Startup Q&A #23: Self-Publishing - Making Money With Your Book

Hey everybody, Matthew Paulson here. Today we are going to complete our two part series on self publishing. Today we're going to talk about where you should sell your book, how to promote your book, how to produce an audiobook, and how to leverage your book to grow your business. Let's do this. This is officially episode 23 of Startup Q and A, the online video show that helps startup founders, entrepreneurs and small business owners grow their businesses faster and achieve their dreams of financial freedom. So whether you're just at the idea phase or if you have 100 employees, this is the show that will give you actionable ideas and advice that you can implement in your business. Now, at Startup Q and A, we believe that the best way to build wealth and achieve financial freedom is to create a business that generates income and then put that income, that profit from your business into income generating investments like municipal bonds, dividend stocks and real estate. And as your business makes money and you funnel that money into these income generating investments, eventually your income generating investments will create enough money on a monthly or weekly basis or an annual basis that you no longer need the income from your business to live off of. This will detach your work from the money that you need. So the money that you need to live will be covered by your investments eventually. And then you will be freed up to to work on literally whatever you want. Maybe it's a passion project, maybe it's a charitable good that you want to do in the world, but my goal for you is eventually to reach a point where your investments cover your living expenses and you are free to work on the things that you care about the most in life. That is really what I am trying to help you accomplish in this show. What I am trying to achieve in my own life, I am getting pretty close and I am hoping to help you reach that too. So today we are going to continue our finish our two part series on self publishing. On last week's episode we talked about why you might want to write a book, whether or not you should hire a publisher, who you're going to need to hire to produce your book. And today we're going to talk about the more fun side. We're going to talk about marketing your book, making money with your book and really using your book as a platform for your business in a way to drive customers to your business. So again, we are going to talk primarily about nonfiction books in this series, but if you are writing a fiction book, you can still learn quite a bit from this episode. Also, these questions don't come from Any one person. They are kind of a compilation of questions that have been asked over time, so be aware of that as well. Before we dive into the questions, let's move into a segment that I refer to as the Tip of the Week, where I provide you a tip trick or idea that will help you grow your business faster or achieve your dream of financial freedom. So this week's tip is to use the service booktracker.com b o o k t r a k r.com so tracker t r a K R to track your book sales. If you are going to sell books on Amazon and CreateSpace and ACX and Barnes and Noble and Kobo and all these other different ebook retailers, it is surprisingly difficult to keep track of your sales for Amazon alone. You have to log into, I think, four different websites to your print sales, your ebook sales, your audiobook sales, and then any commissions you get from Amazon Associates for sending people to your own books. It's not easy to do that. So what Booktracker does is kind of a website that sucks in all those data feeds and reports it in one place. So if I want to see how many books did I sell yesterday? Booktracker will tell you that it's not really expensive either. I think it's like $100 a year or something like that. But if you really want to see, okay, how many books did I actually sell without diving into a million different places? Booktracker is a great tool to do that for you. One thing I don't like about it is it doesn't track audiobook sales for whatever reason, but it does track literally everything else. So it does a great job. Like CreateSpace, KDP, Kobo, iTunes, Draft2Digital, Smashwords, and Pretty much every big book online retailer and distributor. It has it. So that's the tip of the week. Let's dive into the questions. Every week we take four or five questions from Facebook or website or questions we make up and we try to answer them on part of the show. So if you'd like to have your question answered, go to the domainstartupqa.co and fill out the form and submit your questions. The first question is where should I sell my book online? So first, Amazon. Amazon is the dominant force in publishing. They sell 50% of all books, period, in the United States. There is a reason why Borders Bookstore went out of business and why Barnes and Noble is having a really hard time making a profit. It is because Amazon ate their lunch. I really believe Amazon should be your primary sales channel for your book. You should have an ebook on Amazon paperback through CreateSpace, Kindle ebook as your ebook, and then an audiobook through acx, which is another division of Amazon, which will then distribute to Audible.com, owned by Amazon, and then itunes owned by Apple. So for your print book, I really like Amazon createspace. It is an entirely print on demand service. So you don't have to have books in your garage or buy like 5,000 books at a time and figure out where to ship them to Amazon. It's just Amazon pretty much takes care of everything. You upload the design, then when somebody buys one, they print one and mail it out for you. So you don't have to deal with shipping, inventory, distribution, any kind of stuff like that. They take care of it all for you. And that is just a. I think it's a much better way to go when you're self publishing because nobody wants to be mailing out like a book through the mail every day to somebody that bought one. It's just too much work and frankly, you don't need to do it for your ebook. I don't necessarily think you should be exclusive to Amazon maybe for the first couple months to get the initial benefits of their KDP select program, but after that, definitely be on ibooks and Kobo and some of the other bookstores. The Google Play bookstore, I think Microsoft is going to have one pretty soon. Get your book as far and wide out there as you possibly can. Then just use an aggregator tool like Smashwords or Draft two Digital or pronoun, and these companies can