As a first-time author, you may be worried about how to make a good book that would sell. Check out this article that would tell you how it's going to be, releasing a good vs. perfect book.
Today's article has three points and you're going to want to stick around for the third point. Because it's a secret why getting this good vs perfect concept correct is insanely important. When it comes to making sales and achieving your goals with your self-published books.
What we're going to discuss today is releasing a good vs. perfect book. This is a subject I've discussed with some people on Youtube. As well as in real life outside of Youtube and the internet.
Regarding how good does your book need to be before it is ready to be released. This is something that can get in the way of many writers from getting their books onto the market. You have written your very first book and now comes the exciting part.
You have to format it, you get the cover and maybe you go through some editing. But you know that it's not quite right, you still need to make some more changes. You do another round of editing and making these changes but it still isn't quite perfect.
We need to do some more changes. After all, we want to ensure that we won't embarrass ourselves when the book comes onto the market. Because then, otherwise people will look at the book and maybe think negatively of us.
We want to make sure that it's perfect and if it never gets onto the market, we also don't have to worry about that happening. So, what we do is we find ourselves in a loop of trying to make it perfect. What happens is that we find ourselves stuck.
The book never gets onto the market. Meaning, we don't have readers to tell us whether the book was good. What we need to do to improve on the book is to make it something they're going to want to read. Perhaps even start our next book.
You can see we get in this position where we're completely stuck and unable to get out of this position. It's very frustrating, it is way too common when it comes to products and services. Those people who create these things, you have written these books and they're never even going to hit the market ever.
It is because of the good to a perfect problem that you find yourself in. That is what we're going to discuss in today's article. But first, check out my free Self-Publishing Checklist.
When I first wrote my very first three books, I took them through at least a minimum of 4 to 5 rounds of editing. With two separate editors looking at my books and going through them, ripping them apart. I also used a whole series of tools like Pro Writing Aid, Grammarly, Word, Libre Office, and many of these tools.
Then, I also listen to the book, I read the book multiple times. To ensure that I would not be able to find any mistakes or errors in the book. I wanted them to be perfect which was my first goal.
Check out this related article: How To Build A Self-Publishing Team
Then I released them. I started seeing some sales on it. However, I saw that there were an awful lot of expenses associated with the price of producing a single book with so many rounds of editing.
The question I had was, is it possible to release a book that doesn't use so much editing? I began to test this out. I had a whole series of books that I would pay other people to write. I knew they would be popular because of using the keyword strategies.
I was mentioning it before and as a result, I would take them through quite a bit less editing. The problem was I just didn't see that there was that much of a difference in response. If there are grammatical mistakes, that can create some challenges for the average reader.
Where it seems like it was written by somebody in a non-English speaking background who maybe doesn't quite have the concept right. People will respond to that but people are very forgiving if the story is great and compelling. And your non-fiction solves their problem.
They aren't spending too much time asking "how many rounds of editing has this book been through?". Maybe if I make a mistake on this or on that, they're going to come after me. They'll say "Oh no, you shouldn't do it, even these Youtube videos".
Does everything have to be perfect? You'll see that I misspell words or say things not the right way sometimes. That's just the way that it is. I could try to make it all perfect.
But how many people am I able to help on Youtube if each video is flawlessly edited and I'm putting out only one video? If I even get that video out. Because after all, it's not perfect.
What I discovered then was using tools like Word and Grammarly. The latter is a very powerful tool to fix the basics. Then also, I use a tool on my iPhone called Voice Stream which is an app.
I will then be able to listen to the book to make sure that it flows smoothly. It's surprising how the quality of these voices that can read your books have become and Voice Stream is by far my favorite. I am not a partner with them but I would highly recommend it.
I don't know if they have it on the android phones yet. But if you have an iPhone, it's worth checking out. One of the premium voices that I use cost $1. You can ask me if you would like more information on that.
But listening to your book being read is a fantastic way to find mistakes. If I have a Kindle book, I'll just throw it on there. I can listen to the entire Kindle book be read to me. So that's also just a little secret. Even though it's not one of today's secrets, but that is a fantastic way of actually getting through it.
As a result, the quality of the overall book is going to be just fine but this still brings back the question of what is good and what is perfect? So, releasing a good vs. perfect book? What is a good book? Well, it is a book that is on Amazon.
When you have organic reviews coming in, it's going to get you between three and five stars. Now, notice I didn't say it gets you five stars. Because of five-star reviews across the board, that would be a perfect book but a good book should get you between three and five stars.
That's it, if your book is getting one to two stars, we need to do something with the book. There's something broken with the book, it's making a promise and it's failing to deliver. There's an expectation that your reader has and it's not being met.
