← The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
Make 6-Figures Self-Publishing Books on Amazon
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This book has made me over $150,000 on Amazon alone. And it only cost me $5,000 to design the COVID to format the interior, and then to put it up for sale. That is a 30x return on my money. And I did all of this without paid ads. I haven't spent a single dollar marketing this book or going viral on booktok. I've never even seen my book mentioned anywhere on TikTok actually. And no big publisher behind me, I self published this book all on my own. So how did I do it? Well, in this video, I'm going to walk you through the entire publishing process, from outlining and testing new ideas, to how to self publish on Amazon, to the really simple evergreen marketing strategy that I execute every single day that consistently generates anywhere from 3,000 to $10,000 in royalties each month from just this book. And I'm going to point out some of the mistakes that I made along the way so that you can make six figures from your next self published book a lot faster than I did. Part 1. Testing ideas and outlining your book so there are two ways of writing a book, and I've done both. The first way is where you open a blank document, you light a candle, you put on your chapeau, and you begin with the first word and then you just start writing from there. And this is a recipe for disaster. The metaphor I like to use here is that this is like trying to find your way out of a 10,000 acre forest with a flashlight that only shines three feet in front of you. And yet this. This is how most people write their books. And this is how I wrote my first book, which was a memoir called Confessions of a Teenage Gamer. And that book took me four years to write and only ended up making me a few thousand dollars in lifetime royalties. The second way to write a book is where you start writing online instead. In fact, I would encourage you, if you've never written a book before, to forget that you're even trying to write a book. Instead, you should ask yourself, what's the topic you want to write about? What's the niche you want to dominate, and who is the target reader that you want to help? Then go write about that topic in that niche for that specific person online for a year. That is what I did for my second book, the Art and Business of Online Writing. I knew I eventually wanted to write a book about how to write in the digital age, but instead of starting with the book, I started writing about that topic online. And you want to guess what happened. I attracted my target reader. I became known for that niche and I got to tell in public every single idea that I had on this topic with readers telling me in the form of engagement or comments or questions which ideas were most helpful to them. So by the time I actually sat down to write the book, I didn't have to do very much writing. Okay? All I had to do was go back through my library of content and pull out all the highest performing ideas and then build my book around them. And it should come as no surprise that by taking this strategy, it didn't take me four years to write this book. I wrote this book in four months and it has made me hundreds of thousands of dollars. Part 2 Editing Now a question I get all the time from self published authors and even authors that land traditional book deals is where can I find an editor? And my answer is, well, it depends because there are three different types of editors. First, there are positioning editors. So these are people who help you through what I like to think of as the highest level decision of your book, which is where you plan on sitting on the world's bookshelf, AKA how to most effectively position your book for whatever that means to you. Second are structural editors. So these are people who help you think through the content of your book, the order in which you should present your ideas, how to best deliver on the positioning, how to deliver on the promise that your book is making in the title. Right? They're really helping you think through the structure of the content. And third are grammar editors. So these are people who exclusively help you do a final read through, and all they're doing is checking for spelling and grammar. They have no input on positioning. They have no input on structure order of ideas. They're really just another set of ideas. My personal take here is that hiring an editor is completely optional. Conventional wisdom says you absolutely need an editor, and the truth is you don't. If you want the writing process to feel less lonely and have someone to bounce ideas off of, sure. You know, maybe hiring a positioning or structural editor would be helpful for you, but personally I enjoy doing all of this work on my own, and more than that, I enjoy moving really quickly. So I don't typically hire editors for my books because I don't want to have to wait around for someone to sit there and give me feedback. At most I might hire someone to do a final grammar edit and that's about it. But this is a very subjective choice and you should make the decision that feels best for you. Part three Publishing on Amazon. So people think that publishing on Amazon is way more complicated than it actually is. Yes, there is a little learning curve, but I promise it is really not that hard. So let me walk you through what goes into it so that you can understand just how easy it is to self publish a book on Amazon. First thing you do, you buy an ISBN on Bowker. Okay? So you want to buy your own ISBN because then you can also publish your book on other platforms besides just Amazon, like Apple Books, Kobo, Google Books, etc. If you're not familiar, the ISBN number is this little number right above the barcode. And this is essentially how books get tracked, how book sales get get tracked. This allows your book to get populated into the master library of all books. So most people don't know this, but you know, everyone says, oh, you can't get into bookstores without signing a traditional deal. Well, actually you can. Someone could go to a bookstore and request this book right now and the bookstore would just look up this book and look up the ISBN in their massive directory. And then if enough people asked for it, they would order it to their bookstore. So you want to buy your own ISBN, because then if someone or a group of people start asking for your book in a certain neighborhood or territory or area, bookstores can actually order it for themselves. Second, I recommend using a platform like Reed Z to format the interior of your ebook or print book. So Readsy has this really cool free tool that I've been using for years and all you have to do is just throw all of your content in there and the tool allows you to format it, you know, by chapters. It gives you some stock like intro copyright pages that you can use. It helps you fill out like the front matter and the back matter of the book and then it literally takes 10, 15 minutes and then you can just export it as either a Kindle file to upload as an ebook, or you can export it as a PDF file to upload as a print book. Third, the thing I would recommend investing the most money into is the COVID design. So nothing is