If you ever set your goal by selling a thousand copies of books in just one month, then this one is for you. Take time to learn different strategies and tools to be used to achieve your goal.
Before I answer this question, I just want to let you know that the fourth answer to this question is the winning strategy you will not want to miss. Now let's get right on into it.
So the question that was sent to me today was, can you realistically sell a thousand copies of self-published book nonfiction in one month? This is a great question that many people wonder.
Patience Is A Virtue
You come out with your book and you're wondering if I write a book, am I going to build and be selling a thousand copies? Or a hundred thousand copies? Are they even going to sell many copies?
This is a very difficult question to answer, because there are so many different factors involved. Whether or not a book is going to sell a lot or sell none at all. But some tricks can be learned here to make sure that you sell as many as possible.
But before I get started, you can check out my free Self-publishing Secrets Checklist. You will want to check that out if you've been starting publishing just now or even publishing for a while. To make sure you're not missing at any of the important steps.
Now let's get right on into it. When I first started publishing, I wasn't even sure what was possible. So I wrote books on subjects I found interesting.
And I released my very first books on "Achieving Your Goals" was the very first book I did. I had no idea if this is a popular topic. Is this something people would want to buy?
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After it came out with it. I started making sales. So, one sale here, two sales there.
By any means, I did not get a thousand sales in the first several months. But after understanding several things like ads and a couple of other things. It took me to my fourth book before I had a book that was getting a thousand or several thousand sales of one book.
So, I sort of hit it lucky. But if you're looking to not just get lucky on our sales, then we're going to need to do some additional work. This is to make sure that the books that we're selling are going to sell as many copies as possible.
Kindle Spy Helped Me
So let's get into the answers. So the first answer is yes, this is completely doable!
You can in fact sell a thousand copies a month of your self-publish nonfiction book. If you're an author who has never been heard of, then your nonfiction will probably do a better job of selling.
Then, if you had started writing fiction on a much slower journey even though you can make more money on the fiction side, the non-fiction makes it possible to be discovered, for people to find you a lot faster.
Since they're looking for a problem to be solved. The most important thing is to make sure that you're in the correct niche. So the question is, you want to know, which niche is going to be profitable that would lead to this thousand sales per month?
I used a tool called Kindle Spy. That makes it very easy to find these niches.
Now it's going to take some time. But what it will show you is that you can type in some keywords into Amazon Kindle. And you can say show me the books that are ranking for that given keyword.
That's the search results on the first page that show up. Then tell me, how many of those books ranked in the top hundred thousand? I also do the search on a keyword and look and see how many copies of books are selling.
For that keyword, I divide the total number of bookselling by the number of books in the top hundred thousand books on sale on kindle on that first page results. And it's going to give me a ratio.
So there are 100 books I divide it by 10 of them are in the top hundred thousand that would give me a ratio of 10. I never publish any books unless the ratio is under 20.
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So I hope that is a little bit clear. It could be a little bit confusing when we first get started. But the tool Kindle Spy makes it very easy to do this analysis.
That ensures that you're selling a thousand copies of books in a market that is underserved and has a lot of people who wish to buy those books. But very few books on that specific subject. These books are going to be the top sellers.
Change For The Better
Now, the fourth one of what I told you right from the beginning of the video, is I'm going to tell you a winning strategy. This one is very important. And that is, do not set goals you can't control.
So if you say, "I'm setting a goal to do a thousand sales a month". You're going to be very disappointed because maybe you make a thousand or 10,000 or 20,000 unlikely. But let's just say you did and maybe you don't and you become very disappointed.
Instead of setting your goals around the achievement of a certain amount of money or a certain amount of sales, a much better strategy is saying "I'm going to set a goal on how much work I can do in a day and making sure I'm learning new things every day".
In other words, it's the process itself. The journey itself needs to be our goal and not the destination.
For not having fun and we're not managing to hold it all together. On a daily basis, we will never reach our long-term goals. And number two, there are too many factors we can't control.
That would determine whether or not we got a thousand sales or a hundred sales or ten sales or even one sale in a given month. But we do have the ability to do things like running ads and making sure the covers are good.
And if we see that we're not making many sales on our first book, like I saw on my very first book. Then we can come back and change things like the title, or the keywords we're using.
We can change the description. We can change the cover with all sorts of things. We can run additional ads.
We can try out new platforms like Google or Facebook or things like that, to try additional traffic. Start email marketing, doing content marketing to increase sales. Getting additional reviews on our book through our readers.
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Conclusion
So there's a whole series of things that we can do. But we don't want to set a goal on things that we can't control that only leads to losing our motivation.
This is absolutely essential. It's the most important thing, getting our mindset correct when we're trying to go the self-publishing journey.
I hope that clarified that. What have you found? Have you been able to sell a thousand books within your nonfiction publishing niche?
Let me know below and check out my blogs and videos just like this one that will answer your self-publishing questions.