Planning to market your book and decided to release it through Amazon? Check this out and learn about these 3 things to do once your book is on Amazon.
Today's article has three points and you're going to want to stick around for the third point. Because it is a secret as to the one thing that so many authors do that is a huge mistake when they finally have released their book.
The topic of today's article is 3 things to do once your book is on Amazon. Now when you're first getting started and you've managed to get your book on Amazon, first I would like to say congratulations! So many authors never publish ever.
They never self-publish or get traditionally published, it just never happens. The worst thing I see regularly is students of mine who wrote books years ago and still have not put those books onto the market.
But for those of you who have, there are three things that you're definitely going to want to do once you've got those books on the market. That is what we are going to explore in today's article.
Grab a copy of my Self-Publishing Secrets Checklist to make sure that you are not skipping any of the important steps necessary. To not just get your book self-published but also to win and get that book to start selling.
When I first got started with self-publishing, I remember that sensation of getting the very first book onto the market. You don't know whether what's going to happen. You've spent so much time getting it right, making the book as high of quality as you're able to.
You've edited your book, you've got your cover, your titles, the keywords, the description, and all of these things. You finally get to figure out how to get this formatting thing in place. Now we hit the publish button, we wait about a day to 3 days and the book goes live on Amazon.
But what happens now? The answer is for me it was crickets, nothing happens. Where's your audience? But the book is such high quality so it should sell itself right? I mean because people will just automatically buy high-quality books.
Wait for a second here, how do they know your book is high quality? How do they know it's a best seller? How do they know it's worth them investing money and time into reading it?
Well, shouldn't they just know that? I mean the book is such a high-quality book. The answer is unless there's a word of mouth or something that's letting them know and signaling that the book is a high-quality book.
There are so many options they can choose from other books that may be on the very same thing. Now your book may be better than the other books but how exactly are they going to find out about it? And that is where the crickets started chirping.
I can tell you in my book, I started doing a couple of other things. I started running free promotions but the problem was when they went off free promotion, I mean I would make hundreds of downloads as they would call it. I guess it's not a purchase per se but let's just say an order.
They order the free ones on Amazon and they would grab my books. Hundreds and hundreds of copies would be given away to people. But I'd be like "Well, how am I making money up for this?". And then when I went back to full price, it might have triggered a sale or almost no sales.
I've seen that before as well. So we have to be very very careful that you can use this to do lead generation. That is where you're getting new email subscribers on your list through these free books.
But then again, maybe your primary readers are just getting your books for free. So then they're not going to pay you in the first place to buy your book, that's a bit of a trick. The other one to remember is that when we give away free books, the types of people who download them mostly will never even open the book that they've downloaded for free.
They feel good about getting the book and feel like "Oh great I got the book, I'm feeling like I'm making great progress". But they don't ever read the book. Also, people who get stuff for free, tend to be more negative which is unbelievable.
If they pay hundreds of dollars for something, they're less likely to be negative about it than somebody who gets something for free. It's unbelievable! If you go on to Amazon, you'll see all sorts of negative reviews from people who didn't even pay anything for the books.
They're like "this is the worst book I've ever read on this subject, I can't believe this". You're just like "you got the book for free, how can you complain about it?". But this is the way the world works, a lot of people who are looking to get stuff for free, also tend to be complaining.
Because all they want to do is complain about the very thing. They got it for free so you need to be very careful with this free book promotion method. It can be good and I believe you can only run it if you're on KDP Select, Kindle Select. This means you can't have your book then your eBook on Ingram Spark.
Or on Smashwords which is where I like or Draft2Digital if you prefer. But I prefer Smashwords myself. We all have to figure out what works best for us. Then the second thing was that I was contacted by another author who wanted to do review swapping.
The way that these works are you're in contact with another author. They read your book, you read their book and you both leave reviews on each other's books. The downside of this one is that can get you in trouble with Amazon and I saw that virtually.