take your ebook and then spit it out to all these other places. I personally use Draft 2 Digital. I've heard some people have had problems with Smash Smashwords. I just never went that route. But Draft 2 Digital has worked out pretty well for me to get my book into these other places. Definitely go and check out Draft two Digital out. I think that's it. So yeah, paperback, put it on Amazon and then CreateSpace will actually put it onto other bookstores too, but you'll probably not get a ton of sales from that. And then ebook, try to get it everywhere. And then audiobook through acx, which is the Audiobook Creation Exchange. And that will submit your book to Audible and itunes. The next question is, how do I market my book online? First, there are generally two ways to sell books online. First, you can play the long game of building an audience, becoming an expert, becoming a trusted advisor, a friend to the people that follow your content. That is frankly what I'm doing with this show and what I do with my books, the goal is to build a giant following of people that will consume your content, your books and your other stuff. The goal isn't to make a ton of money off the initial content you create, but to funnel these people into online courses and training programs and services that you offer that are kind of higher price point things. So your book will kind of be your entry level product that will feed into your other products. The goal with your book and with even this podcast and stuff where you're just producing content for your people, it should be to build relational equity with people so that they trust your advice, they care about you and the content you create, and they want to consume more of it. So eventually you build up enough relational equity where when you have something to sell, people will flock to it and buy it because they like your stuff. Second, there are some very specific types of advertising that work well to sell books of your show. There are two or three ad networks that people use to sell a lot of copies of their book. The first is bookbup ads. Bookbup is a daily newsletter that has discounted e books. You can advertise in their newsletter pretty cheaply. I think it's for my category. It's between five and eight dollars for a cpm. So for every thousand people that see the ad, I pay five to eight bucks. I've sold a ton of copies through BookBub ads. Second, Amazon has their own ad network called Amazon Marketing Services. You can put up your book there and then they'll display it on related books and you'll pay on a cost per click basis to sell copies of your books. Both of those have worked out pretty well for me. So the whole goal with kind of these BookBub ads, Facebook ads, I guess even Facebook ads and Amazon Marketing Services is to generate some sales to drive up your author rank on Amazon and your sales rank on Amazon so that you will. If you're a best selling book, people buy best selling books. If you're on a bestsellers list, more people will find your book. So if you can generate some initial sales through these advertising platforms that will lift up your book in your rankings, you'll show up in search results, you'll show up in category pages, and then you'll sell more organic books or books organically as well. I think that's it for that question. Next question is how do I produce an audiobook version of my book? So if you have your book out in the market and you want to get some extra kind of run out of it, you should really consider after your e book and your print book, make an audiobook, for whatever reason, especially with help in how to books, advice books, business books, they do very well as an audiobook because people love to consume them in their car just on their own time. I've actually made more money selling books as an audiobook than I have as a paperback and an ebook. I probably sold about 20, 25,000 ebooks somewhere in there. And I think I sold about six or seven thousand audiobooks. That's not a huge number, but I've actually made more money selling those six or seven thousand audiobooks then I have ebooks. So audiobooks tend to have higher price points. So instead of like a $3 ebook, it's like a $14 audiobook. And then you get a decent, like 4, 40% or so royalty on that. And if your audiobook happens to be the first audiobook that somebody downloads as part of their Audible subscription, you get like a $25 bounty as a bonus. And those definitely do add up over time. So, you know, we've had some pretty good financial success with the audiobooks. It definitely covers the cost of making them, and then a lot more after that. Whenever we launch a new book, we launch an audiobook day and date with it, so that we can get audiobook sales from that initial push, because the audiobooks just tend to be the most profitable type of book to sell. So we definitely want to make sure we have those on day one. Now, really, the only place to publish your audiobook is on the audiobook Creation Exchange, acx, this is an Amazon company that publishes audiobooks, so they will sell your audiobooks through Amazon.com, through audible.com and through the itunes store, which is really the only three places that people buy audiobooks from. So ACX is really the way to go if you want to have an audiobook. Now, there are a couple ways to use acx. You can actually use it to find a narrator on your service. You might find somebody who will narrate your book for you on your service, and then that narrator gets a percentage of the royalties of your audiobook. You can do that. What I do is I have a guy named Stu Gray that records my audiobooks. He does a great job, and then I just pay him a flat fee, and then I just upload the file to Audible or acx. And that has worked out pretty well for me. I'd rather pay a flat fee up front for the audiobooks than give somebody royalties forever for recording an audiobook. Stu likes it because he gets cash up front, and I like it because I get to keep all the royalties. But if you don't have a ton of cash to put into an audiobook, you might be able to use kind of the royalty split thing as a way to attract a narrator who will record your book in exchange for a percentage of the sales. So with you, the way it works, your book listing has to be live on Amazon before you can do it on Audible. So you submit your book listing through Amazon through like an ebook or digital print book, then you claim the book on Amazon, and then you upload your files. Amazon makes sure that everything is hunky dory in terms of formatting and spacing. You do need an audiobook editor