Have you ever thought of hiring someone on Fiverr? Here’s how to use Fiverr for your self-published books.
In today's article, we're going to take a close look at how Fiverr can help you, what exactly it is, what it can do for you, and what it can't do for you. So, today's topic is about how to use Fiverr for your self-published books. And let me tell you, there are an awful lot of ways to do just that.
So, the first question you're probably wondering is, what exactly is Fiverr? Now, some of you already know, so stick with me. But when you're getting started with anything online, one option you have is to Google it, and some sources are going to show you how to do stuff yourself.
You'll see that with self-publishing, you can do most of the steps yourself without any additional help. You can theoretically make your covers, do your editing, do your formatting, and do every single aspect of self-publishing. You can even do your running of ads and marketing, all of it.
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However, there is a huge challenge with that, which is your time. If you have money, then it's worth investing in the necessary tools to do self-publishing right from the start. But after that, you can take the money and put it into paying other people to do what they're good at. That's where Fiverr comes in handy.
Now, why do they call it Fiverr? Well, originally, and they still have it, many of the gigs offer a particular service for $5. So, almost everything on there would have your first level gig for $5, and they might have one for $15, then one for $20, or $100, or something like that.
But when you're first getting started and use Fiverr, you're going to start by finding and seeing what services they offer. I know the very first services I was using were cover design and editing services on Fiverr. I even used ghostwriting on Fiverr.
I discovered that you can use Fiverr for all sorts of things, including learning how different tools work and going through stuff with people who already know how to do something and are willing to share with you.
even used it for tutoring, like Spanish for my daughter, for example. So, yeah, in fact, it was funny because she would even find a tutor for herself and then hire that person to teach her Spanish. Fiverr can be used for all sorts of really fascinating stuff. That's something that many people have not explored – the idea of freelancers who have those skill sets.
When it comes to self-publishing, it is especially powerful. But there are a lot of things that you're going to want to use it for, and you need to make sure you don't use it incorrectly. So, I want to give you a few guidelines to use when trying to find the right gig and the person who's offering that gig for your specific job.
The first one is that we want to find somebody, and you can rank them by the number of jobs they've done, like the number of reviews that are on their profile. So, we have an idea of how many jobs they offer, and based on that, you're going to see how many stars they have.
Now, of course, like anywhere else, people have fake reviews and stuff on there. However, if they've got something like hundreds or thousands of reviews, it's really hard to fake that. So, those people have actual reviews.
Then, we're looking for people who have a four-and-a-half to five-star average for the reviews that they have on Fiverr. Those are the people that you're going to want to do work with, that you're going to do business with. If you don't have people with thousands of reviews, well, then look for the people with the most and most positive reviews.
This is a surefire way to not find yourself hiring someone on Fiverr who's going to do a poor job or maybe not even deliver the services that you're looking for. The second thing is we're going to look at the price. After that, we can choose people who are charging an awful lot of money and people who are charging very little.
If they both have over a thousand-plus reviews that are all five or four or five-star reviews, you're going to find that what they're providing is going to be close. This means you don't want to waste money on Fiverr. This tip alone is going to save you a lot of money.
So, make sure when you're getting onto Fiverr that you're not being overcharged, but rather going for the gigs that are cheaper but have an awful lot of positive reviews. The next thing to remember on Fiverr is that you can negotiate everything.
Ordering In Bulk
So, if you have a basic gig, but if you're going to order multiples of those things like multiple covers, multiple thumbnails, or multiple this and multiple that, you can say, 'Look, I'm ordering 10 of these things, and I'd like a sharp discount, like 50% off the normal price.
Sometimes, you can even go for more than that, like as much as 66% off. I want to pay one-third, so if it normally costs $30, I want to pay $10. But in exchange for that, I'm going to order 10 of these gigs.
So that causes the person to say, 'Wow, this is amazing.’ They're willing to do it because it gives them guaranteed cash, and we're getting that cash pumped into their business fast. In exchange, they're willing to give you a sharp discount. So if you can order in bulk, that's even better.
These are just a few of the basic rules when we're going on to Fiverr. Now, the first service on the self-publishing side is professional book cover design. They have insanely good cover designers. In the description below on all of my YouTube videos, you will find my cover designer, the one that I specifically use for doing all of my designs on Fiverr.
She charges around $30 per cover, and they are good. You can negotiate the price if you're doing lots of covers. But if you're doing just one cover, it's $30. There you go, and you're going to have it already done.
So, instead of trying to come up with some clunky cover, you are trying to design it like you think you know Photoshop. And I'm like, 'Well, do you have a graphic design or graphic artist background?' The person's like, 'Well, not really, but I'm just sort of playing around with these little pixel graphics and stuff.’
And I'm just like, do not jeopardize your chances of success for your book just because your cover is lousy, okay? Don't do that. Don't do that; you can use Canva for free. Of course, I know, but everybody does it, so your cover's going to look identical to those people. Instead, hire a professional who is going to give you a top-notch cover.
Now, when you do this, make sure you give her copies of the top best-selling covers already on Amazon as an idea of what it should look like. Remember, we don't care about what you like or don't like; what we care about is what people are spending money on in your specific niche.
So that's an important one. You can check out my affiliate link below on all of my YouTube videos and find my top cover designer right in the comments. Alright, the next is editing and proofreading, and this one plays a huge role here. You have lots of people who are college professors, teachers, and professional editors on Fiverr.
