Selling a book requires following a great strategy. Discover how I sold over 40K books self-publishing as well as some useful tips you must be doing to sell lots and lots of copies of your self-published books.
Today's topic has three answers and the third one is a secret you're going to want to stick around for. I'm going to tell you the one issue that separates the winners and the losers in self-publishing.
So let's get into it. Today, we're going to discuss how I sold over 40K books self-publishing. By the end of this article, you're going to know exactly all of the mistakes that I made during the process of my self-publishing journey.
You can have the knowledge and the steps necessary to replicate it for yourself. You're going to feel fantastic about that when you see just how simple this whole process can be.
But before we get into the answers, check out my free Self-Publishing Checklist where I break down step by step the 7 key steps to getting your book self-published and selling.
So, how I sold over 40K books self-publishing. Let me tell you a little bit about my story. I originally started and I thought maybe self-publishing would work well for me.
Well, let me just cut to the chase. After a period, I reached a point where I was even considering selling, trading in Mexican pesos because it didn't work. But let's get on with the story here.
When I first put my books on the market, I followed through the very easy steps of putting a Kindle book onto the market. I assume that maybe it would just sell immediately, that I should start seeing those sales coming in.
Check out this related article: How To Make Money With Kindle Publishing On Amazon In 2020
I could not have been more wrong after a year of this and failing at getting the sales. I was excited that people were reading my material and they enjoyed the books. I was getting positive feedback but I simply was not getting the sales that I was hoping to get.
That led me to think maybe self-publishing is a losing endeavor. Maybe you sell a couple of books here and there. But otherwise, the golden age is over and you're not going to be able to make a killing at it any longer.
That was when I considered going into the peso trading markets. Only to see that this analysis of graphs was completely chaotic, it didn't make any sense whatsoever. At the same time, I was in contact with my friend Vincent and he informed me of a course on Amazon ads.
At the time, I had never taken any course. I hadn't done any investments. I thought I could do it the cheap way which is to just figure it out yourself.
You Can't Figure It Out Yourself
Like everything else, you just figure it out except when it comes to self-publishing. It's not a good idea to figure it out yourself. In fact, you're going to need to try a lot of stuff but without the right strategies, you're going to lose.
When I took this Amazon course on running ads, I started to see the sales go up. The important part was not so much that the sales and how much I was selling were going up. It was the fact that it had taught me something very important.
This was something you are going to want to try yourself. You may also have the same thing, I had the mindset that I could figure it out myself. But it taught me that other people who have done it before can bring all sorts of stuff to the table that could help you make sure you succeed.
So, after some time, I ended up taking additional courses. Each time I learned new strategies, I became part of communities where people were sharing freely the strategies to win at self-publishing.
I started seeing my sales going from 1 to 2 to jumping 10 and then 20 sales a day. It was absolutely amazing, so I started coming through that. The thing with this huge jump in sales, I suddenly realized and came to the revelation that you can in fact win at this game.
Since that point, we've seen a little over 40,000 sales. When choosing the right niches and going into it, I realized that I simply didn't have the time to write all of these books. That is even part of the strategy which is you write books on the things you're interested in.
Check out this related article: "How I Wrote My First Book?" (+Self Publishing Tips)
You can hire other people to write books on other topics and by optimizing those books, you can get the sales going. The machine keeps going and you are putting it into new markets.
To this very day, I am trying new strategies on the self-publishing business to see if I can even get them even higher than the great results that I have already seen. So, how I sold over 40K books self-publishing.
Let's get into a couple of the key answers, little takeaways from the story here. The first is that you need to choose the right market. If you are in the wrong market, you are going to lose.
To choose the right market, you need to know the skill, how exactly to go about choosing that. That's what being part of communities can be helpful. I also help people regularly on my Youtube channel and through coaching.
Go For That Investment
The next one is you need to optimize your books. You can expect that you're not going to sell any books if you have a poor cover, your title is bad, your description is terrible, and the contents of your book are not put together in a very logical way that's built upon selling those books.
We're not talking about the information itself even we're just saying the organization of the information is more important than the content itself. The content matters because we need to ensure that your readers are going to be happy with what you're selling.
Otherwise, other aspects actually matter more. If you have a poor cover, it doesn't matter because they'll never buy your book in the first place. So you need to make sure that these things are optimized.
Then finally, you must be running ads. You must have a marketing campaign and you're paying money to try to get the sales on your book. I tried going cheap. Do it for free and you end up getting nothing.
Sometimes, it takes that investment. You have to think of it as a seed, you have to put in the ground and wait for it to grow. We're throwing away one seed so that we can get a lot more seeds from that single seed.
This is exactly the concept of costs. We take on costs to get a large return on our investment. That's a very very important point that lots of people miss completely. So you need to optimize your books.
The third step and the secret step of the day that differentiates the losers and the winners, it is that you need to repeat this over and over. Do not jump into Mexican pesos, that would have been a huge mistake.
I knew nothing about it plus the person who was teaching it, their methods were just chaotic. They were drawing lines here and lines there and telling you can see a ceiling and a floor. It was just chaos so I would definitely not recommend going into that or anything else.
The self-publishing business is a fantastic model that can work for you. You just have to stick with it and learning new strategies to help you succeed and win at your self-publishing business.
So, I hope that was helpful in terms of learning how I sold 40K books and the key strategies involved. What have you found? How many books have you sold?
I would be very interested to hear what your successes are. What strategies you have found? Let me know below in the comments. Check out my other blogs and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.