There are series of a tasks in self-publishing and you might find it difficult because you don't have the skill to do those steps. Let me tell you how to build a self-publishing team so that you can delegate the tasks and make self-publishing easier for you.
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's stopping you from building the right team for your self-publishing business.
The topic we're going to discuss in today's article is how to build a self-publishing team? When you're first getting started with self-publishing, you may be limited a bit by the budget that you have. Maybe you do not depend upon your starting point in this entire process.
One thing you're going to discover is there are a whole series of tasks for which either you don't have the skill to do those steps or you don't want to do those steps. Because the fact is maybe designing a cover or trying to edit your book, you're seeing that you're not able to do as good of a job as other people.
Those who are specifically trained or are skilled in those sets. That's one side of it and the other side of it is maybe you've been doing a lot of these tasks. But you find them tedious and it's killing your motivation to continue to self-publish books as an author.
Because you're exactly trying to do these steps that you aren't as a person built to do. After all, maybe you just want to write some books. This is a feeling that many authors have.
It can destroy what you're doing and the solution is building a team. But where exactly and how do we get started with that? This is what we're going to discuss. Check out my free Self-Publishing Checklist where you'll find the secrets to get your book out there self-published and selling.
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On my own story, this was kind of an interesting one. Because it was very surprising what exactly and how this would go about taking place. I had no idea about this whole subject of a self-publishing team when I first got started.
I just started with a Kindle book that told me how to go about creating a book for Kindle. I also was watching some Youtube videos and some other books that I was reading at the time. That was taking me through some of the basic steps necessary to get our books self-published.
As I was moving through the steps, I was writing a thousand words a day. Everything was going just fine until I realized I'm going to need a cover, I'm going to need a like a cover designer. I'm going to need an editor, a narrator, and somebody to do the formatting of my books.
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I may need a coach to help motivate me. What about the keywords and the descriptions? Also with the paperback formats and narrators on the audiobook version, there were so many different roles. I began to understand that I wasn't going to be able to do all of these roles myself.
I even tried to hire people out on Fiverr on certain gigs just finding random people who would do the job without pay. Without costing too much money since I wasn't pulling in any money really at the time. But I discovered that this was also not particularly a great strategy.
Because those people that I had been hiring were doing a poor job. I would just have to hire them again to fix the mistakes that they had made on the original job. Since I wasn't even familiar with the steps, it was hard for me to see whether or not they were doing it correctly or incorrectly.
That was a huge challenge for me. So what happened was some of the teams that I started to build when I was getting going were just one-off jobs. That would be like in the gig economy where you're hiring a person to do a single job for you.
Over time, you begin to find the ways that you're going to best do this. What you need exactly is a great cover. Then you test out a lot of cover artists or people who are doing ghostwriting for you if you choose to go that route.
Or finding keywords and these other things single one-off jobs. But I also saw that why would I want to go with one-off jobs as opposed to you can just as well hire a team and train them? That was the beginning which was well if you're going to hire a team, then how exactly do you go about doing this?
You have to have an idea of what it is you want them to do. That was when I began to understand the key to winning in self-publishing was having a system where it's going through the steps like a checklist. A system that pulls them through the steps and then a team that can implement those steps.
That was one of the key things that I did. I started at the beginning of creating courses where I would go through video courses. Explaining how to do these steps to my virtual assistants so that they would be able to put together my books instead of me having to put together the books.
Those are the very courses like the Book Formatting Course and Content Marketing Course that I have. Because what better way instead of explaining to each of the virtual assistants how to go about doing it? Why not just create a video where they could follow the simple and easy-to-follow steps and have their book on the market?
That was the beginning of my understanding that this is relevant to self-publishers as well. Other self-publishers could use the very same content. These videos that I had created for my virtual assistants to get your books onto the market.
Go ahead and check out the courses that I offer exactly in this area and I think you will also find it helpful. One of the things is you get feedback from your virtual assistants or your teammates. They will take a look as they try to implement it.
Then I change the video courses and improve them as things change within the world of Kindle. Those are worth checking out, that was a mistake that I made very early which was trying to manually figure it all out myself. Without actually taking a course which would take you very simply easily through it.