Formatting Is Important
We are excluding reviews that are complaining about Amazon's issue as "I paid for the book and Amazon doesn't download to my device correctly". People complain about your book as a result of failures for Amazon to get it to download properly or the book took too long to send in the mail.
These are the sorts of things that you can't do anything about. You should not include those when you're counting the reviews that you're getting on your books. But in general, you should take a look at your books and see are you getting three to five reviews?
Keep in mind something like Fifty Shades of Grey is selling millions of copies. It was not over four it was like three and a half stars on the reviews. But in reality, that is good enough and that's what I mean by good.
I was saying you can just throw garbage out on the thing. Well if you throw garbage out, it's only going to get one to two stars. So that's a good way of knowing the quality of the last book was too low.
I'm going to need to raise this quality to ensure that I'm going to get the reviews that I'm going to need to get more sales. Because it is a form of social proof, it's very important when it comes to selling our books.
Check out this related article here: Content Marketing - Can you afford to ignore it?
The second point almost should be a secret point on its own. It's that you can fix a book if people complain about issues once it is on the market. This is something that so many authors are completely unaware of.
This is the reason I argue for doing self-publishing where you're doing it yourself. You don't require anybody else to help you get your book on the market. So you're going through the steps, you're using Jutoh which is the tool that I use to do all of the formattings for all of my 200 plus books that are on the market.
To ensure that we're going to get the sales that we're going to need and the quality of the formatting is going to be in place. That's a tool that I use to ensure that people aren't going to complain. They might complain about the formatting, that this looks wrong or that looks wrong and that we need to fix something with regards to the formatting that we've done.
Or maybe there are some grammar mistakes. You can take the book and make those changes and then re-roll it out both the paperback and the Kindle book. You are not going to be able to do this with your paperback version because the title of your paperback version, it's connected to the ISBN.
It would require a brand new ISBN and then you might find yourself putting duplicate content which can get your account banned on Amazon. But excluding that particular scenario, you can change out the contents of the book. No problem at all, unlike if you had gone with a traditional publisher.
I can tell you I read books regularly. Traditionally published books have regular mistakes in them. Grammatical errors, missing words here and they're forgetting things. Inconsistencies and all sorts of stuff.
Then they make it through now. If those authors wish to change that, they do not have permission to do that, they have to go back to the publishing company. And they have no interest to go about fixing that whatsoever unless the book is selling thousands of copies.
But if you self-publish the book, you're able to make those changes. Those are necessary to help you boost your reviews and the reviews are very important. It's incredibly important and maybe one of the most frustrating aspects of self-publishing.
Probably reviews would be the top and then doing your covers would be your second most frustrating aspect at least for me. For other people, it might be more on the technical aspects. Like the formatting and such.
But I find with Jutoh it's just so easy. There's not a challenge when it comes to formatting your book. However, as you continue in the self-publishing game and the process here, you get better and better.
You can improve your books but here's a question for you that I have on tip number two. It's that if your book has never hit the market, how do you even know if it's perfect? Because the reality is you haven't given a chance for your readers to tell you what they don't like.
I think it was Stephen King or somebody else who commented that your readers are incapable of telling you what is wrong. But they are capable of telling you what is right with your book. They may not even be able to tell you what specifically is wrong with the book.
But if all of your readers keep making the same negative comments on your book, you can learn from that to improve the book as we're pushing it closer to perfect. But I want to get on to the third tip because this is the secret tip.
And this is a tip that you need to take to heart and that you at least should consider. If you're going to blow off everything else, I say this one specific tip is something that can make a difference for you. On this whole releasing a good vs. perfect book and it is that the absolute top thing you can do.
When it comes to selling more books, make a full-time income off of your book sales. The absolute top thing that you can do here is putting more books on the market. I say this and people push back on me and say my books need to be perfect.
If you put garbage on the market, it's going to be terrible. Are you getting three stars? If you're not getting three stars, you're doing something wrong. Then your quality is too low.
But if you're getting three, four, or five stars on your books and you're continually improving the quality of those books as you go, you're going to start making sales. You can invest those sales and better editing on your books in terms of better covers, better keyword research, and better tools.
You're going to get the Coaching that I offer to help ensure that you're going to get those sales that you're going to need. As we're pushing through running ads and doing content marketing. These other little tricks here are to maximize the sales that we're getting to do that.
So we're not talking about leaving one book. That's stuck permanently, waiting for it to be perfect. But rather, putting a book onto the market. Let the market tell us what they think about the book's quality. Then let us improve upon that.
