Transcripts
1. Welcome to Class: Welcome to this digital products course all about books and e-books. What are you going to learn in this class? What is a book? And y is a great option for you. The tools to create e-books platforms to sell you books. Create Grenier own e-book from scratch, covering, writing it, designing a book cover formats, everything you need to do to get your book up online, specifically to platforms like Amazon, which are the, is really the biggest player for selling e-books. We're also going to cover how to turn and e-book into a physical book and sell it via platforms again, like Amazon and pricing your book. And of course, looking into case studies of examples that I've done and have successfully done to help grow my business. So let's get going.
2. Why are eBooks a Great Digital Product for You?: What is a book and why is it the perfect digital product for your business? Well, what does the book I'm not even going to go there, but I will say that the type of book that I think is best for you going into online business is some kind of informational educational content type book. Maybe you're interested in writing fiction books, but I think writing a fiction book is going to be a lot harder than writing a non-fiction book. And there's lots of ways to actually outsource some of the work for a non-fiction book that doing so far are a fiction book would be a lot harder. I'm guessing that if you thought about your business right now and thought, Okay, well, what would I do? How could I make this a book? What would I write about? Most of you would probably do a non-fiction book. Why is this a great option for you? It's a great way to find a completely new audience. It's rather simple to create in terms of the tools and equipment you need and selling it is easy to in terms of as just a single file that you can sell and deliver. You can deliver it via email, you delivered via different apps and web tools to deliver digital products. But unlike other products that we've covered in this course, like an online course, webinars and coaching products, software and apps. Those are a lot more intensive and the way that you have to deliver to the customer, customer e-books or something that once you create it, there's a lot, a lot of work up front. But once it's created online, you can sell it repeatedly without really any extra effort. So ends up being something that could be super passive. I'll tell you from my experience, all of the books that I've written for my business, pretty much a 100 percent passive at this point. I go in once in a while to do some promotions that you have available to you via Amazon's Kindle select Program, which we'll talk about in this section. But other than that, I pretty much just put it up there and forget about it. So like I always like to do in these sections, I like to look at different types of random jobs or skill sets and just talk through them. Talk through what I think you might want to write about. So finance advisor, this is something that has a lot of potential for writing books. All kinds of things from budgeting to starting a business, depending on what your specific like niche is in finance, real estate, stocks investing, starting a business. Did I already say that? So many things you could write about for finance, and it's a topic that a lot of people are interested in learning about. Mechanic. Okay, So this is a good one. Let's see. If I was a mechanic, what would I write a book about? Maybe how to buy a car? How top 10 things you need to know about a car, top 10 things you need to know how to fix on your own car. You know, you could even get more creative. Let's say, what if you want to do a more fictional or creative writing as a mechanic, maybe you talk about the craziest car stories that wherever brought into your shop and maybe just stories from the mechanic shop and what happened there? I think there's a place for a sort of non-fiction account of pretty much any career. Anyone that's interested in being an auto mechanic potentially would be interested in reading your story. Gardening. Oh my God. So many things that have to do with gardening could be in a book. I mean, we know there's magazines galore about gardening. And so everything from There's a picture here of fall, some fall plants. So how to plan a fall garden? How you can be broad. You'd be like tips for starting your own garden, or it could be super specific. How to prepare your, your soil for your upcoming garden. Maybe a specific book about all the different bugs and pests that you have to deal with and the solutions for them. Or a general, just a dizzy gardening book. So many things you could do with these skills. I believe that everybody potentially has a book in them. So hopefully throughout the rest of these lessons, you'll learn the tools you need to actually get started to do it yourself. And potentially go out and start writing one.
3. Recommended Tools to Create a Book: In this lesson, I'll go over the recommended tools for writing your own book. So there's two basic steps for writing a book. One is writing the actual content and then the next is formatting it. So this is important if you are selling it online. So if you're doing a physical book, this is different. But let's go through them. So writing apps, probably not, not really confusing at all. Microsoft Word or Google Docs pages on a Mac or scrivener, which is more of a writer specific application, are all great tools. I've transition myself from Microsoft Word, which most of us probably grew up using two using Google Docs for pretty much everything. I do. I know that I have a lot of friends and family members who do write professionally that like specific tools like scrivener. So check them out. But if you want something that is a little bit more unique, I used to use an app called ohm writer. I don't even know if that's available anymore. Pause. It is oh my gosh. Okay, I just thought about this after putting together the entire slideshow for this course. But OEM Writer is a really cool app that basically clears out all of the distractions. It has a blink background, it has some bill in like downloaded music. And it is a way to have distraction free writing. So check it out. It's I believe it's free. And I usually use this all the time when I was writing for a school. Now let's talk about the formatting software. We'll talk about the different formats that you need to put your book into later on. Uploading just a simple Word document or a PDF. While you may be able to do that on certain plow forums, it's not going to look good on eBook readers. So if you have a Kindle or another type of ebook reader, it's not going to be able to format. It is not going to be able to zoom, make the text bigger or smaller. And you really want those features available for your reader. Pdfs are fine if you're just selling it on your own website, you know, giving me away as a lead magnet, emailing it out to your followers or anything like that. But if you are putting a book on the Amazon marketplace, you definitely want to have a, a formatted book that we'll look good on an e-reader. So some of the options are drafted digital velum, which is for Mac, Kindle create, which is Kindles own or Amazon's own sort of formatting application that they have. And then Kitab UX, which is a popular, popular one that a lot of ubiquitous use with all of these, basically what you can do is take a Word document and import it, and then it will do most of the work for you. Some of these are free, some have paid options. But the kindled Cree option is definitely a good F31 to get started with. So if you want to just see what it is, you know, if you're just getting started with this, it might not be something that you want to pay for right now. And that's what I've used in the past to actually format. I've also outsourced and paid someone to do this and we'll talk about that in a future lesson. So these are the apps that you want to know. So probably the writing apps you already knew about, but the formatting software, these are ones to check out.
