Today seemed like a timely day for another update on my Amazon business, for two reasons: my first royalty payment is on the way, and my first original book is out!
Don’t get too excited about the royalty, though—Teachers Pay Teachers automatically sends out payments via Paypal, on every 15th of the month. They don’t wait for it to accrue above a certain amount like Amazon does. So this month’s princely sum due to me this fine day is….drum roll please…28 cents!
I am not too concerned. It was the wrong time of year to put out teaching stuff, so I am confident September will be busier. I plan to refresh some of it over the summer and making sure everything is looking good for a big back-to-school push.
As for my Amazon stuff…yay, for my new book! It is called The Reader’s Guide to the eBook World and is the first of three projected titles based upon my NAPCO era of Teleread work. The chosen ‘chapters’ were all expanded, polished and edited. Even if you’ve read them before, they will seem fresh and different. I hope you enjoy it!
I want to add, from a creative standpoint, that it was much more work than I thought it would be. I had to organize them into a cohesive order, write new material, proof and edit…it took way longer than I thought it would! I still have more work to do. I have already added it to my website and personal blog, and posted about it to Mobile Read. But there are some people who got mentioned in the book if I was referring to their articles, so I want to email all of them. And I have already gotten some feedback that my cover may need some improvement, so I am looking into what that means so I can coach my graphics guy (aka the Beloved) on what to do.
I have also set up an email list since everyone says I need one of those. I have no subscribers yet, but all the Kindle how-to guides I have read stress that the mailing list is Very Important. So we’ll see how that goes. It definitely seems like there is always something to do as far as the book business goes!
Anyway, I’ll update again when my next book is up. I am currently holding steady at one sale a week, but that first book was in a very low-sale category and I knew that. Now that I have a potentially higher-traffic category under my belt, will my sales numbers go up? We’ll see!
1. “from a creative standpoint, that it was much more work than I thought it would be.”
Yes, most people don’t understand the amount of work involved. I gave one of the books that I had put together to a friend to publish as an ebook under his own name. The content was all there. In the end, he stated that now he realizes how much effort is required to publish an ebook even when the complete content is handed to him on a platter.
2. “all the Kindle how-to guides I have read stress that the mailing list is Very Important.”
No doubt an email list can be one of the most powerful tools for book marketing if you know how to generate one with a lot of names on it and how to use it well. But as a self-published author whose books have sold over 875,000 copies worldwide, I can say an email list is not essential. There are many ways to market books, in fact, a lot more than the majority of “book experts” know.
Whenever some marketing method such as social media becomes popular, I tend to avoid it. I abide by what author/musician Bob Baker says,
“Think in terms of opposites. Make a list of all the specific things that major book publishers and mainstream authors do to promote their books. Then imagine what would happen if you did the exact opposite.”
Check out his article “How to Become a Book Marketing Ninja” at:
http://fulltimeauthor.com/how-to-become-a-book-marketing-ninja/
Someone once said, “If you only know what everyone else knows, you don’t know anything.”
My approach is to look at what the competition is doing. I also look what the competition isn’t doing. Then I select a few things the competition isn’t doing that ends up selling a lot more books.
Ernie J. Zelinski
The Prosperity Guy
“Helping Adventurous Souls Live Prosperous and Free”
Author of the Bestseller “How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free”
(Over 250,000 copies sold and published in 9 languages)
and the International Bestseller “The Joy of Not Working”
(Over 280,000 copies sold and published in 17 languages)