Are you looking for strategies that can help you make sales on your book? Maybe you have been doing the opposite, the reason why your books are not selling. Now, you can do this and you will never write a book that busts.
Pam couldn't figure out why her book was not selling on Amazon. Like almost no sales at all and she had done everything right. Maybe not and that's one of the reasons why in today's topic we are going to talk about Do This and You Will Never Write a Book That Busts.
The thing is that Pam was a college student living in Maryland. She had a very deep interest and a passion for writing about cooking. Because that's something she had been doing since she was a little girl.
She'd put out multiple, she'd done a lot of writing, and come up with some recipes that she wanted to share with the world. And so, she put together a cookbook and that was what she decided to do.
She was doing a vegan cookbook since she was so excited about the whole vegan lifestyle and all of that. And so, by putting out a cookbook, she could help even more people discover the recipes that she had come up with over the years.
She had a lot to share with the world. What she was hoping for was that by getting these books onto the market, she could start seeing a passive income coming in. As a college student, she wasn't making that much money.
She had heard about people who could put books onto Amazon. They start seeing a whole lot of sales coming through on these particular books they were doing. She also had several books that she wanted to get on the market.
She was thinking, “I could write several cookbooks addressing different things like desserts and main meals within the whole vegan lifestyle and that aspect of it.” Maybe expand from the cookbooks to even going further to other areas as well.
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But the problem was that she simply wasn't seeing the sales that she was hoping to see on her cookbooks. In her first book, she got onto the market. So, she was hoping to get multiple of them going.
But she wasn't going to be doing this if she didn't see sales at all. Because after all, maybe the market was telling her they just didn't want exactly what she was offering. She began to doubt this whole passive income idea.
The idea of putting books on the market that will sell while you sleep. Then, you're making money from them and you can use them to put your next books on the market. Whether or not this was even something that even was true or whether it was just a myth that nobody's able to do this.
People just talk about it but in practice, it's simply not something that can be done. So, what happened was she thought “I know, let's see if we can fix the books that people want to buy.'' So, the first thing she did was take it through multiple rounds of editing.
Because she figured the reason people don't want the book is because maybe some editing issues could be fixed. You know, in terms of some of the basic formatting or other things like that. She wasn't because you have to buy the book to even interact with the formatting.
The way we see we have a formatting mistake is when people buy the book, they leave one-star reviews. They’ll say the formatting or the spelling in these things were off. But she wasn't making those sales.
She thought that maybe if the book was edited better, just a few more rounds of editing, and then this thing would be ready to hit the market. But it had no impact. You made these changes, she spent money on editing, and it had no impact at all.
Knowing The Importance Of Title And Subtitles
So, do this and you will never write a book that busts. The second thing she decided to do then was maybe if she had better images in the book, then people would buy it. You know, putting little fancy colored highly detailed high HD images into the book.
This would possibly result in the sale she was looking for. So, she took pictures of the food and made it even fancier than it was before, but this had no impact at all. Again, we're dealing with the inside of the book.
It had no impact and that was incredibly demotivating for her. So, the thing is that she had heard and watched a couple of the videos that I put out. Where I was addressing a lot of these issues and the frustrations that a lot of people and new writers experience when trying to get their books to sell.
So, she decided “Okay, I will book a free Discovery Session.” What happened was that we sat down in a Zoom session. We were able to look at exactly where she was, what her motivations are, and the goals that she was looking to achieve.
We immediately noticed a huge issue and this one stood out. It's by far the most important thing about anything you're going to do with your books. I talked with all of my clients about this issue because it is so important if you want to see your book sell.
The answer is that your title and subtitles are incredibly important. Unless you're a famous person already, well then, they don't matter at all. Then your name matters more, right?
You're marketing across who you are already. If you're a celebrity or micro-celebrity or an influencer out there and you're in and then it doesn't matter as much. It still matters because that gives us the ability to find cold traffic audiences who've never even heard of us.