4. Platforms to Sell Books: In this lesson, I'm going to go over the ways that you can sell your book. So the first one is what I've talked about already. Amazon Kindle, it's probably what you think of as the first place to buy an eBook. Amazon started as an online bookstore. So most of us who are older than me, I guess, who were born in the eighties. I swear I was born in the eighties and older knew that Amazon was the place where you'd find textbooks as a high-schooler or even in college for a lower price. Now it's a place where we buy everything but still their bookstore and there e bookstore is one of the biggest and the reasons that Amazon is as big as it is now. So Amazon Kindle, it's really the only place that I'm going to recommend to try to dive into and sell your, your e-book. Because it's super easy to do so it's super easy to upload a book and to put it out there, and even to start to get some traction and sales. It's also a great place to find a new audience. We talked about this in the first lesson, are one of the first lessons of this section. But if you put a book on Amazon, it's a completely new search engine for people who go there to buy things with people who go there to search for a product, a digital product, or a physical product. But if they're looking for a book, if they're looking for an eBook, they're looking for digital products. So the name of the game, whenever you put a digital product on a place or a platform, like Kindle is that you need to rank it. You need to do whatever you can to rank it so that when people search for whatever the topic is or the keywords are, your book pops up. There's different strategies to do this. And we'll talk a little bit more about how to kickstart your e-book ranking in a minute. But in general, SEO, good SEO, in terms of your, the, the title of your book, the description of your book, Choosing the right categories and subcategories, and of course, those important reviews. You might also want to sell your book on your own website. There's lots of options for selling digital products like Shopify, selfie, I, gum road, eDonkey junkies. One of the older ones that some of us digital product creators know about from over a decade ago is really one of the first places to, to sell digital products like online courses, video training, e-books, and that kind of thing. All of these will have an option to embed a checkout option on your own website. Or you could actually create your own, your entire website using some of these options or be a place where you direct people. I've personally used gam Road and I still use gum road for some things to sell digital products. Pretty, pretty easy. Shopify is probably one of the most popular options right now. But really any of these will do you just find for selling an e-book? Now, what's the difference between selling on your own platform versus on a marketplace? If you watch this section of this course on creating online courses, It's going to be very similar. The pros and cons selling on your own platform is great if you have an existing audience, if you want to charge higher for your book, but you have to do all of the marketing. So if you don't have any audience, if you don't have an email list or a social media following, it's going to be hard, if not impossible, to just put your book up on a website and expect it to sell. Contrast that with a marketplace, there's ways to rank your book, to get it up there, get people searching for it. And like I mentioned, the marketplace is just that. It's a place where people are there to buy millions and millions and millions of people every day go to Amazon to buy things. And so it's just figuring out how to get your product in front of them on the marketplace that they're already searching on for potentially you, your product, which is the solution to their problem. And so that's good in the sense that there's customers already there, but it's also bad because there's so much competition. So pros and cons you have to weigh. You could also do both. In the next lesson, I'm going to talk more about outsourcing some of the work for writing the book. And talk about my experience with different platforms and the different stages of writing and form it, matting a book that I recommend outsourcing.
5. How to Outsource Book Creation & Formatting: In this lesson, I want to talk about how to outsource your book, and I'll talk first about the different platforms I recommend Upwork.com, Fiverr.com, and a more specific one word to kindle.com are all platforms that I've used to help create e-books for my business. Today, I've had I have for books that I've written and published. All of them are on Amazon right now if you want to find them, some of them are a little older, a little bit rusty and not perfectly polished, but they actually still sell and people still enjoy them. And I started writing e-books myself because just like you, I wanted another avenue, another passive income source, and another way to find new potential customers for my mean core business, which is my online courses. So I actually wrote books on basically the same topics that I teach online courses with the hope that someone that would, would read a book of mine, find the book, want more information and ultimately purchases a course of mine. I, even in my, my books would link to the courses and used it as a part of the sales funnel. So speaking of these platforms though, Upwork Fiverr.com, you might have heard of them, probably have. Fiverr.com is really, you could find pretty much anything out there. It's gig based. It's a, it's a marketplace for freelancers to post gigs. And so I've used it for all kinds of things, not just writing books. I've used it for people to help design graphics for people to help me move a website to a new domain for writing or helping to format a book and all kinds of things. Upwork is more of a job posting site. So you put a out a job posting and people apply for it and you have to interview them and hire them. And so it's not, as, I would say, easy as fiber in the sense that, you know what you are asking for upfront. You have, you have to do the work to find the the gig or that's perfect for you. But with Upwork, it can be a little bit more customizable. For example, with fiber, you might have someone who just does the taking a Word document and converting it to a an IBA book ready file. But with Upwork, you might have better luck finding someone to edit or ghost write your book more long-term projects. Or maybe someone who can do it off from for writing or helping to edit your book to formatting it, to even uploading it on whatever platforms you want, like Amazon. I used word to kindle.com for my latest book, which is a basically the book version of my, my photography master class and my most popular course. And this entire book was actually outsourced. I had someone watch my course. It was actually a student of mine who watched my chorus