going to have a bigger impact on sales for your self published book or traditional book, every book than the COVID I recommend using this website called I Need a Book cover. Com. This website is essentially a directory of designers who have worked or currently work for publishing houses and they just want to freelance on the side, which effectively means that you can hire the same person who has designed covers for your favorite writers, even writers that have sold millions and millions of copies. Those designers want to freelance on the side and they are not as expensive as you think. Expenses here range anywhere from maybe $1,000 for a cover, upwards of $5,000 for a cover. Absolute top tier designers, you're looking at like 10 grand for a cover. And that might sound like a lot, but you have to think of each book and your self published library as like a digital real estate portfolio. Right. Some properties will lose money, some will break even, a few will outperform the rest and then a couple will be outliers and they will pay for the whole thing. Right. And so for context, you know, If I spend $5,000 designing this cover, well that sounds like a lot of money until you see how it plays out. And you realize I turned that five grand into, you know, combining Amazon sales and my website sales north of a quarter million dollars at this point. Right. So it's up to you on the level of risk that you want to take. But my recommendation would be if you're going to spend money anywh, if you said I'm going to self publish a book and I only have $1,000 to invest in the whole thing, invest in creating the product, invest in marketing, everything, I would literally put the entire thousand dollars in the COVID design because nothing will have a bigger impact than your cover. Okay. Fourth, I recommend doing some pre publishing research using this really cool tool called Publisher Rocket. No affiliate code or anything. I'm just obsessed with this tool. I use it constantly. So Publisher Rocket pulls data straight from Amazon so you can look up how other books are selling. You can find low competition, high reward book cate to associate with your book. You can identify keywords with lots of search volume. You can do a lot of cool stuff with this tool. I spend probably an hour or so playing with Publisher Rocket before I publish any of my books because I want some context around what category should I put it in or what keywords should I use when I upload it. Especially if you plan on writing more than one book and you want to build out a library of books. That's how I think about it. I would absolutely spend the money and buy Publisher Rocket. And fifth, if you don't have a KDP account already, you can create a new KDP account using your Amazon login. So KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing. This is Amazon's publishing arm. And all you do is just link that to your Amazon login. Then you go to the bookshelf, you add a new title, you select ebook, print or audio, depending on what format you want to upload. You fill in the details, title, subtitle, description, ISBN, number, price, etc. All that stuff. You hit publish and your book will go live 24 to 48 hours later. It is very easy. I have done this 10 times now. So I've self published 10 books at this point. Some have lost money, you know, like my poetry. No surprise there. Some have broken even or made a tiny positive return, like my memoir, Confessions of a Teenage Gamer. You know, I invested probably $1,000 into that book. It's made $3,000 maybe in royalties. So made me a little money. But also no surprise that the books that are most relevant to the niche that I write about consistently online, which is digital writing, ghost writing, those books have made the most, you know. So on Amazon alone, the art and business of online writing has made over $150,000. But including sales from my personal website, that number is probably closer to a quarter million. Maybe I've crossed $300,000 in lifetime royalties at this point. But I also invested five grand into the next book in the series, which is the Art and Business of Ghostwriting. And that book hasn't sold as many copies. It's also a more niche topic, but it's already made me over $25,000 in royalties on Amazon alone. And again, if I count my sales through my personal website is probably closer to 50,000. And this book and all of the books in my library are going to continue making money every single month. Some will be more profitable than others, but that's why I take this portfolio approach and why I would recommend that you do the same. Part 4 My Evergreen Marketing Strategy the big question that everyone has and wants answered is always, what should my marketing strategy be? Well, why don't we just take a look at what other big creators are doing. Alex Hormozi self published his book $100,000,000 offers and he did the same with the follow up book, $100 million leads. And he has shared publicly that he sold over 800,000 copies worldwide of these books by himself. What is his marketing strategy? His marketing strategy is he makes content, specifically YouTube videos, and as he's talking, he has the books on the table in front of him. It's very simple. Or let's look at Dan Ko who self published his book the Art of Focus. I don't know how many copies he's sold, but based on some rough napkin math, I can tell you he's probably sold above the average self published author. So what is his marketing strateg? Well, he makes content and either organically in the content or in the description he reminds people, by the way, I wrote a book and what am I doing right now? I am explaining a topic to you in my niche and as I'm talking I have the art and business of online writing on the table next to me. So what is the big secret marketing strategy? Just follow the instructions on the box like you're baking a Betty Crocker cake. Okay, you make content in a niche, you turn your highest performing ideas into a book and then you make more content in your niche and remind people, by the way, I wrote a book on this same topic and you do that every single day for a year and you will sell hundreds if not thousands of copies. But if you do that every single day for 10 years, you just might be the next Ryan Holiday. He is one of my favorite examples of why becoming a successful author, whether you sign with a traditional publisher or you just decide to self publish, is all about becoming known for a niche you own. A lot of writers want to be as successful as Ryan Holiday, but not very many writers want to write a thousand articles or make a thousand videos on Marcus Aurelius 10 tips for living a Stoic Life this is something that has taken me a very long time to learn on my own writing journey, which is why I want to share it with you. Becoming a best selling authority in any capacity has way less to do with what kind of book you write or how great the writing is, and has way more to do with dominating a niche and building a traffic engine in that niche and then driving traffic to your book or library of books over and over and over again. You don't win by writing a great book, you win by building a traffic engine in a niche and reminding people over and over and over again, hey, and by the way, I wrote a book.