Chris A. Baird | December 13, 2021
3 Ways to Sell Your Self Published Book

Have you tried so many tactics when it comes to selling your books yet you still only see very few sales coming in? Well, this might be the answer to your problem. Check out this article to know about the best 3 ways to sell your self published book.

Today's topic has three points and you're going to want to stick around. Because the third point is a secret as to the absolute best way to go about selling your self published book.

Now, the topic that we're discussing today is 3 Ways To Sell Your Self Published Book. You're going to know different options available when it comes to self-publishing your book.

You're going to have the road map necessary to make sure that you are choosing the right path for you. And you're going to feel great knowing that you've figured out which options may be right for you and which options are not right for you.

So let's get into it. Grab a copy of my absolutely free Self-Publishing Checklist. To make sure that you are not skipping any of the steps necessary to not only self-publish but to win at getting your self published book to sell.

From my own story, I first heard of somebody off of a podcast I was listening to. And I would highly recommend listening and reading as much material as you can on self-publishing if you're getting into it. 

Somebody who had been making a living bought an entire house. Out of profits and royalties that they had earned off of selling their books on Fiverr. Now, Fiverr is a website originally set up by fiverr.com. 

My cover designer, you can see my affiliate link below in the description of all of my YouTube videos. That's the designer that I use from Fiverr. For about $18, you can get a cover made, they're great and she's amazing.

But on Fiverr, you can pay as little as $5. The idea was that you would pay five dollars or five euros and then you'd pay an additional dollar to Fiverr themselves. Now it's $2 but for the most part it's $5 and they will do service.

You'll have a freelancer in the world who will take a gig and we'll do a service for you. I've also personally set up gigs on there and made money doing different things. Since I'm also a data analyst in addition.

And the thing is that I discovered it is an amazing platform. I still use it probably at least once or twice a week. Even yesterday, I was using Fiverr in order to solve some problems.

Just hire experts to tell me and show me how to go about solving it. But the idea of selling your books on Fiverr was a completely new idea for me. I had no idea that that was even an option 

I have no idea that some people are making a full-time living off of just putting their books on Fiverr. That was shocking, that would even be possible. So what happened was that I had still used Fiverr for a number of different self-publishing jobs.

There's a whole series of things they will do in self-publishing. I would not recommend getting the formatting jobs because you'll continually need to make changes. And a lot of these people really don't know how to do it correctly.

So that's a painful experience. That's the reason why I use Jutoh. You can see my affiliate link below in the description of all of my YouTube videos.

That's the tool I use for doing my formatting. And the thing is that I took my self published book, I put it into PDF format which was easy. Since I already had it done for my paperback books through Jutoh.

It makes it super simple with a table of contents and everything is set. So all I really had to do was just put the cover in the front of the PDF. And then repost that PDF onto Fiverr as a gig but the gig is immediately resolved.

When somebody starts the gig, it sends them the link to the self published book. They mark the gig complete, give me a review, and then back we go as to sell nothing. It could be simpler, the only thing you have to do is at least tell them the job is complete.

After you've done it, you would deliver the self published book. Mark the job complete, they would mark it complete and that would end that gig. And so I put three or four books onto Fiverr just to see what would happen.

And the thing was that I saw a few sales coming through over a couple of years. I got some positive reviews. In fact, I completely ignored it because it was so little money that was flowing.

But the fact is when I went back in there, I saw that there was a number of people who had gone in there. They all had given five-star reviews for these different books that I had put onto Fiverr.

I was completely shocked that this goes on. But the fact is that the books that I sell have a specific problem. They meet that problem and that's pretty much the whole point of a lot of books even fiction books.

You're trying to solve a problem people have with boredom. But it can be a little bit more demanding. Regarding what exactly those readers are looking for when it comes to non-fiction.

It's a lot simpler, they have a problem with puppy training and you're going to show them how to go about doing that. And as a result, they're going to give you a positive review.

Unless they're one of the trolls out there who just like to give negatives. But for the most part, if you've solved the problem, they're going to give a positive review on that self published book that you've put out on non-fiction.