How are they going to find us if they've never heard of us? The answer is they're going to find you because they're searching for you on Google and Amazon and these other sites. For example, in her case, they type in the word vegan and they don't come up with her book.
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Now, why don't they come up with her book? Well, I can tell you exactly why they don't come up with her book. It's because she doesn't include the word vegan in the title.
She came up with something like Green Foods, Healthy, No Animals, or something like that. But the fact was that what we discovered was we used a tool that I like which is KDSpy for keywords for the book titles.
As we were going through this particular tool and were using it on her book, we found that the keywords that she was targeting on the clever titles she felt were clever. I mean I thought they were clever titles. They just have nobody searching and none of the keywords people would look for.
But using KDSpy, we were able to find all of the related keywords to the whole vegan entire grouping. We could see other books that she was competing against and see exactly which titles they were using.
Because KDSpy gives you the ability to create a word cloud of the things that people are looking for. Then we're able to go from there to use some of those keywords that they're using. And then also using the top keywords for the title itself.
Then putting these things together, we were able to come up with a title and some subtitles. It tells our audience what we're going to do. So, if it's a vegan cookbook, you need to make sure that it has in the subtitle the word vegan cookbook in there.
If it's about desserts or salad recipes or maybe it's the main meals or whatever it might be, we're exactly specifying what it is. When the person searches, it'll come up. And secondly, when they look at their amazing cover, it happens to match the others.
Giving People What They Want
The second most important thing is that the other best sellers in your niche we're going to make sure that it doesn't look too different from what they're doing. Because, if people are spending money on these books, if your book looks similar to them, then we're going to drive that same traffic.
We are going to get those conversions against your book. Just like they're making sales against their book with thousands of copies a month. Our goal is not to completely dominate a market, it's simple to jump into a market where there are already a lot of sales going on.
Take a small tiny piece of that pie that's just a teeny sliver. It is usually enough to make us quite happy with the results that we're going to get out of this entire process. So that's the second thing, right?
But the key which is also the first thing is that the title and subtitles are the absolute top priority. Unless you're a micro-influencer or a celebrity of some sort where they know you. So that's why I use KDSpy as my absolute top way.
There are two things we use with the competitor keywords that they're using and then also looking at the Top Search items. You can do that easily enough on Amazon.
If you even type in vegan and space and then type A, it will pull up all the things’ people are searching for in A and then B and then C and then D. You can also do the same thing in Google to find out what exactly it is people want.
Our goal is not to try to guess what people want but to give them what they want. What people are searching for is a great way to tell us what exactly they want. Now, when they get into your cookbook and stuff, you can give them what they need.
This is an important thing to remember with sales in general. It is that people sometimes don't know what they need. So, you tell them what they want, they get, and you deliver on that.
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Then, you give them what they need in addition to some of the background information. And a lot of other things that they're going to need. That was very important for Pam to do as well with her book.
In the end, she felt very positive about this. She felt she had a little bit better of a direction after the free Discovery Session which you also can book. Just go ahead and check on it, we can take a quick look at your situation as well.
So, she finally did purchase KDSpy. She wasn't sure, she was a little bit skeptical that maybe this isn't going to work so well. What happened was that she changed her title and she changed her subtitle.
She was looking at the Top Search key terms and things like that. But what happened was after about a week, the book started to sell. It was amazing, it was like the book's contents weren't any different really.
I mean she hadn't done that much, that made no difference at all. She hadn't changed much of anything else. The description looked pretty good and the cover was still the same.
But just by changing the type of the subtitle, in particular, she was able to start seeing people who were searching or coming through to purchase her particular book. The next stop on her little journey is going to be ads.
But in terms of the most important thing in getting these sales, it was the title and the subtitle. One of the things also when we're going with this whole self-publishing thing and I was commenting to her as well is building habits into what we're doing.
That plays such a pivotal role. And that's one of the reasons I want you to check out 3 60-Second Habits For A Best Selling Book. Go ahead and check that out.