Everybody who did do review swapping ends up eventually getting a letter from Amazon because it doesn't take a genius to see that. If you leave a review on somebody else's, later on, yours that you've just swapped. I mean it's obvious from their computer system but the reviews still give quite a bit.
Then what they do is they ban you from reviewing other people's books. This is the most common thing that happens. And the other thing is if you choose to do something like review swapping which I am not recommending, but I'm telling you it does work.
It is that make sure it's in the same genre. That you're not doing this for books that are outside of the area. That your books are at the best way to get the incredibly important reviews.
It is through people that you know who are not directly connected to you through Amazon. And also through your readers and getting them on your email list and advanced review teams. These are the methods that are a little more in alignment with Amazon though you're still giving them something for those reviews.
Or other people you already know which will make it more likely. They would leave positive reviews and those also do get stripped by Amazon. If you think your friends and family, can just have them you know take a look and leave an honest review, Amazon wants organic reviews.
They will flag those people and send you a nasty letter as well. Warning you of shutting your account down if you continue this practice with the review front. And I just want to make it clear to you that you should be very very careful on this front.
Though generally, I had only seen Amazon go after people hardcore when they were dealing with thousands of reviews. They were hiring VA's and thanks to getting reviews for them. So I just wanted to hit that, we haven't hit the review thing in a while.
High-Quality Cover
Reviews are incredibly important too. You just have to be careful where you're getting them from. I'm not going to tell you where you should do that because there's a lot of risks associated with the review process and Amazon changes its terms and policies all the time.
But moving on, later on, I learned about running ads that have paid traffic to your books and saw a huge jump in sales. It's an on-off switch if you run enough ads and your cover is high-quality. Your description and title are matched for keywords and such.
If we're willing to pay enough per bid for so many, for every click you get the bid price that you had on there. It's going to bring in a click and they're going to look at your page. If your page copy is really good for your sales page, then what's going to happen is after ideally, I think it was 10 clicks, you would get a sale.
And assuming your bid price isn't too high, your book price is high enough you can either break even or you'll make money off of these. In my case, I was making crazy money off of these so it just made me push even more money at those ads. It would just keep going, I've run in all 100 million impressions.
So, 100 million times people have seen the covers of the books that I run ads on. Amazon continually changes the rules on the ads so that certain books of mine are like, you can't make this promise about for this book or that book. So suddenly, they take down the ads.
And I rerun those ads and then they accept them the next time. Then we wait for a few months until they reject them again and the game continues. So because of one very consistent thing and this is another thing that I have not mentioned before.
It is that Amazon's review process is inconsistent. They hire people from all over the world to do this reviewing process of theirs. Sometimes, they'll let a book through and sometimes they'll stop it and you never will get banned just for making a request.
If you're sending a request to running an ad or sending a request to pushing a book out there, you might have one person who reviews it and says, "nope we're not letting this go through". You resubmit and the next person who reviews it says, "it's just fine".
This is something I have never mentioned on my blog and my channel before. But the fact is that sometimes, just submitting something again with no changes, just make a minor submission. And boom it goes straight on through as long as it's not clearly in violation.
But they're very inconsistent with regards especially if you're sort of on the line between "are they going to accept this ad or they're not going to accept this ad?". That's the sort of thing but running ads is by far a fantastic way. Just flip a switch and on comes the traffic.
But let's get into the 3 things to do once your book is on Amazon. So number one is paid ads. I already told you that you need to start running Amazon ads immediately the second your Kindle book or your paperback book gets live, you should do the Kindle first.
I'll tell you my secret answer, it's number three. My secret answer today is going to cover that. But your Kindle book needs to come on Amazon first then what we're going to do is we're going to be running ads and just be pushing them outright.
We're going to turn off the ones that are losing money to us. This is our goal on the ads since we can't see sales for all the different types of books that we have. Because sometimes they'll buy through this book or they'll buy through it even on a different website.