and wrote, turned it into a book. They wrote out a book based off of the course content. I then went on Upwork.com, had someone edit it. So Dow was outsourced and then I went to work to the Kindle.com because I really wanted to make sure that it was perfectly formatted for Kindle. Not that you can't do this on Fiverr up work, but I have had issues in the past where people have formatted it the incorrect way. And I wanted a more reputable site. So I went specifically to this platform, which is this is what they do who were to kindle.com starts at $49 and they took it 48 hour turnaround and they did a really good job. So there's lots of other websites and platforms out there that can handle different aspects of writing a book. These are the three that I would recommend. And I think even if you don't pay someone to edit your book, I think it's definitely a good idea to get someone's, someone else's eyes on it. Not only for content, but of course just the basics of spelling and grammar mistakes. It's one of the easiest ways to turn off a reader and get poor reviews are those things and also the formatting. So I have a couple of books that I put up on on Amazon a while ago. And they aren't formatted properly for the Kindle reader. And so those constantly were getting bad reviews because of that until I went ahead and updated them. And if you can try to do this with the software that we mentioned earlier in this section. And if you, if you go in there and learn that software, you can do it. But I think sometimes it's easier and better quality and worth it for your time to outsource it and keep these platforms in mind for all sorts of different aspects of your online business, upward and fiber have, have people who can help you with pretty much anything that Diego and I are sharing in this course.
6. Designing a Book Cover that Stands Out: Let's talk about designing your book cover. First, let's go over the software. So we have a couple of recommendations. If you want to do this yourself, Photoshop is probably one of the best options. If you, you know it. It's more expensive. You have to pay for the software and it is intense, so you have to learn it. I've got a course on it. If you want to learn how to use Photoshop or something as simple as canva.com can. You can create a design for your cover with with canva.com. Every platform has different specifications for the size, dimension, the quality, the pixels, and all of those things. And so when you are uploading a book on a platform like Amazon a will give you all of those details. And so using a tool like Photoshop gives you a little bit more control over that. But using Canvas, you can do it as well. And then of course, just like we talked about in the last lesson, you can't outsource this. The other app or platform all add to the list is 99 designs on top of fiber. And upward, 99 designs is specific to design in gravity Design. And what's cool about 99 designs is that it's a competition. So you could actually, you get lots of different people designing for you and then you get to pick the winner. You only pay for the one that you choose. So it's kind of a cool thing to get a range of different designs. You have to create a prompt, give them ideas, give them direction if you want specific colors or types of imagery, but then you get a lot of options. I actually did this for my previous logo for video school back when it was video school online.com. And I picked one and I ran with it and it was a great logo for a few years before I rebranded to video school.com to talk about tips and best practices for designing an ebook cover. I figured it would be fun to actually go into the Amazon Kindle store and actually just poke around and talk through what I think are great covers, what aren't so great covers. And within that kind of give you some best practices. So I mean, I think the key things for me are that you have to design your cover for the screen. And so that means you're designing for someone to see it as a small thumbnail, meaning text has to be big if you want them to be able to read it. Images should be simple, clear, explanatory for what is actually on what your book is about. And you're gonna see in here that the more simple covers I think, are, the more eye-catching. Using very contrasty colors between your text, the background or your text and the image. And also using blockier fonts also tends to help make it more legible. People generally do judge a book by the cover, especially when they're in a bookstore. If you walk around the bookstore, What books are you pulling out? Unless you have a specific book or author in mind, you are scanning the shelves and typically. Depending on your style and preference, something might jump out at you. But some of those key things like bold fonts contrast fonts, colors with the background so it's clear. What I mean by that is like a very light color or bright color font with a darker color background or vice versa, that just makes it more visible. But then you pull out the book cover and again, you judge it based on what looks like online. It's a little bit different because people are typing in words. And so the title and the description and getting those key words, the words that someone is thinking about when, when wanting your book that's white, helps your book appear. So it's not just So on scanning through a bunch of books and and picking it based solely off of the thumbnail. But once one does type in those words, what actually comes up and what's the first thing they're going to click on? So let's go look at some specific examples of some specific topics. But first, I'm just here on the crafts, hobbies and home Kindle books page and I think you should do this. Go on to Amazon, go down to the shop buy department, go to the books, go to kindle books. And then you can go to any of these categories down here, or you just kinda have your main categories up here. But I think it's important are easy to kinda go through and see and compare and contrast the different types of covers if you go into a specific topic so that you're kind of comparing things that are in the same range. So just initially look at this screen for a second and which covers stand out to you. Now I can tell you the ones that stand out to me are this one, this one with the cat, and then this one down here, that's teal one with the dog, maybe this one with two dogs right here. All of Mabel and me. And then after that, I don't know these three up here kind of all together, maybe the Storm Rising. Now, why did those stand out to me and tell me, ciao with me if those and leave a comment and the chorus. If these were the ones that you stood out to you or if other ones and why you think that. But I think this first one think like cat for sure because it's simple. The background is simple. The cat, it's not very distracting. And the cat is what stands out. Same with this one. The particulars of Peter. The background