Are you planning to put your books on Amazon? Here are the things to know before you publish on Amazon Kindle.
Penny had been making the absolute final changes to her book for months and months. It had been like six months since she had finished the book. She had gone through all of the editing and the cover and the metadata.
All of this sort of work was already complete. But at this point, she just had a few more changes that needed to be made. Just a last change which she continued to do month after month.
Making additional last changes and still never published her books. After all, the book would be better with just a few more changes, right? Well, not so much. That's why in today's topic, we are going to discuss Things To Know Before You Publish On Amazon Kindle.
Penny is a writer, a first-time writer. She writes psychological thrillers and she lives in Alabama. She's been working on this for a long time.
She had a very good idea of exactly the storyline. How additional books were going to be playing out along the same line of the same character. Following this character around within these psychological thrillers.
A very exciting concept and based upon what I was looking at, the outlines that she had been working on, I could see this was a really good idea. A book that was going to sell was worth getting on the market.
The thing was that she wanted to get her book out and be a bestseller. To finally have the story that she's been thinking about for all of these years on the market. But the problem is that she discovered there were just so many improvements that needed to be made before she would put the book on the market.
This is a common problem that so many people have. Because after all, if I just make a few more changes, it will be better, right? So, she noticed around the same time that another book was coming out into nearly an identical target market.
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So, in other words, the same niche is this psychological thriller niche. Particularly some other details of this that make it specific to her when it was coming out onto the market. The thing was she realized that if she didn't act soon, this could bring other books in.
The competition level is going to grow within this market. All because her book wasn't out on the market. But she began to doubt herself and realized that she didn't want to release the book until it was ready.
She would make a fool out of herself. She's a first-time author and she just wanted to get it right with her very first book. So, she came up with a few ideas.
The first one was that she would reread her book just one more time. One more reread where I read through it and then like if I cut out this chapter or I cut out this paragraph and I add in some additional things like that and change some of the characters, then I'd be complete.
So, she continued this process of doing that. She said this was the final thing. But in reality, it wasn't. She's continuing to go on with this whole correction thing.
The next thing she saw was that her cover was terrible. Now I can tell you her cover was fine, there was nothing wrong with the cover. But she decided I need to redo the cover.
The cover is not going to sell at all. It's not going to work for my particular book. So, she orders a new cover but when the new cover comes, it is another thing.
Diving Deep Into Each Step
So, we continue this same process over and over. What happened is she was reading my blog and she noticed I was doing free discovery sessions which I still do. She booked a session where we were able to take a look at her book and her exact situation.
We break it down as to what is the next step. There were several things that she had to understand before publishing her book. Important things and things that are not important.
The first thing is you're going to make mistakes. This is something that no matter who you are when it's your very first book, in fact, your very first anything, your very first game of chess, your very first garden, you're going to make mistakes.
The thing is you have no audience. So, there's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's not like your book's going to come onto the market. Then all of these people are going to come out and say, my goodness I found a spelling mistake on page 42 or something.
This is not how this works with books. What happens is we have no audience when we first put our book onto the market. If we haven't been building some sort of a social media presence or some sort of content marketing strategy. So that's the second thing.
The third thing is some things can only be learned after you've had your launch. This is true with a lot of stuff where it's difficult to learn to swim until you've gotten into the water. Get your book onto the market and have it amazing before you've ever made any mistakes.
This just isn't going to happen often. Just doing the very thing, going through the steps and better. Just getting something that's good or onto the market is absolute of critical importance when you're getting started.
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It is something that so many people fail to do. They don't understand this idea that when you launch something that triggers a whole series of things inside of you as a writer. That says, “I am now a self-published author.”
People start buying the books and giving you feedback. Going back and forth to help you with your books in the future. But if you don't have this feedback loop, how will you know whether your books are good or not?
It makes it impossible for you to figure this stuff out. So, the other thing is that it's worth seeing your top competitors. These are a few things that are worth doing, looking at your top competitors and their books.
Make sure that your title and subtitle communicate who your book is. For what value it's going to provide. And number two, make sure your cover looks similar to the best sellers in your niche.
The people who are spending lots of money to buy all of these books, they're telling you what they expect to find. In Penny's case, a psychological thriller. And that's an incredibly important point.
So, we don't want to just jump over everything and just push something onto the market for the sake of it. No, we're going to do our research and there's a whole bunch of additional layers. That I go in with my clients regularly when we're looking at the deep dives into each of the steps.
But we keep things easy, not so difficult. Because by simply looking at only one thing at a time and if your book's not on the market, let's get it on the market. If we've just done the basics, we've got those things in place.
Learning So Much By Acting
We're ready to get on the market and we can make changes to the book afterward. The thing is that she found it helpful going through this. Because I was bringing up a lot of points that she had sort of thought about in the back of her mind.
But nobody had ever said, “Have you considered this? Have you considered that?” That's one of the things I enjoy about sitting down with writers and authors. To discuss exactly where your books are at and what can be done in the future.
Even just a discovery session that you can book for free will help you overcome that exact barrier. So, the thing is what did she finally do? She finally did manage to upload the files.
She got them on Amazon. She filled out all of the metadata and then she was hitting a problem with the bio. Her author's bio was not in place. So, what did she do? She started to think, maybe I'm not ready to publish the book. Maybe my keywords are off and I should wait on them. I've also heard the importance of building an email list.
Maybe I should start setting that up before I put my book out. She then realized, “Wait, I'm doing it again, this same thing which is trying to make everything perfect which is just going to delay the release of the book.”
So, she decided, “No, I'm not going to fall for this, this time.” So, she hit the publish button even though she didn't have a bio or a picture of herself. Her bio was not great, I agree it was not particularly all that great.
She saw some sales. She had her friends and family of course do the initial sales. But she saw some additional sales that were happening there. And began to realize that there were some things she could change.
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But on the other side, after we hit the publish button on Amazon, we realized something very important. It is that when we get to the other side of it, our book is on the market and we're in the feedback loop.
Now, we can go in there and make changes to the content, both our paperback and our eBook. No problem making changes. The title can't be changed on the paperback version without completely taking it down but you can on the eBook and your contents.
What's inside the book, you have permission. You're allowed to go about making changes to that without it creating too much of a problem. So, if you find spelling issues or things that could be improved, though I often recommend that, you simply move on to writing the next book.
Unless we're talking about stuff that your readers are pointing out to you that should be corrected. In your first book, you've gone through the basic steps. You get that free checklist I have; you move through those steps to give yourself the best chance possible to get your book to sell.
Then at this point, we're now ready to hit publish and move on to the next book. You'll discover something magical. It is that each book you put on the market is going to get better and better. You learn so much just by acting.
You start to learn a lot of different things including when we're talking about Amazon KDP. The fact is the algorithm and how exactly it works and that's one of the reasons why you're going to want to learn more about Breaking Down KDP Publishing "Algorithm".