Have you been thinking of self-publishing your first book? You should start self-publishing like this and don’t fall behind.
Today's topic has three points and you're going to want to stick around for the third point. Because it’s a secret as to the number one thing that's going to kill your self-publishing business.
But what we're going to be discussing in today's article is START Self-Publishing Like This (Don't FALL Behind). By the end of this article, you're going to know the keys to success when it comes to self-publishing. You're going to have the steps necessary to get your books onto the market and sell them.
You're going to feel great about each step of the way as you get there. One of the things that I've learned over the years after putting out 120 million ads on Amazon and driving that traffic to my sales pages, to my 200 plus books that are on the market, it's that optimization is incredibly important.
This is one of the reasons I meet with people for completely free during a Discovery Session. To discuss exactly how we can optimize your books with no commitment to buy or do anything after that. If that sounds like something you would like to learn more about, go check and book.
It is a free Discovery Session with me. We will sit down and look at your book. So, here's the thing, Gary was one of my clients a while back. He was working in my 1-On-1 Program.
He's currently not with me but he was at the time. What happened was that he was putting superhero books on the market. He was wanting to get recognized as an author for not his books.
That was the thing, with this one here, it was that he had the idea that he didn't have a lot of ideas. But he was thinking, “If I can just put this one book on the market, then I will be known for that specific book and then there will be no need to put out any additional books.”
But the problem is that self-publishing does not work like this when it comes to the whole idea of “one and done”. Like Gary, he was hoping and thinking that a single book on the market was similar to somebody else who had also mentioned the idea that they said, “Once I put my one book onto the market, how am I going to handle all the emails?”
How am I going to handle press people who want to get in touch with me regarding this particular book? I said that is not going to be your problem. So, what exactly is the key to starting self-publishing like this?
Check out this related article: Self-Publishing-An Introduction
What should you be doing? Well, I can tell you number one is that you should focus on one book at a time. We are not looking at focusing on all of our books. That would completely burn you out very very quickly.
So, what we're going to do is we're looking at one book at a time. We're looking at the individual steps to getting this book onto the market and getting that book to sell. Then the final thing is with the next book, we're looking at optimizing and learning from our first book.
We go to our next book. Now with many of my clients, I sit down with and we discuss exactly their books, we're able to speed this optimization part up. Because we're able to stop them from making a lot of the common mistakes.
What is so common is that many authors, when they go on putting their books onto the market, they make the same mistake over and over and over again. Then at the end, you've got a pile of books and they're not selling any copies. You're thinking, “What did I do wrong?”
The answer is you're not optimizing and you're not learning from the previous mistakes. You need somebody who's had enough books on the market. Somebody who can see what the signs are could show you what is the problem with your book.
That is something that I would say of all the services that are the thing that people appreciate most. It is the fact that we do a deep dive, looking exactly at what is wrong with the book that's causing it not to sell.
Learning How To Optimize Your Book
So, we can optimize it and then put the next book out. That was the other thing, it's that once we start the next book, we're simply going to learn what we learned in the first book. That's the second point: it's this idea of a loop.
So, it's a feedback loop in which you complete an entire process as best as you can. One key rule is we do not go backward, we don't demotivate ourselves by doing these sorts of things. We go forwards and as we go through the loop and we're learning, what exactly is it that we made mistakes the first time?
We're listening closely, looking at the sales, looking at the cover and all of these things. Then with the second book, we're simply going to go the next layer deep. The thing is with the keys and these steps when it comes to self-publishing, there are many layers.
It is an ocean; it goes down down down down each of the steps. The psychology of covers and what it is that makes a cover successful that makes it in somebody's brain; the psychological side of things. Figuring out what I need to do to get my book to excel.
What kind of cover am I missing on my book that's going to help drive that traffic? So, we're going to be able to see the sales that we want to see in our book. But we don't hit it all at once and that's one of the whole points with Self-Publishing Made Easy if you want to do it the easy way.
