Marketing more books on the market can help you get more sales but the question that you might be asking is "how many books should I self-publish?". Find out more about self-publishing and how you can get started right away.
Today's topic has three points and you're going to want to stick around for the third point. Because it's a secret as to how an author can get a lot more books on the market much faster.
Many authors have not considered this as an option when it comes to self-publishing. That is what we want to discuss today. The question for today is "how many books should I self-publish?".
The person who sent this in is wondering. Maybe you've self-published, you've written one book or a couple of books. You're thinking "Well, was that enough? or should I do more books?".
Then you get stuck where you're not able to make the decision. Should you start writing more or maybe move on to something else? At what point do we start writing more or quit writing?
Maybe the books we put on the market already are not selling. We're thinking nobody wants to read what you have to say. But that is probably not the truth and this is what we're going to discuss in today's article.
But before we get into the answers, check out my absolutely free Self-Publishing Checklist. Let's get into it, Chicken Soup!
The thing is when I was at the Air Force Academy several years ago, I had a roommate who was a very average reader. At the time, I was not much of a reader and I am now, thanks to self-publishing. But my roommate enjoyed reading lots of the Chicken Soup For The Soul series.
He would go through book after book after book. I began to wonder a little bit, how many books are on the market? Because he was going through so many of them.
You're just wondering this seems like an awful lot of books from the author of the book. But the author of the series was very clever because each book would be Chicken Soup For The Soul Of A Hiker, Chicken Soup For The Soul Of Children, Grandparents, or whatever it is.
He would have this whole series of books built out. He had a hungry market and he just keeps feeding them more books on the same subject. There are some books like this whether we're dealing with fiction, you have a whole series of books that cover go from book to book to book to book.
And we just build a universe out of the thing or movies for example. Or in non-fiction when we find a particular niche that we like for example, one I was thinking about was Elrod's book series, The Miracle Morning.
It's even better because then you work together with other authors. Have them do a lot of the writing, you check to make sure it's in line with what you're trying to do. You have one more book on the market following the same pattern.
Must-Have A Large Distribution
Using the same similar advice or similar stories or whatever it would be. You're meeting your audience's expectations. They know you, they like you, they trust you, and so they want more books.
The thing is a huge amount of money is made going through with customers that just can't get enough, your readers simply can't enough. You just keep on coming out so when you're sticking to one thing that works a specific niche.
It will help you achieve what you're trying to do when you're holding into that similar niche. We're going to take a closer look now at exactly this Chicken Soup For The Soul. A couple of things they did right that are going to be able to help you with today's question which was, "how many books should I self-publish?".
Or how many books should you self-publish? The first answer is you should publish as many books as you can get out onto the market. The more books you publish, the more money you will make.
The old books continue earning money years into the future after you've already published and moved on. The same goes with music, a phrase that's often used is called "the long tail". That is when you put something onto the market right, it continues to sell not every day but a little bit here and there.
If you have a lot of formats and a huge distribution, we continue to see this trickling of sales for each book. The more books we have, we're building a long tail now. Maybe your newest books will get the most traffic and the newest customers.
But in reality, it is my old books that are making me the most money. The combination of all the old books outcompetes and outsells the newest books that I put onto the market. On Amazon, they found that the authors who were making the most money, all had something in common.
They had 40 books or more out onto the market. One of the best marketing strategies is just to write more books. Let's get to point number two, one pin name per type of book or niche.
Do not start mixing pen names, start mixing your own name with different issues. I made this mistake when I got started. I was interested in "habits", "goal achievement", "sleep", and a whole wide variety of subjects.
I started putting books out on all of the subjects I was interested in. But then it waters down, the target audience that I'm going after. Does that make any sense?
The audience wanted to read maybe more books on "habits". For example, Scott, one of the other main authors on Amazon puts books on "habits". Steve Scott has a whole series of books on this exact subject.
One Pen Name Per Niche
You have Habits For Runners, Habits For Children, Habits For Adults, and we continue the game. But do not switch away from that one topic. You might be thinking people get bored with it.
We are bringing in new customers. We're hitting it from different angles and we learn as we go. So you're going to learn new things that you're going to be able to implement right away.
Your new audience will be more than eager to go and purchase that. The secret answer for today which is the third answer is that you can hire people on Fiverr or Upwork to ghostwrite for you.
That is to say, you do not need to write all of the books yourself. You can find profitable niches that you may not be interested in writing in. But the fact is by simply writing these books out, overpaying other people to write these books, you already are familiar with the process.
Those books also create a long tail for you and remember only one pen name per niche. It's completely acceptable, many authors use to have several pen names because they don't want to blend the niches. Maybe they just prefer a different name that they want to write under.
It's considered an acceptable practice. The only rule I would say is to make sure your books are high quality that your customers are going to be happy. Otherwise, they will give you low reviews and that will stop future sales.
That's something you need to pay attention to when you're getting started with the ghostwriting game of self-publishing. One of the goals of course is to bring in more money so that you can have better tools and better editing for your books as an author.
Check out this related article: Must-Have Self-Publishing Tools?
There's no reason you can't do both at the same time. Since you've already learned a lot of the skills that are necessary for getting your book on the market. It's just as easy to take any manuscript and put it onto the market.
It's very exciting when you start to get going on that process in particular. Since it frees up your time using other people's time. As opposed to using your own time which you have only a finite amount of.
So, "how many books should I self-publish?" How many books have you self-published so far? If you could write that below in the comments, that would greatly help me.
Because I want to know where you're coming from, is it one book? Is it no books? Maybe you have 100 books. I would be really really interested, so just write that below in the comments. Check out my other articles and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.