Now, if you want the absolute best of the best, you should go to Upwork. But if you're on a limited budget, Fiverr is fantastic. You could find a school literature English teacher who taught high school-level English in America, and she will do the editing on your book.
Check out this related article: Using Fiverr For Great Book Covers
I had two of them doing editing on some of my books in the early days before the revenue started coming in, and these editors are going to be fantastic. They're going to do a great job for you if you follow the basic rules that I already gave you above.
Then we come to formatting and layout. You can get your book formatted on Fiverr. I did this originally, and I seriously regret it. I would highly recommend not using this service on Fiverr because after you finish your book, you're going to add a lead magnet at some point, and you're going to find mistakes in your book.
You'll need to add your newer books at the end of the book, make some major changes, and maybe update the links and other things inside the book as time goes on. You'll want to be able to do that formatting yourself, and that's one of the reasons why I have the ‘Book Formatting Made Easy Course’. It shows you how to use my favorite tool which is Jutoh.
Use that tool to get your book formatted yourself. You can make small changes, hit a button, and it reformats. This is the way you want to go. Next is ghostwriting. I remember the first time I hired a ghostwriter on Fiverr to write one of my books, and the works produced by this ghostwriter were outselling the books I had personally written.
This person had written a 24-page book, and it was performing significantly better in terms of sales than even books that I had spent months writing. Just to give you an idea, yes, you can indeed make a lot of money if you're targeting a very profitable niche and using the right keywords.
You can go this route, and it taught me that ghostwriting is not a terrible option. There's nothing unethical about it; it's just fine. Many authors do it without a problem. You can do ghostwriting and write your books as well.
There's no problem, but Fiverr is one of the routes you can take. However, make sure you're scanning for plagiarism. Plagiarism scanning is important because I did have one ghostwriter who ripped off other books.
I reported them to Fiverr, and they were removed from the platform. My money was refunded, and I didn't get myself in trouble with Amazon for using someone else's content. That's a very important thing you need to pay attention to.
Targeting The Right Keywords
Then comes illustrations and artwork. You can find lots of illustrators and artists on Fiverr. Some of them will do the work for you at a relatively low cost, while others may charge more. So, you want to make sure you look at the samples they provide. This advice holds for any of these services.
As I mentioned above, if they're terrible, just move to the next one, okay? You're not wasting a hundred thousand dollars on each person you're using. I mean, seriously, $5 to $30, probably per person. And if you're spending more than that, you're spending too much money, okay?
So, you know, keep the price limited. We're going to put out a lot of books; that's the goal. Some authors say, 'No, I just want one.' Well, it's not going to sell, so you're probably going to need multiple books unless you nail it on your first one, which you can do; that's a possibility. But for most authors, you're generally not going to hit it out of the ballpark on your very first book.
The next thing is marketing materials. Okay, you can hire them to put together a marketing package for you, which'll have all sorts of little thumbnails. It'll have covers and things like your Facebook images.
All this sort of stuff, you can put that together, and it will help increase the visibility of your book when you're putting it on your website or maybe on a Facebook page and these sorts of things.
Then comes keyword research, and this is the most important. You should learn how to do this yourself, but if you're a little bit lazy (and I know some of you guys are lazy, I get lazy from time to time, to be honest with you), when it comes to keyword research, you're going to want to go through and make sure that you're targeting good keywords for your book.
Because that's going to directly increase the number of sales. It's the single most important thing you can do with your book: make sure you're in the right market, targeting the right keywords. It’s the most important thing because if they aren't finding you, that means you're responsible for making sure you're running ads to get those people to find you.
But then you're going to use the ads on the keywords. Why not just have them find you for free? Get those organic sales right away. So that's a better way to go.
Then, audiobook narration. Now, some of these people have no experience and they put themselves as experts. Make sure you check the reviews. I've had experiences with some of these people, and some of my clients thought they'd go.
The cheap route is trying to find them on Fiverr, and before you know it, you're paying a ton of extra money. You're waiting, and they're halfway done with the project, leaving you hanging. Do not get left hanging by somebody on Fiverr. Choose somebody who already has a lot of reviews, and they'll hook you up.
Next, you have your book reviews and beta readers. Book reviews are something you have to be very careful with. It is illegal to sell book reviews; that is not legal. So, there are ways of getting around this particular one. But at least in terms of finding beta readers, that's a good way to go. You can find people on Fiverr who are willing to read your book for you and give you their thoughts.
However, if they're selling you reviews, that will get you in big trouble because they'll be doing reviews on other people's books, and it's supposed to be this chaotic soup. Usually, the reviews are not very high quality anyway, and it's illegal. Fiverr got sued earlier by Amazon for selling reviews, so be very careful with reviews. It's better to have beta readers or people who are on your email list, as I told you before, to get them to do this.
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Then, we can move on to author branding, which deals with the idea of establishing a strong author brand, building logos, author bios, and consistent messaging across all platforms. There are people on Fiverr who are fully capable of really helping you do exactly that.
As you can see, Fiverr is incredibly useful for a whole series of things related to your book. You can do some of them, but I don't recommend doing things like book formatting. That should not be outsourced. Keyword research, you can have them help, but you should learn how to do it yourself. I teach my Group Coaching clients and my 1-On-1 Clients how to do it.
So, that's a big one there, and the one I would most recommend is getting your covers done on Fiverr. You can check out my affiliate link in the description below of all of my YouTube videos and check my other blogs and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.