I put it on there, so I was getting these positive reviews. The thing was that few sales weren't worth my time but it was worth the experiment. This is something I've hit upon a number of times.

It is that sometimes, for every 100 experiments, one to two of those experiments results in an actual win. The other 98 are a complete waste. But they're not really a waste. 

Because I could never have found those two wins. Those things like for example Ingram Spark was an experiment that turned out to make an awful lot of money. Same with my hardback books on Lulu.

Ways To Self-Publish Your Books

Now we have the experiment with Amazon doing hardback books. Maybe that is something that is definitely going to be worth our time. To figure out how that works and start putting our books on there and see if they outperform Lulu.

If they do, then we just simply move from one to the other. But that's a lot, this has a lot to do with the subject of when we're getting started with self-publishing. Or even becoming advanced in self-publishing.

We're doing a lot of experiments. There are a lot of different ways that we can self-publish our books that we need to explore. That's the reason why I created this 3 ways to sell your self published book.

So let's hit number one. You can sell it directly from your website. You don't even need Amazon and these other places, you can just go straight from your website.

So when they log in, now why would you do that? Well, the answer is because you're going to make most of the royalties. We're talking about the e-book version.

It will be sent to you and you'll have the e-book version. You're going to make 100% of the profit. Unless there are taxes, you have to charge based upon where in the world you're living.

But otherwise, you're going to keep all of the profit. Now on Amazon, you would make 70%. But on your own website, it would be a 100%.

The second place you want to definitely consider is selling it from an unknown limited self-publishing distribution company. So that would be some company that says "hey we do".

I sometimes get calls from people who want me to do promotions for them. And I only promote companies. I actually stand by the companies and products that I've actually personally used and still use.

I stand by these particular ones. But sometimes I'll have people in small companies that offer me "hey I can print out so many copies of your self published book" or something along those lines "If you promote our self-publishing company."

And the companies themselves are more like distribution channels that they're dealing with. But it's very limited distribution channels as opposed to like the bigger companies.

And so it would just be small. You might be thinking why in the world would you want to go with this route? Because they're not going to pay you a lot higher percentage of the royalties.

And the reason a lot of people like this route is because you've been banned off of Amazon. And recently there's been another stream of bannings. As a result of people who had serious issues with other people stealing their content.

Putting it onto anywhere on the internet. Then what happens is that Amazon says "why are you making books out of commonly available material?" Well, it wasn't commonly available, somebody's ripping you off.

This happened to one of my books about I think it was in January of this year. And the rule is you contact Amazon immediately if they ever find any problems with anything you're doing.

You get in touch right away. Their robots will just kick and automatically ban you if you don't respond. So you need to make sure you are always responding to Amazon's complaints and saying "look I don't know what's going on".

In my case, I could just look at the registration date on that content for that website and show. They put it out in 2020 and my self published book was released in 2017. So clearly, I did not  steal from them, they are stealing from me.

Now, it's whack-a-mole so it's not  really worth going after it. But this was one of the other things to consider. The other thing is people just don't like Amazon.

So you got yourself banned from Amazon. The other one is you simply just don't like the size of Amazon. You feel it might be like a monopoly and you know you're going to use your self published book as a means to punish them for their practices.

Their savvy business practices have resulted in all of these small publishing companies going out of business. This is definitely an option, you can use it as a protest.

I don't really care about these major companies and all of the distribution channels they have. I'm going to go with a smaller one, with a smaller pool of readers. In order to make a point to Amazon.

Now keep in mind, unless you're famous and if you are famous then these first two options, I'm telling you right now, it will work great. Because you can put your self published book almost anywhere. Your loyal avid readers, your super fans are going to come.

They're going to buy your self published book no matter where it is. Now if you make it convenient, you'll make a lot more money. But you can put it anywhere.

But if nobody knows who you are, well then they're not going to take a chance on your self published book. The fewer people are available to buy your self published book, the fewer chances that your books actually sell in one of these different ways of self-publishing.

