You wanted to try self-publishing but you knew nothing about it. Here is a method helping self-publishers to publish faster plus more self-publishing tips.
Today's topic has three points and you're going to want to stick around for the third point. It is a secret as to the absolute most effective way to produce your books much faster.
The topic we're going to discuss today, here is a method helping self-publishers to publish faster. When you first get started with your books, our biggest concern is just publishing at all. There are so many students that I've helped over the years where you just get stuck in one of the early phases of self-publishing.
You never get past it but that's not so much on speed but rather just getting through the steps at all. But once you've got your very first book onto the market and we're going to move on to our next book, we begin to understand that some of these steps take a long time.
Things we don't want to do or you're doing everything yourself. There are so many things that lead to a great deal of frustration and that is what we're going to answer in today's article. Grab a copy of my free Self-Publishing Checklist that will show you the secrets of moving through those steps quickly.
It is a little bit of what we're going to be hitting today. Let's get into it from my own story. When I first got started, I knew absolutely nothing about publishing. I just slowly tried a lot of different tricks and failed at the same time.
I can tell you the speed at which I was going was so slow. Friends and family were saying "why don't you just put the book on the market already? Why are you moving so slowly with this?".
It was a bit frustrating for some people, me talking about writing these books. I just need to make sure things are right and I have so many little parts that need to be in place. The speed was unbelievably slow when I was getting going.
So what happened was I got into several different communities on Facebook and other locations. I started to learn how to speed up my self-publishing process. At the same time, I learned some of the tips and tricks that I share on this very blog because they still work to this very day.
Though very few people are fully capable of really implementing them. Unless you've got a coach or somebody's helping to keep you going. But for the most part, you have to force yourself to say "okay, let me see if I can get these tips implemented".
You discover the power of them both in terms of helping you make the process smooth and getting a book written and onto the market and then getting it to sell after that. The thing is I took several courses, I hired several accountability coaches.
Different coaches in different areas to help me hone my skill set when it came to this whole self-publishing thing. Also invested in the tools to speed up the flow of the process that I was using.
The result was I discovered that for some of the tasks that I found that I could do, things that I enjoyed more, I hired up to 3 virtual assistants full time to help me get my books onto the market. As I was producing books to speed up the rate at which I could get them onto the market.
So that I would not be bogged down with this and I have never looked back. I could focus my time on the skills that I enjoyed doing. Those also were the skills that I couldn't outsource or have anybody else do those things and that's exactly what I found worked for me.
So here is a method helping self-publishers to publish faster. The first point is to make a checklist. Now I told you, you can get my free checklist. But for each of the processes, I do from audiobooks to Lulu to Ingram Spark to Draft2digital, I have a very detailed checklist.
It goes through exactly who does what when they do the different things to go through these tasks. So that it's very very clear where exactly we are in the process. Because I can sometimes be working on as many as 4 or 5 books at a time that is coming onto the market.
They're in different phases and trying to keep track of all of that, you're going to need a tool that's going to make that possible. I would say use a checklist.
Different Stages To Follow
If you're using as I've mentioned before Todoist, that's what I use actually to govern all of my task management systems. Where you can paste your checklist into that list then mark it off. You can create projects for each of the different books that you're working on.
At the same time, you don't have to focus on only one thing at a time. Because some portions of your book publishing where you're getting your audiobook produced, you're ready to start writing your next book. Or maybe if you don't wish to write the books, you can order other people to produce the books as well.
Then they're in different phases of the whole thing and we need to follow up and see where we're at. I like to make this a lot easier and speed up how fast you can move. Because we're not having to remember the steps each time just like an airline pilot, they go through a list of a checklist.
They make sure they don't forget the very important things that they're doing. To make sure the plane makes it from point A to point B safely and we're doing the same thing with self-publishing. We want to use as little brainpower when it comes to the issue of trying to get the book produced and onto the market.
At the same time, this checklist method is so powerful because as we discover things that work or don't work for us, we can adjust the checklist. I have my virtual assistants inform me when some of the steps could be improved upon. So that we can figure out what do we need to do next to get these books onto the market and sell.
Check out this related article: Releasing a Good vs. Perfect book
There are thousands of things you can do. We're going to play around with a little bit and adjust the checklist as we go. Even today, I adjusted a few of my checklist points. So that was one of the key issues of our first point.
The second point is we should stay in touch with a community that will help us find the tools. The right tools to speed up the process both the strategies and the tools on YouTube or maybe it's a podcast you listening to or a blog you're reading.