is very simple and the dog image is very simple and stands out compared to like this one right here. All creatures great and small. The dog, the design is kind of cool, but it doesn't stand out as much. Storm Rising the text, yellow font on a dark blue, black kinda background definitely stands out in terms of the title. I think this one more than any of them. I can see what the title is. And that's important because ligate, the title of this book is, look how small that title is. Now I am zoomed in a little bit. So this is a 100% zoom in, just so you can get a better sense of what it looks like. But this is me scrolling and the title is very small. So I really am looking at the cover of the book and not at the words down here to choose what I, what I, what I'm going to click on. This one right here. Think like a cat, even though the colors aren't super contrasty and the title isn't bold and and stand out. It's still I think this one and just that picture of the cat. Maybe I'm just a cat person, so maybe that's why that one stands out to me. Let's go and let's just look at, let's see what non nonfiction looks like already. So Obama, obviously, if you're, if you have a recognizable face than Obama is going to stand out, this heart stopper, that's definitely going to stand out because it's gotta guy with no shirt on. So that stands out to I think anyone. Otherwise, these ones are a little bit boring to me. I mean, it's a lot I just text. And so the next one that stands out to me, I think is the rule of five simply because there is an apple. Now this might just be me, but it's a good thing to know and see yourself what stands out to you and do the ones that just have text standout at all to you. Or even adding some kind of imagery. Is that right? That important? Scrolling down, see this one right here again to me, can't hurt me. The one with the person in it stands out, Martin Luther, I'm just scanning the ones with the faces for sure. Stand out to me. This is a good one. Dirt in the travel section, dirt dot one stands out most to me. And just like the act of the simplicity of it being one that my eyes are drawn to makes it seem like, or it definitely will end up getting more clicks than the others. Now, another thing that I think you should do and I kind of pro tip with designing e-book covers or anything that goes on a marketplace is search specifically for your topic and then see what the colors are that are used. And see if you could use a color that contrast with that. Out of all of these on this page, dirt, the background of this sort of coral pink, orange stands out compared to everything. Let's go back and look at another category. Let's look at business and money. Business and money. Okay, so here, I think the one that stands out to me, what stands out to you blew, right? Am I right? I hope I'm right, maybe not. I'm sure everyone has their own sort of way of looking at things, but everything is this red, orange, yellow, except for this black, blue, big blue background right here for this book, dollars and cents. Okay. Let's go back and see arts and photography. I hope you're enjoying this. I'm enjoying this. And let's look. Let's go down to photography because my book is under photography. So once you go in here as a buyer, if you go deep enough into the categories or if you search for a specific topic, you're going to get a list of books rather than the grid of bugs. Even though you can change the view, it's important to know this, that this is generally how people are going to be seeing your title. And so again, scrolling down, this is where you might, someone might be reading the title of the book and basing their opinion based off of that, more so than just the title itself. But I think for me still the simple ones stand out. I mean, this one for sure, GoPro, Hero eight. Now that's not going to be a book that a lot of people who are searching for photography are interested in. And so that's interesting that, that comes up so high here. This one right here. I know that Tony Northrop, he is a popular photographer on YouTube. And this book ranks really, really well, great reviews, I think because she's on the cover, her his partner. I believe that's Chelsea North rub right there. And that stands out a lot. I think this one right here, remembering Shanghai, this stanza a lot for me to again, faces, faces stand out right here. I would go on here, those Speaking of colors though I would look at these and a lot of blues, lot of graze. What if there was a big bright red book? Big bright red or big bright orange background or even some kinda shady yellow or something like that that would completely stand out right here. All right, I just wanted to do a little experiment to see how well my book is doing and to see if I'm putting into practice what I'm preaching. So I'm on Amazon. I'm doing what most people would do. I don't think a lot of people will actually go straight to the Kindle page. What they'll do is type in photography or the topic. And then they'll realize, oh, I need to look into a specific category because I'm getting photography equipment. Alright, so we're gonna go under Kindle Store and I want to see where my book pops up. Not on the first page. And I can tell because I can scroll and I'm going to see it not on the second and I'm not I'm not surprise. I don't think it would be. But what I'm doing right now is a perfect example of what you can do to increase your ranking. Because I am on the third page now, you might not get a ton of traffic to the third page of Amazon. But you're gonna get a lot more traffic than if you're on the 30th or let's see how many pages there are 400 pages, but the third page is a lot better than the 400th. And tell me that if you're scrolling through this, the bold yellow book cover doesn't stand out from the rest. I did this on purpose because I saw that all the other book covers weren't yellow. They're mostly that gray, white, blue, bold text for the title. So it's easy to see. You don't see my face, but it's a person on their big. And what I've done is I've actually given access to anyone with a Kindle unlimited membership for to have access to this book, which helps it get more sales, which helps it gets more reviews. So even if someone is reading it for free, so on, can potentially review it, which will help it with the general rankings. I've also done a free give away, which you're allowed to do every quarter through the Kindle select program, which I'll talk a little bit about more in the lesson where we go over the Amazon platform. But I did just want to see where I was landing and if I was putting into practice what I'm preaching and I think I am. And so far this book has done the best for me, over 300 reviews. I've made thousands of dollars from this book specifically, and I've converted it to paperback, which is something we'll talk about as well. Thank you for watching this lesson and I hope it was super helpful.