Learn To Run Ads
Somebody, I can't remember who so you can tell me below in the comments because I can't remember, gave the acronym ABS which is always not selling but Always Be Shipping. Shipping new products out onto the market are the absolute top way of increasing your sales now.
You might be thinking, look I'm a starving artist that's okay for me. I would say that's perfect but you know, what if you're not putting the books on the market? You're not a published or self-published author, you are a writer, it is what you are.
You've written some books but you need to put them out onto the market and start making money off those books. As we're getting closer to thousands of sales of those books, we're going to learn an awful lot more than we do about trying to perfect the books. Waiting for the perfect time and you do not want to do that.
I know your books are not perfect, none of our books are perfect. Many of the books I read from famous authors like Stephen King and others are not perfect. There are mistakes in these books.
Some are better than others but none of these books are perfect. And so sometimes, I would even take these books and think that's a three-star book. Some of them maybe even a two-star book and we listen to the feedback.
Check out this related article: Someone Stole My Book!
We incorporate the feedback into our book so that we make sure that the next books were coming out are better. We fix the things in our previous books. We should always be shipping and putting new products on the market.
Because I'm telling you, no matter what you are selling if you're continually shipping new products, you're going to find that about 20% of your products account for 80% of all of your sales. But if you only have zero products on the market, well 20% of that is zero.
You're not making any money. You're putting these products on the market and then like on Youtube, my audience is telling me which type of videos they like to see. It helps me understand the next videos that I should be putting out.
People telling me "hey the quality is too low or the sound I couldn't quite hear it". I'm able to incorporate that into what you're seeing right now. As in a 4k camera, a much higher quality microphone, and a better background. All of these things that I've gotten feedback on.
But how would I get that if I was going for a perfect video? That's something I just want you to understand. That this is what we're talking about when we're trying to say when releasing a good vs. perfect book.
So I do not want you to get stuck as I have. There are so many fake gurus and vanity publishers out there who just want to sell you so many things. You'll never get your book onto the market because they're more than willing to make it perfect for you if you just keep on paying them more money.
My goal is to teach you self-publishing so that you can get your book. You have the tools, the mindset, and the knowledge to get your books on the market. Your books must be good enough onto the market then you can improve them and over some time.
Many of your readers are going to say these books are perfect and that's fine too. Perfect is acceptable but as they say, this is something I've also heard. The idea is that perfect is the enemy of the good.
Because you attempt to reach perfection, it's just not going to work sometimes. Whatever you're trying to do on your hobby, you just need to get out there and do it. If you want to learn about fishing, you shouldn't watch thousands of videos on fishing and read tons of books on fishing.
You're going to need to get out there and throw the line right out into the water, into that pond and start trying. Maybe you're not going to get it perfect the first time. But how do you even know if the fish don't even have a chance?
If you spend all of your time working on the bait, reel, and hook. Just looking at these things but never actually throwing the lines into the water. You could say "oh my goodness whatever I'm doing is working" or "what I'm doing is not working".
Even if what you're throwing out is terrible at least start with something. Just get something out there. We can get some feedback from your ideal customers and the people who are going to be your readers. Who is going to want to be reading your book?
Get something out there into the world. Let's get some feedback from them and then we can pull it back. And you know what, people are not going to laugh at you. You're not going to be ashamed of what you're doing because, in reality, people are not paying that much attention.
Your number one problem as a new writer or an upcoming author is not the problem of people looking and laughing and saying "oh my goodness, your books are terrible. It's just being discovered at all". In this world right now, attention is the number one thing.
If you're not getting the attention, it's simply not going to work for you. You're not going to be able to get any sales of your books. The best way to get attention is by putting more content out there that people can easily digest and consume.
Start to build that connection whether you're doing it through Content Marketing Course that I sell or whether you're doing it through putting more and more books on the market and running ads against them.
There are lots of different options available to you and this is something that you are not going to want to do. I'm telling you, I know I get pushback on this every time I say it. But you should always be shipping.
My question for you is that when is the last time you put a book on the market? If you haven't put it on the market? These are the sorts of questions you need to ask yourself if you're wanting to take this whole author thing seriously.
Do you want to make a full-time income from this? Can you envision what your life would be like if you were making enough money to control your schedule?
What does your universe look like when you wake up in the morning? Getting down and starting to write your books that people are eager to read? Do you want that?
If you do, then I suggest you go with the good. But my question for you today is have you been waiting for your book to become perfect before putting it on the market? If you have, write the word "Yes" below in the comments.
And if you have not and you've been simply putting the good books onto the market and improving them, then write "No". Because that's what I need to know from you. Check out my other articles and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.