because they've got some really weird rules. So I always pay somebody 500 bucks or so to really clean it up and make sure that the right amount of padding is at the beginning and end of each chapter that meets all of their formatting guidelines so it doesn't get rejected after you submit it. It does take some time. You should probably have it submitted 30 days before you want it to go live in case there are some problems with your file. So just be aware that there is an approval process that takes some time. Even after they approve it, it might be another few days before it shows up live on Amazon and Audible and all these other places. Last question is, how do I leverage my book to make money in my business? As I mentioned in the last episode, you are probably not going to get rich from royalties unless you've written the next Hunger Games or Harry Potter. Most books actually sell less than 1,000 copies, and your book, especially the first few books, probably aren't going to sell many copies. And that's just what you should be prepared for. This doesn't mean you can't make money from books. It's just you need to do it in a different way. What you really need to do is leverage your book as a marketing tool for your other business. Maybe you use your book to promote a coaching service that you offer. Maybe some kind of professional service. Maybe it's an online course that you promote inside your book. Really the goal for your book should be to give somebody kind of a taste of your content and then funnel them into something else where they can pay you more money. Really kind of the next thing up should probably be at like a $200 price point. So maybe you have like a $3 ebook that turns into a $200 online course. And that online course is really where you're going to make your money at. So really the ultimate goal of your book should one, be establish yourself as an expert in your field. And then two, get people into a sales funnel for a higher priced product. If you've written a book, the first book kind of happens automatically. Because if you've written a book, you're an author and then you're seen as an expert. So that's kind of nice. But the sales funnel part is something you really have to be intentional about. Excuse me, I lost my place. So the way to do this is inside your book. You should have kind of a link in there to get a free bonus of some kind. I've done this in some of my books, not in others, and I probably should have done it in all of my books. But say you have like a free audiobook companion or you have some free audio or some free guides that you can give to people that buy your book or download your book, like right after the introduction or right before the introduction or after the introduction you might have like one page that says download this companion stuff for this book or download this free guide or download these free audio files for the book. And you can go to this URL and then on that URL there will be kind of a landing page. And then people have to submit their email and this is key. People have to submit their email to get your bonus and then that way you can get them on your email list and then put them into an autoresponder email series for whatever. The other thing is that you have to sell to them and that is the way to generate sales. The E book is really, or your book is really a loss leader to get people onto that landing page to have them give you your email address so that you can sell them other things through email and social media that are higher priced. That is the real way to make money with books. Frankly, this is probably the biggest mistake that I have made with my publishing efforts. I've got eight books out in the market. Six of them are in print format. They're all out. I've sold plenty of copies of them. I feel pretty happy with the number I've sold. But the mistake that I've made is I haven't done a great job of turning that into something bigger. Now Obviously I have MarketBeat and Google photo contests and US Golf TV and Falls, angel phone and all these other things that make me money. So I've never felt the need to turn my publishing business into something that is a bigger, better thing, that has a higher price point. But if this were my day job and I was an author that all my money came from writing, I would definitely have done a better job about putting bonuses in my books with links to opt in forms to build my email list. I haven't done a great job for that and then have products to sell to the people that are on my email list. Certainly it's worked out well with MarketBeat. We've done a better job with automatic income, making it more relevant to the MarketBeat audience and then using MarketBeat as an hub sell for that product. But my Internet business books, my marketing books haven't done a great job with that. That is the one thing I could have done better. If I was really smart, I would have made an email marketing online video course and then promoted that inside the email marketing book and just had a natural funnel for that. And my, you know, email marketing demystified my business growth day by day. Online business from scratch. 40 rules for Internet Business Success if all of those books funneled into an autoresponder series that promoted some kind of online course, I probably could have made a lot more money than I did today. Hate to even guess, but if I needed to live off the income from these books, that is definitely what I would be doing. Alright, I think that is the end of that question. And that is the last question for this show. So if you would like to subscribe to Startup Q and A and get next Monday's show delivered to you automatically, go to the domain startupqa Co and there are links to subscribe via email, Facebook, RSS, iTunes, YouTube and Stitcher. You can also personally follow me on facebook@facebook.com matthewpulfonpage my personal facebook account is facebook.com matthewpulfsen if you want to add me as a friend there on Twitter, my user ID is MatthewDP. And if you like the show, you like watching me on video or you like listening to the audio version of this show, please, please, please, please please please please, please, please, please, please please please go to itunes and leave us a review and a five star rating. It'll help us take the message of financial freedom through the power of entrepreneurship, bring that to the masses, which is really the goal of this show. So go to itunes, leave us a review, write give us a five star rating. We would really appreciate that. I think that's it for the show. I'll see you guys next week.