There are a lot of things that you should be doing if you want to succeed at self-publishing. But let me tell you the answer to the survey what do you need most help with when you self-publish your book?
Today's topic has three points and you're going to want to stick around because the third point is going to tell you exactly the one thing that you actually need the most help with.
Let's get into it. Today's question is a survey what do you need the most help with? This is a question that you maybe you're not considering.
Many authors when you first create your book you have these ambitions. You would like to get the book onto the market self-published or maybe traditionally published. As you're going through this very process, you begin to understand that it's not easy as you thought it was going to be.
As you're going, you start to put it out. You start trying to put the book together and maybe you finally do get it onto the market. Then you're not seeing any sales and you're thinking I can just do this alone?
If you're just going to figure it all out or maybe you need help. You're listening to a lot of different voices but it's so confusing. One of the key issues you have to ask yourself is, what exactly do you need the most help with?
That is what we're going to answer in today's article. But before we get into the answers, check out my absolutely free Self-Publishing Checklist.
Now let's get into it, a little of this or a little of that. When I first got started, I was under the perception that how hard can this whole self-publishing thing be. I thought it would be super easy I don't need any help.
I thought I can figure this out. I grew up my whole life playing with programs and all sorts of stuff. You'd get us to buy something from the store, a stereo system, or something and just figure out how it works.
You don't need to read the instructions or these sorts of things. And why would you call anybody if you just invest enough time? You'll figure it out, that was my thought with self-publishing as well.
But I discovered that no help equals no sales and even worse no help probably means not even getting your book onto the market. This was a huge mistake that I made so I began to take courses and I joined forums.
Check out this related article: This One Mistake Will Cost You $1000s!
I learned lots of different tools and tricks that I tested out. But ended up wasting a lot of time going through all of these different efforts. To try to get my book self-published onto the market, running ads, and other things to try to see if I could get the sales up.
There was a lot of time wasted. This wasn't that big of a waste because the fact is we have to start somewhere. The best thing is people have already done what it is you are trying to accomplish.
When it comes to self-publishing you should be listening to people who have self-published books. Understand the difficulties with it. People who aren't light years ahead of you but people who are doing it daily.
Optimizing Books While Getting Ads
In my case, I'm doing it daily. I'm continually going through the steps of self-publishing daily and getting out books. Usually, once every week I am getting another book or a type of book onto the market.
Or working with narrators, working with the Kindle version or the IngramSpark version. And continually staying in the thing so that I can also understand exactly the frustrations. The things that are necessary to get the book onto the market.
That is perhaps why you're reading this article right now. You are trying to get a better grip on exactly what you should be doing when it comes to self-publishing. If you want to do it easy, there's plenty of courses and other people out there who make it difficult.
But if you want to do it easily that is the thing that this blog is all about. I started seeing which methods work and which ones don't. The beauty was I continued refining the process itself.
The result was I began getting a good base of books that we're selling daily. And by putting more books into the queue, building a longer long-tail of books, we continue to see the sales going up over time.
And what happens is the passive income that's coming in from the books that have previously been published is used to pay for things like Youtube production. Things that I'm doing right now to help even more people avoid the mistakes that I made.
Check out this related article: Where I Self-Publish My Books?
This is a fantastic route that the books give you. It is an opportunity to assume you can get them onto the market. But the mistake that I made was that I thought I don't have any questions, I'll just figure it out myself.
So, for the survey what do you need most help with? The first thing is you really need help with knowing where to get started. There are different phases of the publishing process and we want to make sure that we're not hopping over any of the key ones.
The ones that will be required if we want to see an optimized book come onto the market. We want to see that book make some sales. This is a very important part now for me. First, you just need to get your book onto the market at all.
That would mean particularly getting a Kindle version onto the market. Second, you need ads against it and after that, we don't focus on anything else. Ideally, you would get a cover and you would optimize.
You would have a good description, you would learn things about keywords and these sorts of things. But at least if we can get the book initially written, we can optimize it later. The beauty is we can even change the title and all sorts of stuff as long as it's the Kindle version.
Once it has a paperback version, then it's a little more difficult to change the title of your book but at least initially, with the Kindle, there is no problem. You can do all the changes afterward.
You Need Tools And Services
At least by getting it out there and seeing some sales happening, it will help motivate you and prepare you for the journey that's ahead. Because there is no end to what you can do with that one book. We can splinter the content and use it for social media marketing.
We can turn parts of the book into parts of our blogs. To drive additional traffic for our ideal customer and ideal reader. We're trying to take the book and put it on multiple platforms.
We can run different types of ads and all sorts of campaigns against this book. But we have to start somewhere and getting started is the first thing that most people need the most help with. I would say that's what you need to do, do not get overwhelmed.
The second thing which is also critical and will also save you a lot of time is knowing which tools and services you need. To succeed with this game I have gone through, I don't know how many thousands and thousands of dollars I've spent on tools and courses.
I discover that many of these things don't work. I have a list of my affiliate links below in the description of all my Youtube videos. Those are links to all of the services and the tools that I use to make sure that my books succeed when they get onto the market.
You can test and take a look at those and maybe some of them will work for you. If you have other ones, just let me know I'm always interested in testing out new tools. That is very exciting for me.
The third and secret answer for today's question is Always Be Shipping (ABS). I can't remember who exactly did this. Let me know below if you remember who was the one who originally said this.
But there is Always Be Shipping, meaning shipping a product out in the order. In this case, it would be your books and in my case, it might be my books, my Youtube videos, courses, and these sorts of things.
In your case, it would be getting your books out onto the market. So what you want to do is you want to ask yourself, how you're using your day? In terms of moving that forward to get more of your books onto the market.
If you don't have your first book on the market, what can you do today that will get you closer to that goal? Don't worry about all the marketing and all of the other stuff until we have achieved the first goal.
As many of my former students would be able to tell you when you first ask the question about, what should I do? Would I advise somebody? I would ask do you have your Kindle book out?
And they would say what do you mean? I'm working on marketing and building all of these sorts of things. I would say that's a waste of time. You need to first focus on getting your Kindle book out.
If you don't know how to do that, you can watch some of my other videos where we discuss a little bit of that. That's just a little bit of the skills and the things that I found to be very effective.
So for the survey what do you need most help with? Go ahead and write it below in the comments. Check out my other blogs and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.