Or they'll come back later and it won't be attributed to us. Our goal on the ads and this is another secret I have not mentioned here, is that it is breaking even. It's just fine, so 40%-50%, a cost I'd say 40% at least is fine.
That is to say, because our profit margin is around 40% on all of the averages, on all of our paperback and Kindle books. Kindle books at 70% and paperbacks it could be high, it could be even less than 40% or worse than 40%. But it averages out for me around 40%.
If my ads are earning 40% of the cost to me is coming back in sales, then for me, this isn't acceptable. The cost, it's acceptable at 40%. Because the fact is I'm going to be making more money and those people are going to be joining my email list.
This is going to help me get reviews which are going to also give me the ability to market to them on my future books. We have to think a little bit through this. Breaking even is fantastic, I'm okay with that.
I do not shut ads down that are break-even but ads that are not breaking even and have lost me $2, I shut them down. There's a little bit of a more ad strategy, everybody has different ones. But these have worked for me greatly since 2017 when I started running ads four years ago.
You'll have to give it a try, so that's the first question I asked for anybody who's got a book on the market. Are you running ads? They're like, "how do you run ads?". I'm like, "look, just set it up and let him do an automatic keyword selection set up 15 cents per ad".
"Then shut it down if you lose $2". That's it, it's very very simple, we want a cost of about 40%. But if you're not losing $2, then just let the ad run forever.
So I don't ever shut them down. I've got ads still running from 2017 in the beginning. It was January 2016 when I first took a course on how to run ads. Number two organic marketing, interact with your ideal customers.
I had somebody, one of my students. Even just a few days ago and they were like "How exactly am I supposed to get my books to sell?". They keep posting them into Facebook groups with other authors.
Well, rule number one quit posting and spamming other authors with your books. They don't want to buy your books, they're not your target audience. They were doing a book on the subject of what was it they were doing.
It was abuse or something like that and then they were sending it to other authors. But why would other authors care about this particular category of abuse? Instead, go to abuse groups.
You're going to be able to help people who have been abused or victims of abuse. And you can go there and interact with those people, do not just post your book and hope to make sales. This method is terrible even people direct messaging me to send me spamming of their latest books.
I was like, why in the world would I go buy your book? I have no reason to do that, I buy books for which I know I like and trust the authors. It's very simple, you should be using the same strategy.
Joining Reddit groups, Facebook groups, Twitter, wherever the people who are reading the types of books that you're writing. Those people who are reading it like if it's solving a problem, go to those locations and interact with the readers.
Then you're able to say "hey look I've published this book on this subject". That is amazing and then you get a little social proof and such. What will happen is you'll start to see sales coming through those people.
In addition, you can ask them "Can you help me leave a review on this book?". And then we're continuing the cycle of getting the reviews that we need to get our books to sell.
Content Marketing Approach
The other thing we can do which is probably the best return on investment other than getting people on your email list which we're going to do that as well through this method is content marketing. Where you're putting out Youtube videos or podcasts and you're writing a blog or going to other sites where you can post content.
That content will stay on the internet forever right like medium or buffer or some of these other locations where you're able to put your content onto the market. The result is that you're going to see organic traffic flooding into those sites. Causing people to get on your email list.
They can also get to see the books that you're selling or whatever else you might be selling like courses or other things. Those are related to the offer that is in your book and this is going to help drive sales for your book. It's going to happen while you're sleeping.
You don't even have to pay for it because Google's trying to help people. They're trying to help people who want to read what it is that you're writing about. If you're looking to get started on content marketing, you can check out my Content Marketing Course.
To ensure that you're able to learn the steps easily. Content marketing made easy, go ahead and check it out. Get started immediately with a course that I've put out there.
The video course will take you step by step exactly what you need to do to make your book successful. This is by far the number one way to earn the biggest return on investment. But it's a slow process to get your content out there.
Eventually, your readers will find it which is exactly what happens to me. I've been very very happy with this particular route. Let's move on to the secret answer today, the third point and secret point of the day is to get your audiobook version up and running.