At this moment and as a result of that, I'm giving you an idea of the tools that I use. Maybe these are terrible tools for you. In the description of all of my YouTube videos, you'll see all the tools that I use. All my affiliate links for those tools that I use for my self-publishing business.
But for yours, you may find different tools. I love to hear about it, maybe there are better tools than the ones that I'm using. If you do find them, let me know. I've gone through very many and this is typeset that I found helps speed up my self-publishing process.
When it comes to publishing the books and getting them out onto the market as quickly as possible. With a quality level that's going to give us at least four stars, that's sort of what our target goal is. That people are going to like and find the value these books are bringing to the market.
But by staying in touch with the community like as many of you commenting on these videos and I go back and forth with you and help you out. That's a very powerful way of doing it or joining Facebook groups and communities there as well. So you have a lot of different options and choices.
You can do this when it comes to getting your books published quickly. But a very key issue is don't spend too much time in the communities. Keep producing, always producing new books and new things but at the same time, we also want to make sure that we are in touch with other people.
It will both help keep our motivation high. Make sure we aren't wasting time when it comes to our self-publishing but let's get on to our actual secret answer of the day. This is the third point the one that I believe is the most effective.
It's for people, you've got some books out there selling and bringing money in. When you reach this phase, it is an amazing feeling because now you have cash. Are you gonna pull it out of your company? Or are you going to reinvest it in other people within the company?
It is such an exciting time. There's one key thing that almost everybody I know would say this is the best strategy you should do and it is to hire a team. Hire a team and start with just one virtual assistant usually from the Philippines or someplace like that.
Hiring Virtual Assistants
These virtual assistants can follow through the process that we already built the checklist for. They're going to be able to take over as many tasks that they're able to do. So that you don't take away things that you may be either don't want to do these tasks.
Or that you can do them but you just don't enjoy them as much or that we want to increase our production speed. Because the more products we have on the market, the better for us in many ways here. The same goes with marketing all these other things if we can have other people spending hours and hours doing those skills, those tasks instead of us.
We can then focus on the very core things that are going to help our business move forward. Specifically, the things that are useful that they're not able to do. For example, my Youtube videos. Making the video of myself, a video that they're not going to be doing.
Because the brand is built around me and self-publishing. Trying to help as many authors in the world to get their books published easily. But in terms of the video itself, how is it getting on Youtube?
Well, virtual assistants do it and help with regards to the podcast and the blogs and other areas like that. In terms of making sure that the flow is moving smoothly and the same goes with my books. We get the books produced and we have to have them formatted well, the virtual assistants can do that.
In terms of producing the different things and uploading them to the sites to make sure that the books are posted, even setting up ads against the books. The thing was we started with our first tip which is creating that checklist, the system. And then we have good tight communication so we're able to improve things as we go.
This is something that you may wish to, I think www.onlinejobs.ph was the one I was using to find my original virtual assistants. Then I just use them to help recommend other people who are outstanding and can contribute to the overall flow. The process of producing products that we're looking at right here and in your books as well.
So if you're doing tasks that you would rather not do or have low productivity. In other words where your time is better spent somewhere else than perhaps trying to format your books. Or working on covers or these other sorts of things, we can outsource these to other people who are very happy to do those tasks.
That frees up our time to do new tasks creating more revenue, giving us the ability to hire more people. To bring them on to the team and to start teaching them. They're also getting up to speed and then they're giving new inputs back to fix the checklist, fix the overall system.
Check out this related article: The Secret of Formatting Your Books Right
Figuring out what are the priorities and again one of the things I also find useful I mentioned in the earlier one is having a coach, somebody who's able to hold you accountable. To make sure that you're progressing through the steps.
My coach has a fantastic ability to help me with regards to the direction I'm moving things. Because sometimes I'll think I need to go in this direction, then the coach can help say "no, this is not the thing you should be focusing on".
So for example, some authors think that posting their books on other authors' things and spamming people with their books that will sell books, has no impact on sales. It's much better to connect with the communities of readers and start building them with email lists and stuff.
I had somebody asking about this recently so these are things you're going to want to consider. And hopefully, some of these tips were useful to you. But my question for you is, what method have you found to speed up your production when it comes to your books?
I want to know below in the comments. Because that will make sure that I'm hitting the right points. Maybe you've even got methods and tips that I haven't thought about and I want to hear from you.
You can help me in my publishing process. The key is its community, we're helping each other to get our books onto the market. In this case, how quickly we can get it?
Remember not low quality but four or five-star type books that we're talking about getting onto the market. What do we need to do to get these books onto the market? Check out my other articles and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.