7. From eBook to Physical Book: On-Demand Printing: In this lesson, I'll share some tools for turning your e-book into a physical book. Being a published author of an eBook is cool. But you know, as even cooler, being a published author of a book that you could actually hold in your hands. It's pretty cool, but it's also really, really easy. A lot easier than it may seem. There are a few different ways to do this. You could design it yourself and publish a book using a platform like blurb.com or Lulu.com. And this is where you can basically just upload your book, have it printed out. There's other services though where you can actually do print on demand and sell it. So with blurb or Lulu, it's more about you purchasing a number of books that you want to buy and then you have to Psalm ship him and do all of that. But to make it easier for you, amazon has created a print on demand service. It used to be called create space. Now it's just under Amazon, KD, ZP. There's also an alternative book Baby. And both of these are options where they're not going to print your book until someone buys it. And so this has changed the game for selling print books. And that's what I'm doing right here with this book. I bought my own book because I wanted to see what it looked like in person. And I don't know. It's pretty I look at this, I'm like, this is pretty darn cool actually, the quality is pretty good. It's not like the highest quality book in the entire world. But just looking at this is really cool. Formatting it is a little bit different than the format for the e-book version. The cover is also a little bit different, but all of that, it walks you through on the platform and it's pretty much a simple click of a button to take any e-book that you sell on Amazon and turn it into a print on demand book. The other cool thing is that you can sell them for a higher price. So we'll talk more about pricing. But obviously printing out a book is going to cost more money than a digital file. But it's something that you can make more money per sale as well. And it goes hand in hand with your e-book sales. So if your e-book does well, then your print book is also going to do well. So anyways, these are the platforms will all show you what it looks like on Amazon. But if you're just looking to print something out yourself, Blurb and Lou are good, but if you're trying to actually sell it, I would definitely recommend Amazon or book baby.
8. Amazon KDP Dashboard Tour: In this lesson, let's go over to Amazon.com and I'll show you the back end of the Kindle program. I'll show you what it looks like to have books on there already and I'll walk through a bit of the upload process and talk through that menu so that you have a better idea of what is expected, what are all the things you need to know and do before you actually upload a resume. Here's the back. And if you have a qA Dp membership, all you have to do is go to KTB p.com, sign up. And here is my dashboard. So here you can see my four books that I've written. Three of these are really old. I went through a period 20142015, where I wrote three books. And then I didn't do it until this past year in 2019 or a year ago with the photography master class. You can see here that I have the paperback version available for the photography masterclass book, but I don't for these other ones. But look, you can literally just click a button and it goes through a process of creating a book. So let's look at that first. Actually, I just want to show you how easy it is. So all you have to do is it's going to pull in the information from the other book. And then you have all your information, it's going to pull it in. What's cool is it gives you an actual KT P ISBN number. This is that international sort of standard number that any book has. So makes you even feel a little bit more special event. You can choose the size and the paper type. So they have different options here if, you know pretty much anything, depending on how you designed the interior of your book, you can choose that Matt glossy, all kinds of stuff you can check out. Then you basically upload the manuscript. They recommend PDF file, but you can upload in a Word file. You can upload a, the cover if you've already created it, or they have a cover creator as well. Okay, so that's pretty much as easy as it could get to turn a book into a random book. Let's show you the reports page. So this is where you see the downloads or the sales of your books. So right here it's a little hard to see because you see these spikes up here. And this is when I was doing a free giveaway of my book. So we had thousands of downloads. And this is a great way to introduce people to your business because you, it's completely free. I didn't have to mark this at all because there are so many people on Amazon searching for everything at all times. If you just put it out there for free, people will find it and I'll show you how that works in just a minute. But that's, that's free. So that's actually kind of skewing it. So let's turn off free and just look at paid units. So here you can see the paid units. Now notice something interesting about what happens to the paid. Units right after the free period, they go up. And that's why it's good to use this promotion that you have every, as often as you can because it helps rank your course. I just showed you in the previous lessons about how I found my book on the third page of search results. It was nowhere to be seen before I did the free giveaway. And so unless you are completely concerned about giving content away for free, which I don't think you should be. I think free content as good. I think you use this option. So no, I typically get a handful of sales every few days, but after that free preview, so 12 the next day, and then every day it has been making sales. This graph down here is for the Kindle unlimited membership. So if someone pays for that membership, you basically get royalties based off of the pool that all authors share based off how popular your book was, how many people were actually reading it. So you can see like a typical month right here, not making a ton of money. That's not the purpose. I'm not gonna say no to an extra a hundred, two hundred dollars a month, and this is worldwide happening every month. The important thing for me is getting more people aware of my business and my brand and hopefully transitioning to my higher price products, which are things like online courses or coaching. I went over here to my historical tab. You can see all through history what, what it looks like. And so let's take away the free units again. And you can see big spikes. Big spikes early on when I gave away or when I launched my first books. And then everything kinda started die off until I wrote my new book. And this is when we launched the photography masterclass book. Same here for the Kindle unlimited. Royalties over time, over for $4,500. Again, not a ton, but I'm not gonna say no, and that's just US dollar as the rest of this adds up to maybe close to $700 thousand. But it's all about getting more people to my website, to my brand. So let's look at that marketing tab. That's where you choose to put your books for free. And I know I'm kind of going through the features of what it looks like to already have books on the platform before we look at actually uploading a book. But hopefully this is interesting to you. Alright, so if you go here and you scroll down, all right, so you have a few different options. You have a, and what I've done is you can pay for advertising. I've never done that. But what to free, easy things to do are these Kindle countdown deals or the free book promotion. And this is what I've done. So all you have to do is click create a free book promotion. And I'm not eligible because I just did my five-day promotion. But next quarter. So you can do this every quarter. You basically choose the book, you choose the days. I always do five in a row because you don't want to stagger them day, like do one day here, one day a week later, because it builds momentum. Your books for free, it starts to rank well, and there is an option to look for free books only. And so you can sometimes alleys for me, my book has actually gone into the top spot or the top page of the free books, specifically under photography. I remember when I launched my first books, I was able to get my free books to the first page of all free books, which is incredible. And that just means more eyeballs, more downloads, potentially more reviews, and then ultimately more cells later on. The Kindle countdown deals is a little bit different edges that allows you to do a discount on your books. And so that's where if you were a little bit more concerned about giving stuff away for free, if this is your core product for your business, you probably don't want to give it away for free all the time or at all. But that you might want to use the option for doing a discount. So I'm actually going to split up this video into a couple of so in the next lesson, I'll walk through how you upload a book and off. We'll spend a little bit more time on that section of the KDE platform.
