. And obviously it's pretty exciting because we've been working for a few months, in fact, on the production a few months, but on the podcast for now 12 months. So I have in my hand a physical copy. With that, I actually was able to go to a lady who's an author nearby, and she had a look and she she found another 4 or 5 hard to find but significant typos. Missed an adjective, for example, and easy to do at the end of a page when it's a PDF. It's easy to miss some of the smaller things. I was also able to just proof the COVID so I adjusted the graphics on the COVID increasing the point size of the subhead, and also used more two-tone color. Online it looked fine, but in print it didn't look fine. So I was able to change that, and it only cost me £6 to get that print copy. What we did then was to go back to CAT, make a few minor changes, and then go back into both the Kindle publishing but also the IngramSpark publishing to upload the refreshed— if you like, the version 2. What happens is that you post your content online and you have some 30 days to revise it. And that's what we've been doing, is using this 30 days to revise it. Now, some of the benefits that I hadn't ever thought of was that with Amazon, for example, one can create an Amazon author profile. And so I filled that in today. And what's really interesting is that you can actually add an RSS feed, the Really Simple Syndication feed, for example, from your own website. So I've been able to add to my Amazon author page my East West PR case study, which is a news page, my Jim James blog, which I've kept for many years when I was in China, and also my Buzzsprout RSS feed for my podcast. So now when people find the book and find the author, they're going to find all the other content that I'm creating simultaneously. I was then able to go to my LinkedIn and take my author page and add that under my profile and also add a link to the, to the pre-order for the Unnoticed Show book also within my sort of additional information about yourself. So on LinkedIn you can have obviously your own, if you like, post, but also you can make it under, for example, you've got the awards and in that same category there is a space for putting publications. So here we are getting to the end of the 12-month period where I started the podcast, been focusing on getting these interviews in. I've now got 50 people in the book, and what we're going to be doing is sending those 50 people the pre-order but also showing them that they're in the book, and then asking everyone to start to pre-order and to promote to their various networks. Now, in terms of cost, I want to share this. So we've got a royalty matrix, and this book is going out on Amazon in the UK print $13.99, and in America $18.99, in Australia $25. Now what's interesting about this is you can actually go in and change the price per territory. It doesn't just unilaterally alter it according to currency, which is what I initially thought, which means that we can, for example, make it very affordable in India, in India For example, or in in other countries where you might want to give a discount in recognition of the reality of people's purchasing power. Now, in terms of the royalty, if I manage to sell a book on Amazon in the UK, I'm going to make £5.27. Realistically, probably more ebooks. And if I sell an ebook in the UK, I'm going to make £3.60. In America, I'd make £4. £80. And the, the money from this all goes directly into my PayPal account. So the book has cost me some £1,800, and that is with my ISBN number and with my publishing on Ingram and my editing, my layout. I've spent more money than I needed to on the ISBN number because if I'd bought a block of 10, it would have only been £16. In the end, I paid £89 for one. But still, you get an idea that for under £2,000, $3,000, you too can create a book and publish it and have it on Amazon, Barnes& Noble, and have people buy it in print or in ebook. And if I can sell 507 ebooks or 347, 346 print books, then I've made my money back. If I do more than that, of course I'm making a little bit of money. It's not a great money spinner, the authoring, but it will be long tail. But also, if we just think about what we are trying to do, which is create authority, not just for me but for my theory of Speak PR, but also for those 50 people that took part in the book— these could be members of your staff, they could be customers, they could be partners. The point is that what we're doing is creating a whole new platform a long-form authoritative platform for ideas and information that you and your company could share with the audience. Thank you. I want to share with you my own journey as I am building this book from this podcast, and I really hope that you find this of use because I'm really a fan of using multiple channels and multiple platforms for getting noticed. And writing a book, I'm finding, is both exciting and very rewarding And actually much more affordable than I ever could have imagined. And so I encourage you to think about it as one opportunity for you to get you and your company noticed. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show.