Self-Publishing Pro

Where do you begin? Well, the first thing to do is write your book. Obvious, right? Yes, but there are a few other things you should do before you begin to write. Some questions need answered. Like, who are your audience? Do you know your genre? What other books are out there similar to yours?

It doesn’t matter if someone else has written a similar themed novel or non-fiction self-help book on the same subject. If anything, it can actually help you. For one thing, check out their sales and reviews. Have they sold a lot of copies? If so, that’s great. That means there’s a market for yours. Have they got lots of reviews? Are they good or bad? Find out what people liked or disliked about their work. Then use this as market research. Aim to include anything they missed and customers complained about and aim to improve on anything they did badly. And make sure you include all the aspects that their customers loved. I would even buy their book to check it out for yourself. If you like, it, be sure to give it a good review. Help a fellow author whenever you can, hopefully they will do the same for you one day.

Now, you are probably thinking, great, Arlo. I’ve done all of that, I’m ready to write my novel. Cool. Go for it. But have you thought about a strategy to launch your book when it’s ready, or will you do that after you’ve written it? And what about marketing it? People need to know it’s out there, where they can find it, and what it’s about. My advice, is to get all your ducks in a row first. Have a plan of action to launch your book. This means trying to pull together a subscriber list, so you can use beta readers and let subscribers know your book is on sale. But you don’t have a subscriber list. And this is your first book. You can’t offer a free first book, and funnel your readers to purchase your second book, because you haven’t written either yet. So what are your options. One solution is to break up your novel into two parts, as parts one and two of a series. You may need to write more to expand it across two novels, but this way, you can release them both together and offer book one as the freebee to get them to purchase book two. Alternatively, you can offer book two free, when the purchase book one. Either way, you want to capture their details with a sign-up form. This can be on a landing page. This is how you build your subscriber list. The money is in the list, they say. Once you have those emails and you use an email marketing client like Mailchimp or Mailerlite, you can develop automated email sequences, offer further purchase opportunities or retarget those who signed up but never went through with the purchase.

So, there are a few terms in the last few paragraphs which you may not be familiar with, unless you have worked in sales and marketing. But, guess what, as a self-publishing writer, you are about to embark on both of those careers. I mentioned funnels earlier. You will become familiar with sales funnels later in this guide. Basically, a sales funnel is a webpage or series of web pages, that grabs the customers attention, leads them along an information path, each stage giving them more information on a product, explaining how it can help them, or give them enjoyment, and each stage adds a little more urgency as to why they should buy it now. This could be a countdown timer, or a special offer ending soon, never to return. Whatever the method used, the sales funnel is to guide your customer to the point of making a purchase. If they look like they will leave and move their mouse to the top of the screen, this can trigger a pop-up box telling them to reconsider, or to sign-up to offers. This is the data capture. They become a subscriber. Now you have them, you will need to send them interesting information, emails with something of value to them, like how-to videos or downloadable files on the best free something or other. Finding the right frequency of emails to send them is something of an art-form. Too much and they hit unsubscribe at the bottom of the email and you’ve lost them. Too little, and they forget who you are or why they subscribed and they click that unsubscribe button. But if they remain with you and the email tracker shows they open your emails, then you can set-up automatic retargeting. They haven’t purchased, but they are still interested, still warm. So you can get ads in front of them because the system knows they clicked and subscribed, but didn’t make a purchase. The internet is a very clever vehicle if you have something to sell. In this case, you have your book(s).

Okay, so, there’s a few things to think about and to get ready before you’ve finished your book, or if you take my advice (and feel free not to), you’ll put as much of this in place before you even put pen to paper (old school). How do you build a subscriber list without any books to promote or giveaway? There are some solutions. I would avoid buying a list of email addresses from some of those websites that charge you for such. You don’t want a thousand email addresses of people who have no interest in books or ebooks or in the genre you write. They will never purchase and will unsubscribe and probably report you to the internet police or whoever deals with spam. You need to find people interested in your books. For example, if you write science fiction techno-thrillers, then you want to aim for subscribers who love that genre. They could be Facebook groups that you join, and gently slip a post in about the book you’re writing, with a link to a landing page and the book description and maybe a mock-up cover, with a proposed release date (keep it well ahead). Don’t constantly spam them with hard selling posts, but ask their advice, strike up a conversation around the books theme or characters and ask them for ideas. Involve them, then ask if any of them would like to be beta readers, getting early copies to review and highlight any glaring issues with plot, formatting, spelling, etc. You’ll need their email addresses to send them the copies, therefore ask them to subscribe on your page. You can build a simple landing page for free on one of the many providers, such as Convertkit. You can also collect subscribers here and send emails to them, although to automate it, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan. But to start with, the free plan is fine. They also allow you to upload a file, which your subscribers can download, after they confirm their subscription. Bingo. You have your first subscribers, and good ones at that. You can also join Goodreads and join some of the discussion groups there. These are mostly other authors, but there’s a lot of dedicated readers on there, who are passionate about books. This is another possible source of gaining subscribers, offering a free advanced reader copy (ARC) to those interested and many of these readers will write a review. They will write an honest review. Be aware, you might not like their review, but generally the readers on Goodreads leave constructive criticism. Don’t take bad reviews to heart, they’re not personal. Use them to improve your writing, like we did with other peoples reviews in the same genre and theme as your book. Take the review as lesson and improve your manuscript. They’re actually doing you a favour. One thing to keep in mind. Don’t ask anyone who you live with to buy your book from Amazon and leave a review. Amazon can track your connections with other customers and they will remove any reviews they believe to be fraudulent. This includes any reviews from someone who has just bought the book. Even if they read an advanced copy, the fact that they left a review within minutes of purchase would indicate to Amazon they could not have read it in that space of time and you will be in trouble with the Amazon police (or someone with an important job at Amazon).

What next? You still haven’t written a word, but now you're building webpages and joining discussion groups and on the run from the elders-of-the-internet!. Well, I guess you’re about ready to get that novel on the go. Just one thing. Have you got your post-launch marketing plan sorted out yet? Yes, great, get to work on the novel. No? Well then, let's take a quick look at your options. The good news is, once you’ve written your book, and had it proof-read and edited, and the cover created and the manuscript formatted for ebooks and paperback, you can use it, or if you split it into two, use one to sell the other, as we discussed earlier. You can also setup a promo, either hook up with other authors releasing their books and create a package offer in the same genre, or an incentive to get more subscribers, like an Amazon gift card and free copy of your book, using one of the promo sites like Kingsumo. This is a good way to gain exposure for your book, but it will cost you the price of the Amazon gift card and the postage and price of your paperback unless you offer the ebook version. So you need to work out if it’s worth it. With Kingsumo, the more subscribers post your offer across social media, the more chances they have of winning, as they get more entries. But if you only got twenty-five entries (unlikely), then if you offered a gift card at $25, then each subscriber cost you $1, plus the price of the book. If you got one hundred subscribers, then that’s a better return. What’s also good, is as you’re offering a book, it tends to just be those interested in books, who enter and share on social media. So your subscribers are relatively warm to begin with, although some will be serial competition entrants.

Next time, I’ll look at formatting your manuscript for ebooks. Back soon…