9. Publishing Your Book on Amazon: Alright, so in this lesson we're going to look at uploading an e-book. So again, I'm back here on the GDP dashboard. Super easy to start a book. On the main page it says plus to create a Kindle book and an e-book, paperback. You can do that as well. So let's go through this language. Language. Book title. Include your book title may keyword friendly as much as possible. Subtitle, add a subtitle. I think it's super important to have a subtitle because again, it just adds more keywords that will make your book more SEO friendly and more likely to come up. Search results. I'm all about being super clear and specific about what your your book is. I if you don't want to get creative with it, I'm not calling the photography master class. You're Complete Guide to photography book. I'm not calling it My vision or the art of light or something like that. There are books like that that do do well before those of us who are simply digital content creators, who aren't authors who don't have a big machine behind us trying to push out a book and rank it. Being specific with keywords is very important. The key L1 important thing though, is that the title has to appear on the cover. So you can't just write a bunch of words, nonsense or super long subtitle just because it has to appear on your cover. So just make sure you're happy doing that. If it, if your, if the books are part of a series, you can do it that here. If you have multiple additions, say I put out another edition of this book, keep grabbing it. If I put another, I would up the addition and probably put the old one has additional one. Put your author contributors, you can add everything from editors, photographers, translators, credit them all there, and then description. I mean, you can read here about why descriptions matter by it. My Word prime it. You want more words that people will be searching to find your book to appear in your description. Put your mind. Put yourself in the mind of someone who's looking for your book and what are they going to be typing? Use those words clearly and in a creative way and legible way that makes sense. Not just repeating photography, photography, photography, but make it make sense, but use them as often as it makes sense to do publishing rights. It's going to be your own copyright unless for some reason you want to put it on to public domain keywords. Okay, so this is again where you want to use specific words that will help people find it. So for me, I can't remember what I use for keywords for this book, but I would probably include things like photo, photo editing or other major topics, a portrait photography, different styles at landscape photography, those big topics and words that someone might be interested in or might be typing to find a book. And then if, you know, if the Dharavi masterclass seems like a better option than finding a specific landscape photography book. Then, hey, that's great for me, hopefully great for them as well. But again, it just helps it appear. Next, we look at categories. Now this is super important because again, the name of the game is trying to figure out how as many people can see your book as possible. So my advice is to pick two categories because you can pick up to two. Definitely don't do one user two options, but make them as different as possible so that your book might appear as, in as many sub or super categories as possible. What do I mean by that? So if I have my photography book, I'm going to put it under ART, under photography. I'm also going to go as far down this tree as possible. Because, why? Because if I put my book Just in general, that means it's going to show up in these three pages. On these three pages of people are looking at the category pages, nonfiction photography in general. But if I go down into, say, digital photography, it means it's going to appear in four categories for pages here, let's remove General and let's see if there's another option that might make sense. Maybe under education and reference. Arts and education might be a good one. So I'd probably want to do a little bit more research to see what other go to other book pages. Books on Amazon, similar to yours, search for your keywords. See what categories those books are in and I'll show you how you do that in just a second. But now my book has the opportunity of showing up in 1234567 pages on Amazon if someone's browsing them. So that gives more chance for more people to see it. Now, one thing, I guess the devil's advocate option for this is instead of using two separate major categories like nonfiction and education, maybe put it under the same subcategory of photography, but in, as different of topics as possible. So maybe under subjects and themes, maybe portraits or, or maybe you do do general. And the benefit here is that you get more Jews for this super category. Because if people are searching and looking at your book under these three sub subcategories, I guess you'd call it. The more people, the more it ranks on these sub subcategories, it will rank better in photography, right? So it's kind of a balancing act. I would err on the side of choosing two completely different categories. If possible, if it makes sense for your book, just because I think that gives it the best chance for getting in front of as many eyeballs as possible. There's some more sort of just general information, age ring grade that's likely not going to apply to you. If you're ready to just put the book out, you put release it. You can also do preorder if you're not ready. So when it let me go forward without implementing a bunch of details. So what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to show you the details of the photography masterclass. So here you can see the categories that I used. Photography photographer, camera photo, learn photography photography for beginners, DSLR. And here you can see the categories. So I actually used the tech, the latter technique of choosing two subcategories in the same super category, which seems to have done well for me. On the second tab, this is where you upload the actual content of your book. So this is where you would upload the manuscript is should be formatted already. If not, you can actually use their formatter, which we talked about here, that gives you the option to just download it right there. I already had the ePub file, which is the file, file format that you use for uploading the Kindle. Here's your book cover. Here's a great link that will give you more information about the dimensions and all that kind of thing. And then here's a preview or so once you upload, you wanna make sure you open it up, see what it looks like. Make sure everything's formatted properly. The images look good. They are the right size and all of that kind of stuff. And then lastly, it's the pricing page. So the first option which I'm already in is to enroll in the KP select program. So I think this is definitely something you should do. It just gets more