Self-publishing can be challenging especially during a time of recession. Learn how to self-publish in a recession successfully.
If you haven't noticed, we are entering a global recession and that means your books are going to stop selling as many copies. Therefore, you're going to need to take the right steps to make sure your book doesn't reach zero sales or close to it. As we're cutting into this massive recession.
So, as we're heading into a recession, that means that you're going to see an awful lot of areas where people are trying to save money. As they're trying to save money, they're going to be much more selective on which books they're going to purchase versus which books they're just going to let sit there.
Your ad campaigns are going to become less effective. Your pricing strategies are going to begin to lose a little bit of their effectiveness of them. So, you're going to need to take the right steps to make sure that your books continue to sell even in the middle of this recession.
How exactly do we recession-proof our books? Well, the first thing is you're going to need to make sure you're not cutting any corners when it comes to optimizing your books to sell. The first one is that you're going to need to choose a profitable niche.
If you're not in a profitable niche during a time of recession, your books are going to go even worse when it comes to sales. So, it makes it incredibly important that your books are inside of a niche that's selling.
Well, what exactly is a profitable niche? That's where you have hungry readers and a shortage of books. We use a tool called KDSpy. We are using this tool to determine which keywords are going to bring us sales even in this recession time.
That's usually looking for the hungry audience. As we can see, we search the number of books available for a given niche. Then at the same time, we're also going to see how many of the books are on the first page of search results for that given keyword or category.
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If you are going to be in the top hundred thousand and looking between those two, we can figure out a ratio. To find out if we are in fact in a profitable niche. One way to look at this niche concept is by seeing the keywords people would search for to find your book.
This one here is a mistake that I would say most of my clients when I first meet them almost always make this. I was even making this mistake. I found some profitable keywords accidentally in my very first book.
But otherwise, I seriously had a lot to learn when it came to keywords. Underestimating just how powerful they are at making your book visible during your recession. If your books are not showing up in the search engines, if they're not coming in front of your target audience, you're not going to make sales at all.
It's already hard enough but make sure you're in a profitable niche. Number two, you need to learn email marketing. The thing is you have email marketing, you have your content marketing, and any of your paid ads.
This combination of learning marketing and getting better at it as you're practicing each of these steps during a time of recession. You need to be able to get in direct contact with your readers. But how are you going to do that?
Amazon isn't going to share your email list. And that was something I was discussing recently with a client in Group Coaching. The absolute importance, how high it is up on the list to start the email list as early as you can?
We're not saying, stop rioting. You need to do both writing and the other. But split your time between the two, between the marketing and creating of new books. This plays a very important role.
Following The Flow Of Winning
It's just like a tree, right? When's the best time to plant a tree? Well, 20 years ago and that's about the same time as the email list. This is also the reason why you need to stick to one niche.
You found your profitable niche so now you're going to just stick to that. When you're building your email list, you're not all over the place. Trying to get into contact with people from all of these different areas and all these different niches and annoying people.
As opposed to one subject that you talk about in your specific niche, such an important point. The same goes true when you're doing content marketing. As you're picking up speed, we're not doing everything at once.
That's how we keep things easy. Pick up one skill, practice that skill, and then add on another skill. We continue rotating through the different things we have until we have momentum in getting sales.
We bring on a team and now it gets easier to do multiple things at the same time in parallel on a given day. This is the flow of winning when it comes to self-publishing. Something that a lot of authors never get to this point.
Because you've already broken enough of the rules that you're simply not going to see those sales. The final thing is paid ads, it’s the first thing. The second you have your book in the Kindle format on Amazon, it's time to start running those ads. We want to run the ads.
Now, you need to work hard. We have to at least get that one review on your book. We run the ads against it and then see what happens.
One of the things that surprised some of my 1-On-1 clients is that when we're going through our session in a period of one session, it takes about 10 to 15 minutes to get your ad started.
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I remember the first time somebody said, you should be running Amazon ads. I'm like, ads? This seems complicated. Doesn't that cost a lot of money? The answer is no and they've earned me a lot of money.
After pushing something more than 120 million times, people have seen my ads. I look at the sales that come through them and it is a massive amount of money. Bringing me new clients and new people on my email lists.
So, this is something you cannot skip when it comes to a time of recession. We need to be able to contact these people without having to go through an intermediary like Amazon and hoping for the best.
Keep in mind, once they're on your email list, you don't have to pay again to get access to them. Like with ads, you have to keep on paying and they can raise the rates. Like they do to make it difficult for authors to put out book after book inside of the same niche.
Keep on optimizing, we want to see the best sellers in the categories that you're targeting for your keywords. We want to see what they're doing and make sure our book looks very similar to their book. But even they make huge mistakes.
Now, one of the things that we were discussing with one of my Group Coaching clients recently was the idea that well, which one of these changes I need to make to my sales page for my book to get the sales I need.
The answer is well if you change this in the description, it's going to probably increase your sales between two and five percent. If you make these changes in your author's bio, that's going to bump it another two or five percent.
Making Sure There Is A Market For Your Books
What about your pricing strategy? This is going to directly impact how much you can pay for ads. So many people are undercharging for their books. This is one of the reasons why I do power sessions with people for just $7.
We do 15 minutes back and forth on the Volley app. We're able to hammer out some of the common mistakes that are being made. That's one of the reasons you can just check that out.
It is so easy, we just sit down, and we go straight through it. We can look and see what mistakes you've made in your book. Or even better, we can help you prevent those mistakes before you've even chosen the title. To make sure you are not going to be publishing a book in a dead market.
Now, trust me, I saw somebody, one of my people I was going back and forth even on YouTube, I looked at his books and he had like 30 books on the market. Then, they're all in the millions ranking. It was terrible how they were all doing.
The reason being was he chose a market that simply has no sales in it. You may be an expert at I don't know, let's just say blowing glass decorations or something. You could come out with every book and you know how to do this color and how to do that material.
But if there's no market for it, nobody's going to buy those books. The way that we can tell whether somebody's going to buy a book or not is by knowing, if are they already buying the books on Amazon right now or aren't they.
Because if they're not buying the books currently on Amazon, well guess what? There is a low probability they're going to start buying your books in that same niche. Now, it's hard to feel that way.
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I asked people what the issue was and well, I'm sort of all over the place. That's the wrong answer. If you want to sell no books, that's a perfect way to do it. I'm just a little bit of this, a little of that. What I’m doing doesn't make any sense.
So, we want to hammer in focus on what we're doing. Making sure that we're putting out books in profitable niches. We're making sure they're optimized. Then, we keep repeating these steps and getting better.
As I was pointing out recently to somebody during a power session, there are about a thousand different strategies that you can implement for your books. 1,000 strategies but that's not the easy way. We start at the highest level and just do the low-hanging fruit first.
As we go through it, we move on to deeper and deeper things. That's one of the reasons why if you aren't working with somebody regularly, I would recommend getting in contact with me so that we can directly work back and forth.
If it's not me, then choose somebody else who's published over 200 books, and has 120 million ads with 40,000 sales. Choose somebody who has been through it in the trenches. Understands what it takes to get books sold.
You do not want to go through this whole thing alone. But we were just discussing a little bit about categories. Making sure your books are in the correct categories. The best way to do that is to check out the 3 Best Book Categories On Amazon.