The easy way is one step at a time. Learn from the mistakes that you're making and implement them in the next book. I can tell you how many clients I have. There are so many clients I have where they're like “Oh, I don't want to go back and change the cover. I don't want to change the content.”
I say that's just fine. Don't do anything that's going to demotivate you. We want to keep moving forward so we learn from what we've done. We're moving forward, we get information from each and everything we do.
Check out this related article: Success Stories: The Power of Self-Publishing
But are we going to just repeat the same mistakes? Well, how would you even know you would not repeat them unless you even made a mistake? So many authors are making mistakes and they can't even see what the problems are.
And so, this is a really big one. It's learning or having somebody if it's not me, then somebody who's also got 200 plus books and has been running 120 million ads to their books. Who can say, look I can recognize what's going on with your books?
Somebody who can tell you what you can do to improve the sales of your books. Don't just hope you're going to figure it out because in reality, a lot of the methods work; the strategy and the tactics that I teach here.
Then, I go to the next layer down with all of my clients and students. It's what you get when you're working through these things. We learn to optimize the book; we start to see the sales go up and then we implement the Jedi mind trick of pricing strategies.
Things that you would never guess that work but they do. Then we go do another loop on it. You see it and then you have the previous books that came out and you're starting to make money. We're getting traction on every book that's coming onto the market.
But let's get to the secret answer of the day. The most important thing and this is a huge mistake that so many brand-new authors or self-publishers make. It is that they are not pacing themselves.
Using Your Time And Energy Wisely
There are two mistakes you can make. One mistake is you say I'm going to sit around and wait until I have inspiration. And one of the authors I think was Pressfield, if I remember correctly in The Art of War, the question was when do you wait until you feel what inspiration is?
Yes, I have inspiration every single morning at nine o'clock when I'm pumping out a thousand words from my next book. Can you see the thing? In other words, he's going to sit in his chair and he's going to write those words whether he feels like it or not.
But he's got the motivation. You see, he's not just waiting for some inspiration or all this extra time or money or these sorts of things before we start to invest in improving ourselves. Which is necessary to get ourselves to the point where we're able to follow through on getting these tasks done.
But the other mistake there it's the pacing where if you go too fast, I've seen this too in some of my clients. I'm going to hit 20 books at a time and I don't know about optimization or any of this stuff. I'm setting a goal for next month; I've got to get all 20 books out.
What you're going to do is you're going to burn yourself out. You're going to lose that motivation because you're going to say, “Oh, I failed. I only got four books out.” It's just like do not do that to yourself, focus on one book at a time.
Don't go backward in time, figure out what is a reasonable amount of energy and effort. Time and progress that you can make daily. Do not try to set big hard fast deadlines for your books. Rather, decide how much time you're going to use every day and use a checklist as a task management system.
Just like the one that I specifically use and recommend for all of my clients, it is the program Todoist. I am an affiliate for Todoist, so you can check that out. It is an amazing piece of software, everyone in my family uses this software.
Check out this related article: Self Publishing: What It's Like?
It helps us keep track of exactly which steps have to happen. In which order for all of the things that matter. If you don't do not have a task management system at this moment, you're making a huge mistake. So, you're going to want to check out Todoist.
Then let me know how it works for you. It is a crazy cheap program and does miracles when it comes to making progress. You can always let me know how exactly that works for you as well.
I can tell you how to set that thing up. Because once you get that going with yourself publishing, you're going to find you can't live without it. You'll do it for your personal life as well. It won't just be your self-publishing business. So that's a very important thing to always keep in mind.
Now, my question for you today is what mistakes have you made on your self-publishing journey? We were talking about some of these. Did you find yourself as the pacing thing? Was that the problem?
Or maybe your problems are going too slowly or waiting for inspiration before you start putting books out. Or the mistake like Gary’s which was to put out one book and think that's going to be enough as opposed to going for multiple books.
Let me know below in the comments. Because I need to figure out where exactly you're coming from. And check out my other blogs and videos as well.