Learning On How To Hire People
I had seen a lot of other courses that are offered on the market by fake gurus with regards to self-publishing. The courses are so complicated, you get lost almost in the first module. As opposed to the easy way of doing self-publishing which is moving very easily through the steps.
Not seeing 50 ways to do each thing but just one way to do things as we move through. We build our team around these exact steps because they can also watch these videos. And learn how to put the books together for us so that we don't have to do this.
That is what I'm all about. It is doing it the easy way and I was able to save a lot of time by having my virtual assistants use these exact videos. The system would be of checklists and I also use Todoist as I've mentioned in some other blogs.
To create projects that they would be able to do and that program is very affordable. Like $40 a year for one license which is enough to create the projects. That your virtual assistants or whoever you wish to hire to go about doing the steps that you're going to need to get your book onto the market.
I am very big on the system side of it. Because in reality, for almost all products and services it comes down to your delivery system. The system itself of how exactly you produce these books.
Whether you succeed or fail as opposed to just randomly trying to hope that your book is going to get on the market. And hope is a terrible way of trying to get your book self-published. Or building a team which is something that I've spent a lot of time focusing on over the past several years.
So how to build a self-publishing team? Here are the three keys. Number one learn the basics of how to do it, you're hiring these people. I'm telling you that no matter what your budget is, it's probably a good idea if you already know what it is you expect them to do for you.
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So if it comes to formatting, take the course that I have, go through the course, and learn how to do formatting. Then you can hand it over to your virtual assistants or somebody else to do it. The same goes with cover design, keyword research, and all of these things we discuss in these blogs that I've created.
The 300 plus blogs and videos that I've created here and on Youtube are going through and covering these specific topics. To make sure that it is easy for you to figure it out first. But don't do this forever, move on, we don't want to get burnt out on these steps.
It's best to then hire it out because then you're able to see you hire somebody to do it. You already know what to expect since you have already been doing the very steps that you're asking them to do. So this is a very key point here which is a key point that many people miss.
You do not want to get burnt out on doing steps that you find tedious. Or other people use the royalties that are coming from your book sales to pay for those people to do these services for you. It is positive on multiple levels because you're able to provide work for other people.
You're able to ensure that you're continuing to put out books and do things that you find exciting like writing the books. As opposed to all of the other work some people think, "I'll just wait forever for a traditional publishing company to hire to pay me just to write, then I can just write books all the time".
But the problem is you don't understand that they only want to hire you, pay you, and have you as an author inside of their publishing company if they know that your book is going to sell. And what better way of showing them this than already having a book that's selling.
You self-publish it. You prove to them you have an audience of hungry readers. You're building that audience in your email list. There are all of these different things that you're already doing.
When it comes to your book, you would say "look I've got a new book I'm interested in a deal for this book". They look and say "wow! we already see that you have a huge audience and people are buying your book already". So it's all about having this momentum.
You have that team around you so that you're able to put out these books. The best way in reality to market any given book that you have is to write another book. You finish your first book, we have the funneling we're using that content marketing as I've discussed and you can check out the course on that one.
You're continually pushing more traffic towards the books that you have. You're putting out new books, you're finding new readers. We are expanding your empire of hungry readers for your book.
And what happens is eventually you're going to start getting the attention of some of these traditional publishers. Then it's up to you to decide you'll make less money in some ways if you go with them. But sometimes you need people to want to feel as an author that you've been accepted as a traditional publisher.
You're not a real author or something, it's nonsense. But for many authors, this is very important. This gives you that option and then you would come to them and say "look I've got this amazing manuscript for a book".
At the same time, they're able to take a look and see that you already have books on the market that are selling. They can see your following on Pinterest, Instagram, and TikTok. All of these other places that many authors have had success at finding audiences.
They can even see your ranking as an author on Amazon. And so they would know already that you are not going to be a risk for them. That is something that many authors value.
The Power Of Marketing
How can you produce so many books with covers, descriptions, keywords, and all of this? The answer is that you're going to need to have that team. But let's get to the second point. You should transfer tasks over to your teams so that you can focus on one thing that your team is unable to deliver.
