Are you trying to self-publish but struggling to start doing it? I’m going to tell you how to self-publish without traditional publishers.
Today's topic has three points and you're going to want to stick around because the third point is a secret as to the most important step when it comes to self-publishing your book. That's one of the reasons why in today's article we are going to discuss this is the easiest way to publish your book, no traditional publishers are required.
By the end of this article, you're going to know why you ought to self-publish your book as opposed to going with a traditional publisher. You're going to have the steps necessary to go about getting your book self-published.
You're going to feel great knowing you can get your book onto the market without any real massive additional help or having to wait for any gatekeepers. So, after having gone through a pile of my books, I've over 200 books on Amazon and multiple bestsellers.
During this period, I've learned an awful lot of different tricks that are useful when it comes to getting your books not only self-published but also selling. These are the things that I discussed with my clients regularly. But I also have a free offer which is just to do a Discovery Session.
It is where we're able to look and see where you are on the self-publishing journey. We will sort of map out where exactly you should be going. If that is something of interest to you, just check out and take a look at the Discovery Session, the free one. And just book a time that works for you.
So, we go back to when I was first getting started with Group Coaching and on a different platform. Now, I moved over to Volley but previously I'd use Facebook and several other platforms. I was working with a client named Ted and we were going back and forth on one specific issue.
He was eager to get his book traditionally published and I asked, why exactly are you so eager to get it traditionally published? He said, well I don't feel like a real author unless it's been chosen or selected by a traditional publisher. This is very common for so many authors.
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You've written something but you don't feel like an author. You just feel like somebody who's dabbling in writing or whatever the case may be. But in fact, you are once you get it published.
You're a published author, whether you self-published it or whether it was chosen by some traditional publisher. But whatever the case was, Ted was starting to get frustrated. He had been trying for a very long time to get a traditional publisher to choose his book.
He also informed me that one of the reasons he wasn't going with the self-publishing route was exactly because maybe there were just too many steps. It was so confusing and so clearly, he wasn't going to be able to do it and in that he was incorrect.
So, that's one of the things with Group Coaching, we're able to go through specific problems and barriers that you have. Limiting mindsets and barriers that we're able to remove one by one as we move forward through the self-publishing process.
So, what exactly is the easiest way to self-publish your book? I'm going to tell you three steps. The first step is you're going to need a book. You're going to need a manuscript for a book you may have written yourself.
Or you can pay somebody else to write like a ghostwriting organization or companies that do that. There are a couple of different ways of doing this. Maybe it's somebody in your family or a child who's written a book and you want to get it onto the market.
Do It Yourself Using The Right Tools
You don't necessarily have to even start with a book you have written. So, any of these options is perfect. The second thing is you need a format. I use Jutoh as I'm going through my formatting process to get this going.
Also, the manuscript should be edited as well. Make sure you run it through Grammarly, it's very powerful too. So, this combination is really good to ensure that the book is formatted properly and is free of mistakes.
We're running through editors and these sorts of things. As we're working forward in the self-publishing process that brings us to our second point which would be the cover creation. I like to go with Fiverr myself, that's the one that I prefer when I'm trying to figure out a cover designer.
Check that out, that’s the Fiverr designer that I specifically use. It cost about $18 order to get a cover. It's a good deal. You just show her which covers you like and then she's able to do it.
But the secret answer of today and this is the thing that is the most difficult. It requires a lot of work and is the most important when it comes to getting your books to sell. It is the title and subtitle that you're going to be using in the book.
It should be matching of course with the cover. But this title and subtitle, it’s the very first question I'm going to ask you if you do a Discovery Session with me or if you join my 1-On-1 Program or any of these other things.
Let us first start and see if we can find the top competitors for the book, you're thinking of putting a book onto the market. Into which market? Remember, it's not a market if you're the only one with the book there.
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You will be functionally a market. But to be a real market, you have to have buyers and sellers. People who are selling something in a thing. For example, people who sell books on how to do puppy training.
Then, we have buyers, and people come. To those people who have puppies, they want to learn how to train them. So, they will buy puppy training books from these sellers. Now, we have ourselves a market, you have both sides going.
Now, what kind of market do we want to see? We want to see a market where there are not that many sellers but a lot of buyers and Amazon gives us that information for free. That's one of the reasons I use KDSpy, it’s my number one tool for figuring out exactly which keywords in your title and subtitle are so powerful.
If you're doing this 100% correctly, then when people read your title and subtitle and look at that cover which should also match the best sellers in your specific genre or subgenre that you're going into, they should know immediately what kind of book this is.
They should know what exactly it has to offer and why they should buy it. So, your ideal reader would immediately have a magnetism towards this book. It has one simple goal; to get them to click. If a person does not click after looking at the cover, title, subtitle, and reviews of course but that comes later, they are never going to purchase your book.
In fact, on Amazon, you won't see a Buy Now button on the search results. Well, I think on some products, you will but at least on the books, you have to click on the sales page. Where you see the description of the book and the author's bio.
Serving A Market With Hungry Readers
You can go into the reviews and you can see the prices. All of these sorts of things are buried a little bit deeper into that specific thing. You will never get there if your title and subtitle are off. In particular, why exactly would that be the case?
How exactly did they find your book in the first place? If you have a good title and subtitle, it's because the search results on Amazon brought your book up on that page. You're telling them this is a paranormal romance for example or this is a puppy training book.
So, when a person types that in, your book needs to communicate that fast. So, they know what kind of book this is based on the cover. You'll see that the best sellers within a particular sub-genre, all are using the same covers.
Very similar types of colors, the colors are the same including the covers and the fonts. Are there pictures on the cover? Is there a person on the cover? Is it sort of like an animation, like a drawing of some sort?
You'll find within any given sub-genre on Amazon, they will have a pattern and they will all be following the same pattern. But how would you find that? Well, we're to do the research by looking at the best sellers.
I use KDSpy as my number one tool, going to take a look at those specific titles. To figure out which ones are going to be the titles and subtitles. Looking at word clouds, which words are showing up in all of these? To figure out what are going to be the best titles for my next book.
Secondly, I'm going to look at the number of results for the keywords I'm thinking of as the primary keyword for my book. Compared to how many books on that subject show up in their search results like Kindle books or paperback books.
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Then we look at how many are in the top hundred thousand books on all of Amazon. This is by far something, you're going to want to use the time for. It is the most important thing you're going to do in the self-publishing process.
In many ways, it's probably best if you could start with this step as your very first step. I know I put it as a number three which is a bit crazy but it is the most important step. And so, before we even start writing the book in a perfect world, we would start and say, am I even writing into a market where you have hungry readers?
You have a start, a market that wants more and can't get it. It is causing the prices to go up and causing the demand to go up. It is causing the number of sales to go up within each of these areas. So you're able to sell your books at a higher price as well.
But that's a different article where we're discussing pricing strategies. I want you to get this point through your head and most people do not pay attention to this. Most authors put books out there and cannot understand why it's not selling.
It's not selling because nobody knows what value your book is providing. They never even saw the book because no matter what they search for, it will never show up. You're not targeting profitable keywords which is by far the most important thing you could be doing.
But I went through a few tools and I told you KDSpy was one of them. But if you'd like to hear the whole complete set of The Most Underrated Self-Publishing Tools: Inexpensive Apps That Make A Difference, then check that out.