Mistakes are inevitable but some authors are worried about making mistakes when self-publishing. Do you make these mistakes? Check this out, I want to help you succeed in your self-publishing journey.
Today's article has three points and you're going to want to stick around for the third point. It is a secret as to the number one mistake that you may be making that's costing you a lot when it comes to self-publishing.
Today's topic that we're hitting is do you make these mistakes? In particular, when it comes to self-publishing, you're looking at getting your book out onto the market and building an audience around your books. But you're making some very big mistakes.
Some of them you may not even be aware you're making it. Therefore, you're going to want to stick around because I'm going to hit the exact top mistakes that most self-publishers just like you are making. So that you can avoid them.
Grab a copy of my Self-Publishing Secrets Checklist. To make sure that you're not skipping any of the steps necessary. And some of the secrets to getting your book onto the market and selling.
Let's get into it from my own story, I had a low expectation of my books, now this was a positive. Most authors when you're first getting started, have very high expectations. After all, your books are such high quality.
Who isn't going to want to consume them and take them in and read your books? The problem is that nobody knows who you are. Your expectations can mess with your head.
I did not have this problem because I thought, well I don't even know if anybody's going to want to buy my books at all. I knew that just because I had a good idea, that doesn't mean someone's going to want to take the chance to buy my books.
Kind of like if I were doing something else, let's say I was producing milk and I went out to the field and milked a cow then managed to put it into a bottle. What I expect that putting it on a shelf in a store, that somebody was going to buy that.
Or they think, "I don't know what this Chris Bared milk is exactly all about". They would just pass on by and simply by not knowing, I knew that I probably had a low chance of actually making a lot of sales.
Well, at least that's what I thought initially which was not terrible starting. The thing is I followed closely an expert in self-publishing's advice on how to go about putting the book together.
The problem was that this particular expert was not focused on optimizing the books. Rather, it was more focused on how we simply can get the books put together and done in a quick orderly fashion onto the market. That was a little bit of a downside but on the positive side, it worked.
The methods and things that I also teach on my Youtube channel and here on my Blog are the very things that I learned in those very early days. I'm giving you a lot of additional information to make sure you don't make the huge mistakes that I made. But which is more than I received from this expert.
This expert did do me a huge service which was telling me the basic steps. And then helping me to get my book onto the market just by reading it. I don't even think I paid the person more than a dollar and was able to work through the process by making an awful lot of mistakes.
The second thing is they got me through the basic steps of self-publishing as I mentioned. However, I did hit a point where I could get my book onto the market but it wasn't making any sales. Well, it was making one here and one there but I wasn't exactly making a pile of sales.
You couldn't exactly write home about the number of sales that were being made and so I knew something was wrong. The answer was my number one top mistake is also the one rule of every other mistake. It was that I wasn't connected to an expert or community any longer.
Working Too Many Issues
I thought I wasn't even connected to a community in the beginning I saw that there were some communities. But what do I need them for? I can just follow the instructions and get the book onto the market.
That was a huge mistake. So let's get into it, do you make these mistakes? Number one, are you working on too many issues at the same time? I see this all the time, even in the comments on my Youtube where a person is going through too many steps at the same time.
It's creating a whole bunch of problems for them when it comes to getting the book on. They lose motivation, they realize there are just too many steps. They're doing them all at the same time and that's one of the reasons for my Coaching students.
I tell them I'm not going to help you with 15 steps in the future. We're going to focus on one step at a time, even my business coach tells me the same thing. Let's not focus on this or this, let's focus on just the one issue that we can resolve at the moment.
Then every two weeks when we meet again, we're able to resolve some of our previous issues and move on to new issues. This is how we go about doing things. We're slowly scaling across a lot of different challenges, we're solving them one by one.
Then we're repeating the process as we pick up the issues that we didn't solve the previous times. So do not try to do all of the steps at the same time. The reason we even have a secrets checklist is to make sure that you're not skipping any of these things.
You're going one at a time. When we get to the last step, then we can start a new book and start over again on the first step. And we continue the process, do you understand? I hope that's clear.
