We all wanted to get more sales but having little to no sales at all is really inevitable. Let me give you some tips that will help you stop losing money on self-publishing now!
Today's topic has three points and you're going to want to stick around for the third point. Because it is going to tell you the one thing you're doing that's costing you a lot of money.
Let's get into it. Today's topic is, stop losing money on self-publishing now! This is a very common problem that many authors get into when they first get started with self-publishing.
You have a book that you've written and now you're ready to get it out onto the market. We want to see it sell some books. but the problem is that as we start to invest in different tools, we use our time on different things.
The costs start to go up and when we finally get our book onto the market, it doesn't make any sales. What happens is we are losing money and it feels terrible. I have completely been there, I understand what that feels like and that is what we're going to hit in today's article.
But before we get into the answers, you can grab a copy of my absolutely free Self-Publishing Checklist. Losing on ads! The thing was several years ago, I heard how powerful ads can be. When we're running the Amazon KDP ads for our books, we're putting the ads out there.
Check out this related article: What Is New Since Self Publishing On Amazon 2019?
I took an ads course at the time and I thought this isn't very difficult. In fact, it's very easy to make money on ads. I set up my campaigns and I saw my sales immediately jump. I started making and pulling in lots of money.
Tons of sales were being made. There was only one problem, I forgot to monitor the costs. I didn't notice that the Ad Spend was going very high in comparison to the money that I was making.
So my ads were losing money, they were costing me an awful lot of money. All of this major loss left me feeling like I thought I had control over this. I thought I figured out something great but in reality, it was just a losing strategy.
Optimizing Books
I started adjusting the losers just shutting them down. Decreasing the bid price on the ads and increasing the ones on the winning ads. The result was that I suddenly started making big earnings on the ads that I was running.
I learned the importance of monitoring them daily. This was one of the aspects where we're losing serious money and we're not even aware of it. That was one of the big points that I learned and I've learned this in a lot of different areas.
So stop losing money on self-publishing now! How exactly would we do that? First is you need to optimize your books with the right tools and services. You can see I like to share everything that I do to make self-publishing easier.
Below the description of each of my Youtube videos, you will see the exact list of tools that I personally use in the affiliate links that I have listed. Those are the tools that I found. I swapped them out from time to time.
There are tools not on the list that I no longer use and I removed them from the list because they simply were not saving me money. Either reducing my costs or increasing my revenue and the royalties coming in.
Check out this related article: What Is Amazon Self-Publishing Royalties Calculator?
But optimizing our books means getting the cover right in these sorts of things. But not spending too much money in the process of doing these exact things. We want to hold costs as low as possible.
If you're going to do it, that means you need to be continually monitoring your costs. To make sure that you're not bleeding money out in areas where it is completely unnecessary. That can be avoided by one using the correct tools and also by making sure you're in a forum or communicating.
I go back and forth with my students all the time and strategies just below in the comments as well. If there are any questions that you have regarding self-publishing. And not losing money which is a big fear for many authors who are first getting started.
Do Not Waste Your Time
You're thinking I don't have that much to work with. So what am I going to do in this particular thing? That brings us to our third and secret point of the day and it is that you should avoid wasting time on activities that don't move the needle.
This is the biggest cost that you're going to see that's going to cause you to lose a lot of money. It is simply putting your time and energy focusing on things that simply are not profitable. Don't move the needle towards the profitability side.
For example, I've seen many authors think that " what if I take my book and I put it all over Facebook groups or I set it to free promos and then try to sell it to other authors? This will be a great strategy!". When in fact this is a terrible strategy that you should completely avoid.
Ensuring you're not wasting your time because your time is the most valuable resource that you have. You can't get more of it, once you've used it up, it's gone. If we want to stop ourselves from losing money, we need to make sure that our time is invested in the activities that will make us more money.
Check out this related article: How Much Money Can You Make Self Publishing A Book?
One of those key activities is producing more books. Number two is making sure that the books we produce were doing within a budget. Ensuring we're going to make money off of every book that we're putting onto the market.
That is something here that we always are focused on. Do you feel that you are losing money on self-publishing? If you feel that you're losing money, you've lost money over the long haul for the book you may have self-published, write the word "Yes" below in the comments.
If you feel that you're making money and you're doing great, write the word "No". That will help me better understand where exactly you're coming from. Check out my other blogs and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.