eyeballs on your book potentially. And you can do those things like the free marketing options, giving away your book for free, being part of the Kindle unlimited program. But then down below, you can choose the actual price. So you have two options. One is if you want to keep 35% of your revenue, and one is if you want to keep 70% of your revenue, now you might be saying, well, why would you want to keep thirty-five percent revenue when there's a 70% option. And that's because if you choose the 35-40 percent, you can basically put your book out there for any price between 1.992100. If you want 70%, you can only put your book out there between 299999. So it's kind of the control that they have over you to say, alright, if you want more money, you have to charge it within this amount, which basically keeps all things equal, a kind of a fair playing field for e-books in turn, on the Kindle Amazon marketplace. But if you do want a higher price, that's completely fine. But you're gonna be making a lot lower of a percentage. So at the end of the day you have to do the math. But it might be, you might be making more money with a lower price but keeping it 70%. And then after that, you just click publish your ebook and they're gonna verify it. They're going to look at the manuscript, Make sure it's formatted properly. They'll let you know if there's anything that needs to be changed. And then once it's live, it's live on the platform. So before you actually launch, it's a good idea to come up with a launch schedule. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in the case study lesson. Alright, in the next lesson we're gonna talk a little bit more about pricing. But hopefully this overview of the key BP platform helps a lot. And if you have any questions, let me know and I'll try to help out as much as possible by.
10. Pricing Your Book: In this video, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about pricing your book. So the first thing that I would do is analyze your competitor prices. If you know a competitor search on their website or if they have a book on Amazon, see what they're selling for. If not, just go on to Amazon, search for your topic and see what the other books in your category are selling for. Now you can either charge more if you want to make your book seemed like a little bit more of a premium product or charged less if you're trying to compete based off of price. There's also going to be a difference if you are selling your book on your own site versus a marketplace. Obviously, you'll have more control on your own platform to sell out whatever price you want. If you watched the previous video about Amazon's platform, they limit your, your ability to price at different rates, especially based off of the percentage of revenue that you get to keep. And so if you're on your own platform, you get to keep pretty much all of the money that you make minus maybe a fee here there depending on how you're delivering the e-book to the customer, whether you're using a tool like gum road or E junkie or Shopify. But the margins are a lot better than on Amazon. And you might be able to price higher because it's going to be a more unique place to buy a book and you'll be selling it to customers that no, you already who go to your website and you just have that ability to charge a higher price because of that compared to on Amazon or any marketplace where people are competing with, you're competing with hundreds or thousands of other authors and other people. Even if you decide to choose a premium price, other people are going to be choosing that lowest price possible to try to use that as a selling point. So I think if you put it on Amazon, an e-book, that is, I think you should definitely charge a lower price. You can change your price over time, but in the beginning, putting it at the lowest price or one of the lower prices between leg to 99599, I think helps to get as many people reading your book as possible, get those initial reviews. And then maybe over time, Azure book starts to rank. You can bump up the price. Like I just kinda mentioned, what is your goal and get as many people into your funnel, into your audience or make money. I think for most people watching this course, writing a book is just going to be a secondary form of income, used to sort of supplement their main source of income and hopefully get people to purchase their main products or services. And so I think lower price get as many people into the funnel as possible, even using the free option of the KT P select free countdown or something we haven't really talked about. It much is giving away your book for free as a lead magnet. A lead magnet being a thing that you give away, usually a digital download. So anything that you learn how to make in this course could be a great lead mine magnet. In exchange for some kind of information. Generally it's going to be adding someone to an email list where you can follow up with emails to build that trust, build that relationship, and ultimately sell your other products and services to. So a very, very quick demo of what this might look like. I searched for auto mechanic, which I think is the most general term you might be able to use. If you are a mechanic and you're thinking about writing a book. Obviously, auto repair is sort of the most popular subject that goes under this cattle that in this category are those keywords. But just looking at the prices, we have got one, This is a sponsored car, so I'm not going to care about that one, but the first book is one of those for Dummies books. So auto repair for dummies. So they have a recognizable brand name which allows them to charge higher. It's typically $23 actually, so it's on sale right now. And the next couple look like some pretty well published and put together books. This one is, looks, it must be rather new. It's only got 12 reviews, but for some reason it's ranking pretty well right there. But 599 for the Kindle edition. This next 114, $7,525. But you can see a 1000 reviews. The ones that have a lot more reviews generally are a higher price. Here's that fiction books. So if you're a mechanic on the F1 series, than you can write a great book about being that mechanic. But here if you just go through it other than the ones that are free, if you are a Kindle unlimited member, a lot of them are $10 or more, so there's space. If you come in with a great ebook that's 299399, to start to rank better based off of price. So it's always good to see what your competition is, is if everyone's charging a lot higher than, maybe it allows you to charge a little bit of a higher price to, but still undercut them a little bit. But if there's a range or if everyone's charging lower, there's no reason to charge a higher price on a platform like Amazon. Alright, hopefully this helps. In the next lesson, we'll look a little bit more into the case study and look at some of my books and talk about the way that I launched them and promoted them when I got going.