We're trying, unlike the fake gurus not to bury you in a lot of knowledge that you're never going to put into action. Rather, we're trying to lighten your load by saying there's only one thing at a time. There's the next step and that's the one you need to focus on a little bit of time every day.
If you stick with it long enough, you're going to succeed and that's just the truth. Number two, are you optimizing your books to sell? My major mistake was that I didn't even know what do you mean by optimizing the books.
Well, the fact is not every cover is going to work for you. Or your description, the metadata, or in terms of a lot of the keywords. You're using all of these things to come together to ensure that your book is getting on the market and selling.
Check out this related article: Are You Failing To Sell Your Books?
So you have to figure out, are you working to optimize these books that you're going to be putting on the market? So as we go through the steps, I focus a lot of time on this because the optimized books matter as much if not usually they matter more than the quality of the book themselves.
So now we present the book, for example, you could have the most amazing food that you've prepared. The meal that's just amazing but if it looks terrible, nobody's going to want to buy it. You could say, "but the food looks so good, who's going to even take a chance on it?".
So you have to first bring the person in to see the food. In many ways the way that we experience a lot of the marketing around the food. It impacts the very way we have the overall experience of that food.
The same is true for books. When you have a fantastic cover and a fantastic author's name and a fantastic description, it makes us excited. When we read the book, we want it to be good.
In a sense that you get this self-fulfilling prophecy where you feel the book is better than it may be. Because there's this mark, it's the impact of marketing. It's unbelievable like a Coca-Cola that's advertised to you as tasting amazingly cold and fantastic.
Connect To An Expert
When you take that first drink, perhaps it does taste the way that they're marketing it. But if we advertise it differently like maybe it doesn't have that much carbonation and maybe it's kind of warm or some other issues with that Coca-Cola that you're getting ready to drink.
This can create a problem because the expectations are that it's going to be poor and terrible. When the person takes a drink, they simply are not satisfied. Even though both drinks may be identical and this is the same for your books.
I want to make sure that your readers get the most out of their books. Out of your books that they're reading. And the way that they're going to do that is if we take the books and we market them with the correct covers and these sorts of things, we're optimizing the books to sell.
Huge mistakes, most authors make this mistake. Do not become one of them. Number three and our secret answer or question of the day, is that are you doing it alone? I told you this is what I did in the beginning.
The answer is do you have a community? One way you can get a community is just by leaving comments on Youtube channels. That's one way of doing it or on Facebook pages, there's a series of ways of going about building a community.
The second thing is do you have a coach? If you don't, I offer my Coaching services which by the way your money back is guaranteed. If you're not happy with our session, you get the money back immediately.
You can check anybody, I haven't ever had anybody ask for the money back. If you ever did, you would get the money back immediately. For any Coaching session, we ensure that you're going to be completely and there's no risk associated.
The final thing is, are you taking courses to help simplify this process? Like for example, I offer a Content Marketing Course in terms of how to format your book, how to do content marketing for your books. And so I previously had done ads courses.
They've changed the ad platform so I'm going to need to update my Ads Course. But for the most part, if you're not taking or don't want to take these courses, then take somebody else's courses. I'm not even saying you have to stay with this.
Do not go it alone and these are the powerful things, community courses, and coaching. All of these things come together to ensure that you're making as many sales for your books as humanly possible. The books are coming on, you're optimizing, you're not making that mistake.
You're not working on too many issues at the same time, just one issue at a time as you're plotting through the process. The steps that are listed in my checklist and you're going to be able to achieve of getting your book onto the market.
Do you need help with that? Just leave comments below. I help people regularly with their books. That costs you nothing so let me know where you're at. I can take you through these steps even if you have no money to afford them.
Even the coaching services that I offer, one-on-one coaching. But if you wish to do it in a public forum, this is a perfect place to do it. I help people all the time with exactly this. But my question for you today is what is your top mistake in self-publishing that you have made personally?
Or do you think you're making it at the current moment? I would love to hear from you because it will help me produce better blogs and videos for you. Check out my other articles and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.