The second you have your Kindle version out to run on ACX and Audible, you have to have a Kindle version available. So we're going to want to get that Kindle version out as quickly as possible as we mentioned before. Then immediately go on to the Audible version.
You can either pay to find somebody on Upwork which is what I did for my books. That's what almost all of my author and self-publishing coach friends also do which is exactly finding your person who can do it for you. You can do a royalty split with the narrators that you will find on ACX Audible.
If you find it too stressful to work through the Upwork process, then just start your first books. Do it that way you'll get 20% royalties on all your audiobooks. It takes them 4-6 months now to review your book.
So when should you start doing it, when is the best time to plant a tree? When it comes to audiobooks, it's 4 months ago, because it takes 4 months for them to make it go live. That book will just sit there and crank and earn you money.
This is the whole point. You're getting passive income which you can then take and reinvest back. And get even better covers, better descriptions, better quality books on your next one, or pay for courses. Pay for coaching and all sorts of stuff.
This is one of the things that I've discovered. I even have my business coach and the books fund everything. You can hire virtual assistants to help you in the whole process of putting your books on the market.
You can hire better cover designers and this is one of the things that so many authors don't understand. It is that when you're getting started, money can sometimes be a little bit short. But once we have enough books on the market, they're pumping enough cash.
We can suddenly fund these other aspects of our business. It depends upon what kind of lifestyle you're looking for. Are you looking to put a book on the market and have it sell no copies?
The starving artist, well if you are, then this is the wrong place for you. Because my goal is to help you get your books selling. Does that make sense? So not just that you've written a book that never sees the light of day or you put it on the market and it crashes and burns.
Getting your books selling and that's the reason why you should not be ignoring content marketing. Some of these other strategies that I teach and help you know. So if you need coaching and help with these sorts of things, then start getting it going.
If you are looking to build the company business up, then implement the strategies I'm teaching here into your thing. You're looking to start getting these books to sell. And so you will have the money to pay for courses, coaching, and other things.
That is going to ensure that we're going to be able to leverage your business. So that you're able to live the lifestyle that you would like to do from the books that you're doing. And finally, the most important I know I snuck it in an extra secret tip on our third point of the day.
It is that you should start your next book now, when exactly should you start your next book? Well, the answer is the same day you put your first book on the market. We immediately start running ads.
We get our audiobook in production and we start writing our next book. Because we do not wish to take a break, as an author you need to keep on pumping books out onto the market. We create the books, we edit the books, and each time you do it you will get better.
Like I've always told you all here on this blog and my channel if you've listened. If there's one thing clear to you, it is when you put the first book on the market. Unless you already have a crowd of people who are just dying asking you all the time "when are you going to do your book? I cannot wait to read it".
Then the reality is you're not going to get many sales on that first book. I know that's very difficult to believe, your book is so amazing that everybody's going to want to buy it. Except for the fact that nobody knows you and that is a huge liability.
So what my goal for you as somebody who's been through the trenches, I know exactly how you feel. I have 200 plus books that I've self-published onto the market. It is to make sure that you are not making this mistake when you are finished with your first book.
Do yourself a favor and start the next book, stay in the same niche and get that next book going. You will be better with your next book, the quality will go up. Do not go back to your first book, start editing and re-editing, don't get into this cycle.
I can tell you how many students I have, stuck in the editing and re-editing, never publishing. It just needs to get the thing onto the market. Let the market tell you if they say there's a bunch of grammar mistakes or other things like that.
after you've done a couple of rounds of editing. Because the fact is every time you reread your book, you will find new stuff but the rate of the return on investment for those additional times is so small. It's not worth your time to do.
So I hope that made a little bit of sense. And my question for you today even though I didn't write it out, it was what have you found that you forgot to do of these 3 things to do once your book is on Amazon? Which ones have you not done when you first, put your book onto the market?
If you put your book under the market and you ignored one of these three, let me know below in the comments. And check out my other articles and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.