And the end result is did you really punish Amazon? Well, I don't know, you gave it to a small publishing house or something like that. And they're not really able to sell it either you're not getting any sales there.

Sell It From Amazon

So it's not clear how exactly you're helping the world by doing a protest with your own self published book. As opposed to finding your readers, build an audience and then pulling it off the platform.

So these are just a couple of thoughts. You can sort of see where I'm building up these first two options. I'm telling you, I would never recommend for you.

Never in a million years would I recommend. You choose either of these options because the number of sales is going to be so unbelievably small. And if you're already famous, well what are you watching me for?

I know exactly why you're watching me. The reality is if you've got a whole bunch of books on Amazon, there's still a lot of tactics and tricks that I'm telling you here. You're not going to hear this anywhere else.

The fake gurus make it all so complicated. Whereas here, I just give away everything I know. Because self-publishing is something I'm very passionate about, right?

I do self-publishing, I continue doing self-publishing. Some of the gurus have given up self-publishing a long time ago and are still talking about it. But this is something for me, I really really enjoy self-publishing.

So that's perhaps why you're with me even right now as we move into our secret answer of the day. And the secret answer is to sell it from Amazon. Where there are millions of readers with their credit cards attached to their accounts.

Ready to buy with a single click of a button. And the self published book is delivered to them. They already know the whole process. They trust the payment gateways.

It's not like when you sell it from your own website. Sometimes people are like "I don't know it", "seems a little fishy". But in reality, on Amazon, there's a high level of trust for the people who come there. 

They're used to buying things, they're trained to buy things. So when they see your self published book and your ads, the ads you're running against your self published book on Amazon. When they see those ads for your self published book, they're going to click the Buy Now button.

At least some of the millions and millions of users are searching. And they find your books among the pages. We talk about how to get yourself ranking on that first page of Amazon search results.

What happens is they're going to click the Buy Now button and you're going to make a sale. Now, you use that money, we reinvest it back in the company. Then we continue on with this particular game.

It's all about getting these royalties in. So that we can start building up the money that's coming in to get the next self published book out faster. Now, 3 ways to sell your self published book. 

So for me, it was hiring additional virtual assistants. I have a couple of employees that would then help me with the self published book production process. Who has transitioned also into video production and other things.

But the point is that as we're moving through this process, we want to maximize the number of channels. The number of people we're reaching makes it as easy as possible for these people to buy from us.

And then we just put another self published book out and then another book. And the question is well, when do we stop doing this? Well, the answer is we really don't stop ever, we just keep going.

We wanted as many distribution channels. Then we're able to increase the amount of money that's coming in. That gives us a lot of flexibility as we're starting to get a little financial freedom.

As a result of the revenue that's coming from these books. That's the reason why if you haven't guessed it, even if I really disliked Amazon, I would still sell through them. Why would I want to shoot myself to punish somebody else?

If I put myself on some micro-distribution network, nobody's going to see or buy my self published book. And as a result, I'm making no sales. So who exactly did I help? Did I help me?

Did I help all the readers who would love to read the value I have? Did I hurt Amazon? Well, a little bit yes but then I hurt myself even more because I would have made more of that money.

And what about the little self-publishers, did I help them? Well not really, you're a no-name person, so nobody's going to really know who you are. Know, like and trust is really what it's about.

So, as you can see, I'm telling you that even if you really dislike Amazon or Walmart, Whatever it is, whatever company it is that sells most of whatever you're selling like in this case would be the books.

Well there's punishment after you become famous. This would just be my comment and we need to ride the waves. A lot of people get really nasty at Amazon and a lot of these other companies.

But in reality, think about what they've done for so many people, they did for me directly. I had no idea about running businesses and things like that. I didn't have any idea about that, it was Amazon who really started me on that journey.

So I'm very appreciative of that. And look, I know all these other issues are connected with them. But I'm just saying, I value getting my books selling more than I do getting them not selling.

I want my readers to actually get as much value as possible out of my books. So I hope that was a little bit helpful to you.

My question for you is what ways of self-publishing have you tried? Check out my other article and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.

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