11. Case Study: Let's Look at Phil's eBooks: Welcome to this case study lesson. In this one, I want to talk more about my general idea for using ebooks in my business and brand, how it's been successful, what wasn't successful? We already looked a lot at my specific book, Photography masterclass, my bestseller on Amazon. So I'm not just going to show you that book, but I really want to talk more about why writing e-books has helped my business. So the photography masterclass, which if you're going to these sub category pages right now, is ranked number four, which is pretty incredible to say that one of my books is competing with these other photographers and content creators like Tony Northrop, who has a successful YouTube channel, much more successful than my own, much more, I would say, experienced in terms of being a professional photographer and many, many more years under his belt than me anyways. But at the same time, I can get a book up here ranking well using my audience and some basic tips for getting your book ranked. And that's the name of the game. And if you've watched this entire section, you know that ranking your book is the best way to make more sales. So how do you rank a book when you launch it? Give it away for free. Don't just give it away for free on Amazon, you definitely want to use one of those Katie p. Select free giveaways, those five-day giveaways. But don't just depend on Amazon to, to send all the traffic to it. You need to send some initial traffic yourself. And so what I did when I first launched each of my books is I sent a blast to all of my followers everywhere. So this year in 2019, I had, last year when I launched the photography masterclass, I already had a pretty large audience, which really helped. And that's why this book ranks so well. I did have an audience of my students on YouTube. I do have people there that follow me Instagram, Facebook. So when that launch I told everyone, hey, this book is free today. On the very first day it was free, tried to get it there because once it starts to rank on that first day or those first couple of days of the promotion. It's going to get more traffic the following days just based off of being on these tuplet, this top list. So for example, if you go to just the Kindle e-books page, the bestsellers page, and you go to a top 100 free. My book was appearing on this top 100 free books out of all categories. And this has happened every time I launched a book. When I launched my previous book, my audience was a lot smaller though. We can actually go into the data and see how many downloads we were getting for those first books, my audience was a lot smaller than. What it was with the photography master class. So you can see here back in November of 2014, when I launched my first book that month, I gave away 4800 copies, so about 4000 copies. Compare that to the photography masterclass when we gave it away, when we launch at 25 thousand. So I still had an audience and probably, probably I would say maybe 20% of this came from my audience. So maybe about a thousand. And then the rest was just because it was ranking on Amazon. And once again, it's on that front page of bestsellers. It will get downloads and that just continues to help it, but any additional download will help. So friends, family, your personal social media. Think about all the platform is you're on all of your previous customers. If you have them on an email list, send an email blast to everyone giving away your book when you launch it. And that's going to help it rank and do better on Amazon. If I didn't give away these books for free ever, I probably, I don't even know if I make any money on Amazon because the only reason I'm making money is because they rank in the search engine. It's not because I'm sending traffic to these pages. I used to have a page on my website that had my ebooks on it and it would direct people to the Amazon page. But I don't even have a page on my website anymore to direct people to these books. And that's because it's not really a product that I want to promote from my website. I want to promote my courses and use the books to drive traffic to the courses rather than my courses or the website driving traffic to the book. Now, if I could get more traffic to the books from my website, not bad. And maybe I should have a page and at least an option for people to see that I have books for sale. But the point is, all of my success has come from the Amazon marketplace and the power of that marketplace. It's not just about getting downloads though, it's about getting reviews which will enable you to have a longer-term success. So especially for those people in your audience who download your book, make sure you follow up with your audience a day or 234 days a week after you give it away for free and ask them to leave a review, an honest review for the book. This will again help it rank because that's, those reviews are one of the best determining factors for a higher rank on Amazon. So hopefully this sort of recount of my experience selling books on Amazon helps you if you have any questions about e-books are selling on Amazon, let me know. I would be happy to help you out, but hopefully this inspires you to get out there and do it. I'm not an author. I'm not a writer. I guess technically I am, but that's not my background and I'm definitely not trained in that. But I have had some success based off of all of the things that I've taught you here in this section. Cheers.
12. Assignment: Books / eBooks Crash Course: Welcome to this assignment for the e-book and book section. This is probably my favorite assignment that we came up with for this class, and it's to design a cover for your book. I know some of you might be thinking, well, should I wait to design my cover until I'm done writing my book? I actually think at least the way that I work, I like getting little things like the cover or a website done first because it inspires me to actually make the product or the business that I'm envisioning. And so I think you can go out. It doesn't have to be your final cover. It could just be an idea, use a tool, a free tool like canva.com, or if you know, Photoshop or any other way that you can create a design, a simple design. You don't have to get fancy canvas, great because they have photos, text templates. They even have a book cover template that I used. So if you've got a canva.com, just search for book cover and it has one with the right dimensions for a typical eBook. And I, I, I actually think that the one that I came up with is pretty good myself. So you'll see it in my project and my solution for this project. You'll see it in the solution I created for this project and make sure to give me feedback as well as always, please provide feedback to your fellow students. That's the only way this is going to be successful. And good luck and have fun.
Phil Ebiner, Video | Photo | Design