It's going to be your personality, that's where the content marketing, your face I would not do anonymously with regards to your books. Unless you have multiple genres, then you should use pen names. But otherwise, it's a good idea to use your face in your marketing.
It will increase your sales. In addition, you have to keep in mind that your virtual assistants or these other team members, they're not going to be able to match and do the work that you've been doing.
Because this is the thing now, one of the things from one of my marketing podcasts. I like to listen to what they refer to as the self-milking cow which is the idea is that you as the cow. I know it's not a very nice way to look at it but you have something like the milk is what you deliver.
You shouldn't be the one who milks the self-milking. As then you're taking the milk and you're processing it, you're transporting it and you're selling it. You're doing all of these tasks. When in reality, you have a specific special power in what you're doing and what you're delivering that you should focus on.
You should ask not how to do these other things but who can do these other tasks to ensure that you're able to do the one special power that you have? And by learning the basics of these other tasks, you're able to figure out which of them you enjoy doing yourself and which of them are low paid?
You get low refund value out of them and you can hire them out to other people to do. Maybe you get tired of some of the tasks and you can just simply pay other people. Like you're running ads you don't want to do it.
Pay somebody else to do it. An ads agency to run the ads against your books or any of these other things. There's a whole series, I think it's a thousand tasks in all. Those are all the different things around self-publishing that you could theoretically be doing.
From building your email lists to setting up a web page to all of these things that can be very powerful at driving traffic. You can get very discouraged as you move forward through the process. By building a team of people who are good at these skills, you should still learn the basics.
But building up that team, we're able to get momentum and keep on doing the one thing that's your special power which maybe it is writing the books or maybe it's the marketing of the books. Or maybe it's sometimes putting the books together or the descriptions or finding the keywords.
There are several tasks that you may be especially good at. I'm not saying that one of these versus the others is the right task for you. But I can say that I wrote a series of books, they did fine and some of them were best sellers on Amazon.
Then when I paid other people to write books on subjects I wasn't as good at, I knew that they would sell. Because of the keywords being powerful, they started out selling my books. I want you to think about that as an author.
That was when I began to understand the power of the marketing side of things. If I can pay somebody else to write a book that's going to outperform my books, I was blown away by this. I could not even believe that was even possible.
But it was this whole concept of if you have a team together, you're able to do these experiments. And that funds the salaries for my two permanent employees. So that's just a couple of thoughts to keep in mind.
But let's get on to the secret point of today and the secret is you aren't going to do this right. But with practice, you will find yourself with the team that is right for you. The team that's right for me will not be the team that's right for you.
And only over time are you going to find the exact people that you're going to need to have on your team. Those are best with you in terms of communication and style and professionalism. The price and the budget that you have available to you.
To find the people that are going to work best for you. You may have to test out a lot of people, I think I hired all 20 people and two people are the remaining ones on that list. One of the tools that I used was running them through the courses that I offer.
Where they would go through the video courses and then they would attempt to create the books. Based upon what they were learning in the lessons and they were either able to do it or they weren't able to do it. And I kept the ones that were able to do it, everybody gets paid as I'm building the team.
So we can just do some experiments to find out who works best for you or me in this case. But it is in the team and the system, this combination of team and system. If you put them together in the right way, we're going to see your bookselling a lot more copies.
We're going to see your output of how much you can produce increasing and you're going to see the sales jumping. I don't know what your dream, what your vision is for this whole self-publishing thing. Whether you want to have it as your full-time job or whether you want to be making much more money than your day job.
I don't know what your personal goals are, what kind of lifestyle you wish to have while you're sleeping. It's selling books but if the system and the team, if you do not have them in place, I can guarantee you, you're probably going to fail here.
Almost everybody I've seen and talked with who's been very successful in the self-publishing business has always had their team and a system in place. To ensure that they're maximizing the sales that they're doing. And focusing on their one superhuman strength which every one of us has.
You just need to figure out what it is for you. My question for you today is have you started building your self-publishing team? Do you know how to build a self-publishing team? If you have, write "Yes" below in the comments. If you have not yet started, write "No" in the comments.
Because I need to know where you're coming from and how far you've come with building your team. If this is a topic that is of interest to you, go ahead and let me know. And check out my other articles and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.